Student Growth Details
CSAP
Eligible Educators: All teachers in grades 4 and 5; all language arts, reading and math teachers in grades 6, 7 and 8; all who teach 9th or 10th graders in language arts, reading or math
Decision Maker: DPS with DCTA oversight
Year Implemented: 2006-2007
Purpose
- Provide an incentive to eligible teachers to meet or exceed statistacally rigorous expectations for student growth measured by CSAP
- Encourage teachers to investigate and develop practices that will lead to improved student growth measure by CSAP
- Provide an incentive to teachers to accept and stay in assignments where students take the CSAP test
Rationale
- CSAP is of broad public interest and could lead to strong support for increased funding
- CSAP data functions very differently from data in teacher objectives, and therefore requires a separate system for recognizing teachers
- CSAP is a high priority for federal, state and local accountability
- There are increased expectations for teachers who work in the CSAP environment
- Organized longitudinally, CSAP data provide a relatively stable and continuous body of information about academic growth
- Teachers are not currently rewarded individually for the growth of their students as measured by CSAP
- The use of CSAP data in the School Accountability Reports cannot be used for a compensation system because it focuses on school performance and student proficiency levels, not individual teacher effects on student growth
- DPS is developing methods to use CSAP data so compensation results are independent of the socioeconomic status of the students being taught
Economic Specifications
- DPS and DCTA will agree on a standard range for one year's student growth measured by the CSAP
- Teachers whose students show growth within the standard range will maintain all previous sustainable increases
- Teachers who move out of the "CSAP cohort" will retain all previously accumulated CSAP sustainable increases
District Capacity That Needs To Be Created
- District focus on identifying the skills and practices that lead to success on the CSAP tests without compromising other educational values and disseminates them to teachers
- Ability to identify student growth automatically:
o District capacity to associate CSAP student growth data to secondary teachers by courses
o District capacity to associate CSAP student growth data to special ed teachers as appropriate
o Rules for exceptional cases such as
§ English Language Acquisition
§ Mild/moderate special education
§ Teacher data sets that have no matched pairs of students
§ Assigning students to teachers in secondary schools
- Training and other supports for educators on interpreting CSAP data and addressing the instructional needs of students to improve performance
- DPS needs to research methods for variable payout of CSAP sustainable increases based on the amount of student growth