Program Expanding Teachers’ Role Linked To Gains

Teachers in schools that participate in a program that overhauls their professional lives, in part by orienting their pay toward performance, are more likely to significantly raise student achievement than similar teachers in other public schools, the first broad evaluation of the Teacher Advancement Program has found.

Released last week, the report on the program launched five years ago by the Milken Family Foundation uses teacher-effectiveness data developed by researcher William Sanders, a pioneer in examining the “valued added” by individual teachers. The study itself was undertaken, however, by Lewis C. Solmon and colleagues at the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching, which operates TAP. Both the foundation and the institute are located in Santa Monica, Calif.

The program uses the value-added information to give varying awards to teachers and schools that have performed better than the state average over three years in...