Student Growth Component
Overview
The mission of Denver Public Schools is for all students to have the knowledge and skills to be contributing citizens in our diverse society. One of the primary goals of the Professional Compensation System for Teachers is to link teacher pay to the district’s instructional mission. The student growth component contains three elements that reward teachers for raising the achievement or growth of their students:
u Student Growth Objectives
u Distinguished Schools
u Exceeding Expectations on the CSAP
Philosophy
In developing the ProComp system, the DPS-DCTA Joint Task Force on Teacher Compensation was careful to incorporate safeguards to ensure that such pay rewards were fair and equitable.
A key factor in ensuring fairness in measuring achievement is tying rewards to student growth over time, not the achievement of students on a single day. This approach ensures that all teachers are eligible for the incentives without regard to the socio-economic level of their students.
Compensation increases that are based on growth of students over time truly reward the educator for the value he or she has added while a student is in the teacher’s classroom or while the student is being served by a student services professional.
Student Growth Objectives
Rationale
Objective setting is a good instructional practice that contributes to higher student achievement. Teachers and student services professionals who carefully assess what their students need, and then design instruction to meet those needs, are much more likely to be successful.
During the Pay for Performance Pilot, research by the Community Training and Assistance Center (CTAC) of Boston found that teachers who set the highest quality objectives had students who made statistically significant gains in student achievement.
The objective-setting process not only provides an instructional focus for the teacher, it also prescribes a role for the principal to collaborate with teachers and to monitor progress throughout the year. This collaboration and monitoring improves decision-making and provides an opportunity to make course corrections if the strategies initially chosen are not producing the desired results.
By using a structured process to set student growth objectives, teachers will use student achievement data to make instructional decisions. During the objective-setting process, teachers assess student capabilities through a pretest at the beginning of the year. They set growth targets for their students and select the learning content and instructional strategies they will use to meet those targets. The results of a post-test at the end of the teaching period (semester, nine weeks, year) will determine whether the objectives have been met.
All DPS teachers and student services professionals are expected to set two student growth objectives each year. Only ProComp members are paid for meeting them. Denver Public Schools has developed online support and a handbook to assist educators with objective-setting through guidelines and sample objectives. The handbook and forms can be found at MyDPS, a special work place on the DPS portal that can be found by going to the “Staff” page from the DPS home page and clicking on the MyDPS link on the top of the page.
Types of Objectives
Elementary classroom teachers are expected to write one objective addressing student growth in reading and one in math. Art teachers write objectives for their content areas. Library media specialists write objectives designed to affect achievement in two areas: 1) information literacy and technology proficiency and 2) attainment of literacy/literature appreciation skills.
Secondary teachers write objectives according to the subject they teach. For example, career and technology education teachers write one objective focusing on student growth within the course content area and one objective focusing on a specific subgroup (one class, one section of a class) or an objective focused on student growth within a specific unit of the content area.
Student services professionals (SSPs, such as nurses, counselors and audiologists) write objectives addressing a department goal and another addressing a goal in the school improvement plan, a team goal, a district-wide goal or a second department goal.
Timeline
In any school year, there are three major milestones in the objective-setting process:
1. Fall – Educator sets the objective and discusses it with the principal or manager, who must accept it (September-November)
2. Mid-Year – Teacher and principal review progress toward meeting the objective with an eye to making adjustments where necessary (January). Adjustments can be made until the Friday before Spring Break.
3. Spring – Teacher or specialist and supervisor meet to review whether the objectives are met; then the principal or manager submits the decision electronically.
The information is forwarded to payroll. The data is also compiled by school and system-wide to track progress towards district goals.
Payment for Objectives
Each teacher and SSP sets two objectives. If both objectives are met, the ProComp educator receives a salary increase of 1% of the index. If only one objective is met, the ProComp teacher receives the award as a one-time bonus.
The principal or manager reports whether objectives are met. This decision is communicated to payroll to compute pay increases for teachers and specialists who are in ProComp. The teacher or SSP does not need to initiate the payment.
Payments for objectives are spread over 12 months, starting in September after the school year in which they are met.
Objective-Setting Checklist
The seven-point checklist now used for setting objectives was developed during the four-year Pay for Performance Pilot by the PfP Design Team with input from pilot schools and with technical support from CTAC. This research effort determined seven factors that are critical to developing high quality objectives that are, in turn, associated with increases in student achievement. These seven factors have been refined into a checklist that includes several indicators for each success factor. The seven factors are:
u Rationale - Why that particular objective was chosen
u Population - Which students the objective addresses
u Interval of Time – Weeks, quarters, semesters, school year
u Assessment used to measure whether the objective was met (pre- and post-data)
u Expected gain or growth made by the students; this is the heart of the objective
u Learning content - The academic skills, behavior or attitudes teachers are trying to support, based on needs identified in the baseline data. Includes realistic personal goal-setting and problem-solving strategies.
u Strategies - Teaching methods or interventions by service professionals to be used to achieve the objective. Include one-on-one contact, home visits, referral to extra-curricular activities.
The Checklist for Development of Objectives (Figure 1) provides more detail.
Sample Objectives
The student growth objective handbook contains sample objectives for a wide array of teaching positions and specialist assignments. Examples of objectives are:
u 80% of fourth grade students attending 85% of the time will show a gain of at least one proficiency level on the Everyday Mathematics end-of-year assessment.
u 80% of sixth grade students attending 85% of the time will gain 80 points of the Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI).
u By the end of the eighth grade Life Management course, 80% of students with an 85% attendance rate scoring in the non-proficient category on the pre-assessment will score in the partially proficient or proficient category on the end-of-course assessment rubric.
u Literacy and math coaches write objectives based on teacher growth resulting from professional development and measured by district best practices. Example: 80% of new teachers in the building will move from a rating of “Developing” to “Effective” on at least two of the “Big Ideas” components of the Reading Workshop Best Practices document.
