Rewarding

Education Resource Strategies (ERS) is an organization that provides resources and tools that aim to change the way people, time, and money are used in urban education to dramatically improve student learning. Resources on ERS’s webpage on teaching innovation include publications and case studies that focus on rethinking and redesigning teacher compensation systems to attract, reward, and retain talent and ideas on how to restructure the teaching job to emphasize teacher teams, differentiated roles, and opportunities to develop and increase impact.

With national focus on reforming teacher evaluation and development, school districts are finding themselves in need of rethinking how teachers are compensated and how to tie this compensation to attracting and keeping high-quality teachers, all while making the new system sustainable. This report by Education Resource Strategies combines a series of memos and explores standard goals of redesigning compensation and its implications for base salary, district priority incentives, school roles, rewards, and fiscal sustainability. This resource seeks to provide a starting point. 

This report is one in a series of four on rethinking teacher compensation. It examines the experiences and offerings given to a teacher by the school system. Education Resource Strategies examines how this value proposition is structure and how it can be leveraged into a strong management tool for attracting and retaining high-performing teachers. 

The Community Training and Assistance Center conducted a comprehensive study of the impact of Denver Public School’s four-year Pay for Performance pilot. Teachers at the pilot schools developed two annual student learning objectives (SLOs) and received additional compensation if they met their objectives. This study examined Denver’s SLOs including their substance, quality, and relationship to student achievement.