NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Vanderbilt University and the Texas Education Agency have teamed up to evaluate the largest performance-based incentive initiative in the nation. The National Center for Performance Incentives, based at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development, won a competitive bid process, and will perform a five-year study of the new incentive program.

The incentive program began in 2005 when Texas Gov. Rick Perry started the Governor’s Educator Excellence Awards Program (GEEAP). The Texas Legislature expanded the program in 2006, and by 2008 the GEEAP will be awarding $330 million to public school educators. NCPI will track who receives the incentive awards and how it affects the education system.

“The incentive program allows us to recognize and reward thousands of outstanding teachers. We are hopeful that this new state program will help Texas school districts attract and retain highly skilled, effective teachers. The evaluation, led by the Vanderbilt researchers, will allow us to gage the impact of the program,” said Texas Commissioner of Education Shirley J. Neeley.

Matthew Springer, principal investigator on the contract and director of the National Center on Performance Incentives, said “The signature activity of our evaluation will be analyses of performance-based incentive programs at approximately 1200 Texas schools and their impact on student achievement; teacher turnover, mobility and quality, teacher behavior and institutional and organizational dynamics.”

The GEEAP program is made up of two different incentive programs. The first program, the Governor’s Educator Excellence Grant, offers $10 million each year to teachers serving economically disadvantaged children. The second program, the Texas Educator Excellence Grant, offers $100 million to educators at 1160 schools. Like the GEEG, schools must serve economically disadvantaged children and meet certain educational performance standards and improvement benchmarks.

In both programs, funds are awarded to the school rather than to individual educators. The final decisions about which educators should receive the grant are made locally. Teachers at each school work with administrators to create the evaluation criteria for individual awards.

“Neither of the incentive award programs is based solely on student performance on state tests,” Matthew Springer, director of NCPI, explained. “Teaching excellence also takes into account such factors as mentoring of other teachers, teaching in subject areas that face a shortage of teachers, an individual’s level of education and experience and whether the teachers are working in schools that are considered difficult to staff.”

In accordance with statutory requirements to evaluate the program, NCPI will be evaluating the GEEG program over the next three years and the TEEG program for the next five years. The evaluations will focus on who receives the awards, as well as how those awards affect the recipients and the schools. The NCPI research team is also interested in understanding whether differences exist between schools that receive the grants every year and schools that only receive the grants once or twice.

“Evaluation plans for both projects include teacher and administrator surveys, data collection on program implementation at the campus level, analyses of student achievement, and teacher turnover, mobility, and quality,” said Springer.

NCPI investigators will present their results to TEA annually over the next five years. The final report on the GEEG program will be completed in August 2009, while the TEEG program will have its final analysis in November 2010. Researchers from the University of Missouri, Texas A&M University, and the Texas-based Corporation for Public School Education-K16 are also involved in the multi-year project.

TEA and NCPI hope that the information gathered during this evaluation project will help improve future incentive systems, both in Texas and nationwide.