Educational Innovation in Teacher Incentive Fund Grants

Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grants support the use of performance-based compensation and other human capital strategies that enhance and sustain performance-based compensation, in order to increase students’ access to effective educators in high-need schools, and to expand the array of promising approaches that can help these educators and other personnel succeed.

For the past five years, AIR has been providing technical support to the Center for Educational Innovation (CEI) in New York City. CEI manages four TIF grants, which serve groups of independent charter schools in New York City, Buffalo, and New Jersey. Independent charter schools generally have few infrastructure resources to support their teachers and leaders, so CEI and AIR are helping the charters to design and implement components of a comprehensive human capital management system to stabilize their workforce and their school culture. In particular, AIR is working with CEI and its participating charter schools to:

• Identify and summarize promising practices that can be adapted as appropriate in the participating charter schools, e.g., for recruiting and hiring staff
• Redesign their teacher and principal and teacher evaluation systems to provide ongoing feedback to improve instruction and leadership
• Provide ongoing technical assistance on addressing student growth measurement issues
• Facilitate the design and implementation of performance-based compensation systems that provide expanded teacher leadership opportunities