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Evaluating the Teacher Advancement Program in Chicago Schools

The foundation of a good school is a faculty of talented teachers. But how do schools attract, support, and retain well-qualified teachers? Policymakers have increasingly turned to programs that use compensation reform and career ladders to complement more traditional approaches like mentoring and professional development.

One such program that is growing in popularity is the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), developed by the Milken Family Foundation in the late 1990s. Now led by the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching, TAP’s goal is to draw more talented people to the teaching profession—and keep them there—by making it more attractive and rewarding to be a teacher. TAP is a whole-school intervention that provides teachers with opportunities for professional growth, promotion to school leadership roles without leaving the classroom, structured feedback, and performance-based compensation. Teacher bonuses are based on value added to student achievement, as well as observed classroom performance and whole-school performance. TAP ties teacher performance measurement to professional development and mentoring to support teachers’ continuous improvement.

Mathematica is conducting a five-year impact evaluation of TAP as implemented in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). The Chicago initiative, dubbed Chicago TAP (formerly Recognizing Excellence in Academic Leadership), is funded by a $27 million Teacher Incentive Fund grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Mathematica’s study is the first evaluation of TAP to use random assignment to study the program's effects on student achievement.

Funded by the Joyce Foundation, the study randomly assigned schools that have volunteered and been selected to adopt TAP to either a treatment group that implements the program right away or a control group that delays implementation. The study also relies on a matched comparison group selected from the more than 300 CPS elementary schools that were not implementing TAP. The data include a teacher survey, principal interviews, and student test score and teacher personnel data provided by the district. The project issues annual reports; the first one in April 2009 found that TAP had an impact on teacher reports of mentoring and improved teacher retention, but had no measurable impact on test scores in the first six months. The second report, released in April 2010, did not find evidence of impacts on student test scores or teacher retention two years after rollout.

Publications

"An Evaluation of the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) in Chicago: Year Two Impact Report" (May 2010)
"An Evaluation of the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) in Chicago: Year One Impact Report" (April 2009)
"Evaluation of the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) in the Chicago Public Schools: Study Design Report" (November 2007)