Education research confirms what our common sense has told us for years: good teachers are the key to student success. But finding and keeping high-quality teachers in the classroom can be a challenge, especially for school HR administrators who are trying to fill positions in hard-to-staff schools.
The TAP System is one example of an education reform that’s helping districts attract good teachers to disadvantaged schools and raise the performance level of those already working there. Judging by the results in Texas TAP 
schools, the program works.
In 2009-10, all Texas TAP schools met or exceeded expected student growth levels, most by two standard deviations above the expected growth level as measured using value-added methodology. The leap in student test scores has resulted in a significant improvement in the state accountability ratings of Texas TAP schools, with every school in the program for more than three years earning a “recognized” or “exemplary” accountability rating last school year. 
Teachers believe that TAP positively influences their work. In a 2009 survey, more than 88 percent of Texas TAP teachers said that TAP changed their instructional practices.
Texas TAP helps with retention, too. Schools that used to retain around 35 percent of their teachers from one year to the next now see retention rates higher than 90 percent.
Texas TAP Executive Director Tammy Kreuz says that TAP succeeds where other school reform efforts fail because it requires big changes in four key areas that directly affect teachers: professional development, performance-based compensation, career advancement, and meaningful performance evaluation and accountability (see TAP’s Elements of Success, below).
Most districts approach school reform in a piecemeal fashion, putting more rigorous teacher evaluations in place or stepping up their professional development. TAP’s approach is comprehensive, focusing on four key elements: Multiple career paths, ongoing applied professional growth, instructionally focused accountability, and performance-based compensation.
Multiple career paths—TAP provides a way for teachers to advance professionally without leaving the classroom, earning the position of career, mentor, or master teacher based on their abilities and accomplishments. Each step involves additional responsibility and compensation. Mentor and master teachers must be skilled instructors capable of working effectively with their peers. They serve on the district’s TAP leadership team.
Ongoing applied professional growth—TAP schools restructure their schedules to allow teachers to engage in regular, collaborative, on-the-job training that focuses on the needs of students. Teachers have time during the school day to meet, plan, mentor, learn, and share with their peers so they can constantly improve the quality of their instruction. TAP schools use data to target student needs.
Instructionally focused accountability—Teachers are evaluated using the TAP Teaching Skills, Knowledge and Responsibilities Performance Standards that includes 26 indicators measured on a five-point scale. Multiple trained evaluators observe teachers four to six times per year. Some observations are announced and some are unannounced. Student learning growth is an important component of TAP evaluations.
Performance-based compensation—Teachers that take on new roles, responsibilities, teach hard-to-staff subjects or in low-performing schools, and whose students perform well receive additional compensation. Student achievement is measured using a value-added model.
Lots of districts have tinkered with one or two of these areas in an attempt to boost teacher quality (and, consequently, raise student achievement). Few can claim the kind of success that TAP schools have experienced.
TAP’s thorough approach to reform is the basis for its success. “TAP is a comprehensive model, but most importantly, it’s a very systemic process,” Kreuz said. “Those four pieces work together and are very dependent on each other to be successful. If you take one piece away, you won’t have systemic reform.”
Texas is one of three states with a state-level infrastructure to support TAP schools (South Carolina and Louisiana are the other two). That means that any Texas district that implements TAP gets a high level of assistance with the program, both at the outset and long-term.
Kreuz has been at the helm since Texas TAP got its start in the 2005-06 school year. That’s when the Texas Education Agency (TEA) provided $800,000 to fund three pilot TAP schools in Richardson ISD. In 2006-07 and 2007-08, eight more pilot schools came on board. The schools piloting the program all suffered from low student achievement, low socioeconomic status, high minority populations, and high teacher turnover.
A $25 million University of Texas System Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grant allowed the program to expand to 33 schools in 2008-09 and to 47 schools this year. As the program has grown, so has the Texas TAP support system. The program now has nine professionals on its state-level team to support districts in the implementation stages and long-term. “The Texas TAP system has really matured and we’ve added schools each year. We now have enough schools to say, ‘Yes, this is working,’” Kreuz said.