For student services professionals
u 80% of all students who fail and/or are absent for the vision/hearing screening will have completed follow up by the school nurse.
u Itinerants with a caseload of 55 students – 75% of those students with average daily attendance rates of 30 to 50% will improve their attendance by 10% or more by the end of the school year.
Assessments
Assessments are the tests or other methods used to measure student growth over time. Assessments should measure the learning content of the objective and be closely tied to the curriculum. Teachers and specialists are to select DPS-approved assessments, when available, that reflect what students are expected to learn in the courses they teach.
Some teachers have access to district-developed assessments or commercially available measurement tools. For other grade levels and courses, teachers must develop their own assessments to measure progress in the content area. Examples of assessments include:
u Developmental Assessment (DRA)
u Language Assessment Scales (LAS)
u Interactive Mathematics Program
u Evaluación Desarrollo de Lectura (EDL)
u Connected Mathematics Program Assessments
u Scholastic Inventory (SRI)
u Student grades, teacher and student interviews, and data from tracking forms for special education student objectives
u Infinite Campus and classroom attendance data, report card data (Itinerant team goal of improving attendance)
u Immunization tracking logs for nurses working towards 100% compliance with state immunization law.
Distinguished Schools
Overview
The distinguished schools element rewards faculty members in a school that has exhibited distinguished performance, with the exception of employees who are released for cause during the school year being evaluated. Similarly, teachers who retire will not be paid the bonus as they will no longer on the DPS payroll.
The criteria for distinguished schools include student achievement as measured by the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP), student attendance and parent satisfaction. While other student growth elements recognize individual teachers in their success with their students, the distinguished schools incentive recognizes the power and value of entire schools working collaboratively to improve student achievement.
Rationale
The distinguished schools incentive is needed because:
u Successful schools are not systematically recognized, rewarded or celebrated in DPS
u There are no direct rewards for teachers at schools that succeed, through planning and implementation, on their school improvement plans
u Neither School Accountability Reports nor Colorado’s guidelines for Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) provide an adequate picture of school performance
u Neither measure takes into account student growth, academic achievement on measures other than CSAP, or performance in areas outside academic achievement in a systematic manner
Purpose
The distinguished school is designed to achieve several objectives:
u To recognize and reward ProComp teachers in schools that meet or exceed district expectations for student growth, student attendance and school satisfaction
u To encourage school improvement planning to be better aligned with district, state and federal indicators of success
u To reward collaborative behavior within schools to meet school and district goals
u To evaluate school performance in a manner that is both more useful when planning school improvement and more balanced than state or federal systems.
Foundational Principles for Determining Distinguished Schools
The ProComp agreement specifies that the District and DCTA will use a mutually agreed upon and annually reviewed method to measure school performance. This method has been developed by the Transition Team and is based on technical specifications and meets the following standards:
u The method shall include multiple measures of school performance
u The method shall include substantially more information on student performance than Colorado School Accountability Ratings or Adequate Yearly Progress, and shall include measures that show student growth based on two consecutive years of data
u The method shall include student performance data from sources other than the CSAP test
u The method shall include data other than student test scores, including but not limited to data gathered from school satisfaction surveys and student attendance.
Criteria for Distinguished Schools
DPS and DCTA worked together to create six criteria that are used each year to select distinguished schools. The academic achievement criteria in this incentive are based on Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) data calculated by the Colorado Department of Education. The School Accountability Report index and the three growth measures derived from it represent student performance data from a third party using assessments based on state standards.
- School Accountability Report (SAR) index (achievement level)
2. SAR improvement index (growth over two years school-wide)
3. Attendance rate (based on 95% of days students are enrolled)
4. Parent Satisfaction rate (measured by district surveys)
5. Beat the Odds index (achievement growth for disadvantaged schools)
6. Student Growth Index (growth by individual student on two annual scores)
Payment for Distinguished Schools
All ProComp educators in a distinguished school are eligible to receive a payment valued at 2% of the index. Distinguished schools are identified every autumn, based on data gathered about the previous contract year. Payment is made in January retroactive to September and monthly thereafter. For more information on payments for the distinguished schools element, please see Section 2.
Exceeds Expectations
Overview
The Exceeds Expectations element rewards ProComp teachers whose students’ growth exceed the expected norms on the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP). Because the element is based on growth from the previous year, it is available only to teachers in 4th through 10th grades in math and language arts.
Rationale
The exceeds expectations element is needed for a variety of reasons:
u CSAP is a high priority for federal, state and local accountability
u CSAP data functions very differently from data in teacher objectives and therefore requires a separate system for recognizing teachers.
u There are also different expectations for teacher who work in the CSAP environment.
u Teachers are not rewarded individually for the growth of their students as measured by CSAP anywhere else in the ProComp system.
u It can provide an incentive to eligible teachers to meet or exceed statistically rigorous expectations for student growth, as measured by CSAP.
Payment for Exceeds Expectations
The exceeds expectations element pays a sustainable salary increase of 3% of the ProComp index. ProComp teachers continue to earn the increase as long as their students’ growth in CSAP meets or exceeds the expected growth pattern. If their students fall below the lower limit of the standard range, the teachers lose the increase. They only lose the amount if they have earned an increase in the past. Payments are regularly scheduled and are paid over 12 months starting in the fall, based on student growth in the previous year. The first payments will begin in the fall of 2007-2008 contract year, based on the two previous years of data.
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