Another major expansion of Texas TAP is imminent. The Texas Education Agency won a $53 million TIF grant in late September that will be used to bring additional high-needs schools into the program. “We are very excited about the opportunity to scale-up the Texas TAP System through the TEA TIF grant. The funding provided will allow us to expand the TAP initiative across the state so that nearly 100 Texas schools will be implementing TAP during the 2011-12 school year,” Kreuz said.
Lancaster ISD was one of the districts that got involved with Texas TAP in the early years. Pat Sadberry, the district’s director of state and special programs, said that former superintendent Larry Lewis was looking for a program that would help the district boost the quality of its teachers when he found out about TAP. He brought the idea to district leaders and all agreed that it would be a good fit.
But leaders weren’t the only people who had a say in the decision. “What we really like about it is it’s not a top-down program,” Sadberry said. “We took it to the campuses and they had to vote to determine that this was a program they wanted.” Teachers at the district’s schools heard Sadberry and Kreuz explain the program’s requirements and structure at a faculty meeting. After they left, teachers on each campus conducted an up or down vote on participating in TAP.
Every school’s teachers approved the program by a wide margin, and not because of the additional compensation they could earn. “Teachers were interested in the support and the ability to improve and build their teacher tool box to be effective in the classroom,” Sadberry said. “We told them about the bonuses, but we couldn’t tell them how much it would be. Money was not the motivating factor.”
Kreuz was there from the start and helped the district navigate uncharted territory, selecting the first two Lancaster ISD elementaries to become Texas TAP schools based on the applications submitted by all the elementary schools and finding and hiring the right people to work as the district’s master teachers.
“Our concern [with hiring master teachers] was finding the right people because they play an important role in the success of the program,” Sadberry said. “Great teachers are not always great teacher leaders.” TAP master teachers perform some critical tasks: observing teachers for evaluations, leading weekly team meetings, demonstrating effective teaching techniques, coaching teachers, and providing professional development.
One aspect of TAP that particularly impressed Sadberry is its evaluation component. Trained TAP evaluators conduct observations at least four times throughout the year and use an instructional rubric to pinpoint areas where teachers need to improve. Each teacher receives ongoing professional development geared to help him or her correct any deficiencies and stressing strategies to help kids learn. It’s a big change from the way most districts evaluate teachers, and the focus on helping teachers improve usually pays off. “It’s amazing to see. The teachers stay and they are developing to be the best teachers in our district,” Sadberry said.
The district’s teachers are also taking advantage of the career pathways that TAP provides, with four mentor teachers joining the ranks of the district’s master teachers this year. That is among TAP’s fundamental goals: to allow teachers a way to advance in their careers without having to leave the classroom.
Teachers are often leery of performance pay. With TAP, they get consistent feedback about their teaching plus assistance from mentors, master teachers, and thorough evaluations. Not only do they always know where they stand, but the support they receive helps them to know what they can do to improve. As a result, there isn’t any controversy over the accuracy of bonus amounts when awards are doled out. “It generates no questions,” Sadberry said.
The TAP performance pay system also eliminates the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ aspect of some systems by rewarding all the teachers in a school when its students improve. “The whole school takes ownership of student achievement and that takes the pressure off of the TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) teachers because the principal can say, ‘We’re a team,’” Sadberry said.
The district phased five more schools into the program through the years. Currently, seven of its nine schools are in Texas TAP and the intent is to implement the program districtwide. District leaders have seen a dramatic increase in student test scores, higher state accountability ratings for schools, and much improved teacher retention. An exemplary elementary school has lost just one teacher in the last four years, and that was due to a promotion.
The district’s principals are excited to see the level of support the TAP program offers teachers and the academic growth of their students. Some are finding they can do more with less administration. “We’ve had a couple of elementary principals with assistant principal job openings who decided not to fill them because the master teachers were so valuable,” Sadberry said.
You could safely say that Pflugerville ISD Assistant Superintendent Lori Einfalt was not a big fan of performance pay until this year. In spite of a job target directing her to investigate performance pay, Einfalt was reluctant at best. “Everything I looked at was fraught with difficulty. I looked at programs in school districts across Texas, and even with good-faith efforts, there were problems,” Einfalt said.
Last October she saw a TAP presentation at a District Awards for Teaching Excellence (DATE) conference (Texas districts often apply for DATE funds to help pay for TAP). That presentation changed her mind. “TAP is not just about performance pay. It is truly about improving the capacity of every teacher and it lifts the whole organization up in a collaborative, unifying way,” Einfalt said. “…It ties performance pay so well to things that you can be certain are related to improvement.”
The presentation was so compelling to Einfalt that she told Pflugerville ISD Superintendent Charles Dupre that not only was TAP’s version of performance pay a good system, she told him it was something the district had to try to do.
Einfalt was convinced of the program’s quality because it wasn’t a solution that started from the premise of weeding out inadequate teachers. On the contrary, she believes TAP honors the work of all teachers and helps them to improve. “TAP is a coaching model rooted in the idea of clinical supervision. Teachers are given the opportunity to have instructional dialogue, to talk about problems. I saw that as the means by which we would begin to elevate the level of instruction in our classroom,” Einfalt said.
Just a year later, Pflugerville has undertaken the largest-scale implementation of Texas TAP in any school district to date with nine of the district’s 28 schools taking part in the program this year. The size of the implementation will allow Texas TAP to see what happens when multiple schools implement TAP in a given year. While school performance usually shows immediate improvement with the program, no one knows if a change of this size can help a district see movement in its overall performance. It’s not hard to see why Einfalt says the switch to TAP is the most significant reform effort in the district’s history.
The district’s high schools have TAP at just the 9th-grade level this year, a unique way of implementing the program. Leaders intend to expand TAP to other high school grades in the future if the 9th-grade pilot is successful. While most high school teachers were excluded from the program this year, they were okay with the district’s decision. “People are interested to see how this works,” Einfalt said.
Einfalt notes that it is a bit more complicated to try TAP in a secondary school because those teachers aren’t used to the high level of collaboration that TAP requires. Elementary school teachers are used to meeting in teams to strategize about their work. Secondary teachers typically operate more independently. With TAP, teams at all grade levels gather in cluster meetings to discuss field-tested instructional strategies with the intent that all teachers implement them. The following week, they bring back student projects for discussion. It’s an effective way of determining whether a new strategy is working but it’s a very unfamiliar method of operation for most secondary teachers.
In spite of the brisk timeline to put the program in place, teachers approved it. “I’m proud of the teachers because I think they’re very courageous. There were some close votes but the majority of teachers supported the program,” Einfalt said.
In both Lancaster and Pflugerville ISD, having a supportive school board has also been a key to the program’s success. “We have four former educators on our board and they love TAP’s evaluative component. We couldn’t be in a better position with our board,” Einfalt said. The Lancaster ISD board is also sold on Texas TAP. In fact, when the board recently interviewed candidates for its vacant superintendent position, support for the program was nonnegotiable.
And both districts have the added bonus of working with the Texas TAP team, a resource districts in other states don’t have. Kreuz and her staff provide training and coaching, do site visits, offer feedback on the district’s model, certify evaluators, and even do the bonus payout calculations for participating schools. Texas TAP is a one-stop shop, and participating districts appreciate the help they receive. “We wouldn’t be able to do this without them…we could not have had this success without their support,” Sadberry said.
Getting the funds to start an endeavor as complex as TAP is no small task. Pflugerville ISD’s start up is partially funded by a $1.2 million District Awards for Teaching Excellence (DATE) grant. Districts can also use Title I and II funds to pay for TAP’s costs, which include higher staff salaries for mentor and master teachers, performance pay for teachers and principals, and professional development. “Any district can do this; it’s just a matter of figuring out the funding. We help districts figure out how much TAP will cost and how to pay for it and how to build a funding plan,” Kreuz said.
Kreuz believes that paying for TAP is not the biggest obstacle that districts face. “It’s the willingness of districts to do true, comprehensive reform. I have not worked with a district that can’t find a way to get the funding with the grant money available,” Kreuz said. “They can take funds away from programs that aren’t effective, but that can be hard. It takes a strong district leader to make the decision and it can impact jobs.”
While the future of DATE grant funding is in limbo, Kreuz believes more funding options will emerge. “As districts understand the need for comprehensive reform, they’ll begin to look at TAP as a model that’s been tried and worked. I expect exponential growth in the future,” Kreuz said.
