Teachers and leaders learn and grow throughout their careers

Teacher effectiveness contributes greatly to student academic outcomes. Yet, variation in teacher effectiveness occurs within and across schools, often resulting in significant inequity in students’ access to effective teachers.

The effectiveness of principals as instructional leaders is essential to school improvement and performance. The abilities of principals directly impact the effectiveness of teachers and in turn, student achievement.

Ensuring the effectiveness of teachers and principals requires an anticipatory and responsive human capital management system (HCMS). Making strategic investments to develop the talents of teachers and principals is pivotal to a district’s success.

Strong districts must also attract and retain a well-qualified, experienced, effective, and diverse pool of skilled educators who are prepared to teach diverse learners.

Schools and districts need to stimulate innovation through their HCMS

CTAC is a national leader in human capital management reform and performance-based compensation. What makes schools fantastic places to teach and lead? CTAC identifies the elements of a human capital management system that need to be strengthened for educators to grow and flourish in their careers.

CTAC assists school districts and charter networks to develop, implement, and evaluate HCMS initiatives that strengthen the capacity of educators, increase student achievement in high-need schools, and create greater equity in district practices and results.

By improving and expanding their HCMS, districts can recruit, retain, and develop effective educators. CTAC helps districts build the capacity of their HCMS to:

  • Customize recruitment and retention efforts
  • Provide targeted, evidence-based professional development
  • Use multiple indicators of educator performance to inform key school and district decisions
  • Build strong career pathways
  • Align performance-based compensation to student learning

CTAC helps districts across the country to strengthen their HCMS

Duval County Public Schools, Florida: CTAC conducted an audit of the effectiveness of professional development services for educators in Duval County Public Schools (DCPS). Over a multi-year period, this audit examined the effectiveness of professional development in literacy, mathematics, and science. The audit found a statistically significant relationship between teacher professional development hours in literacy courses and student growth in reading.

Harmony Public Schools, Texas: CTAC is providing technical assistance, evaluation services, and a hard-to-staff school study for Harmony Public Schools, a charter network comprising more than 50 campuses throughout Texas. CTAC is supporting Harmony to deepen and differentiate professional development for teachers and administrators, enhance consistency in career pathways across the system, and reward teaching and leading with financial incentives. Through this work, Harmony has developed a micro-credentialing program, increased the quality, relevance, and usefulness of its professional development, and implemented a performance-based compensation system.

Henrico County Public Schools, Virginia: CTAC supported Henrico County with technical counsel, evaluation, and conducted professional development audits. The Learning Leaders initiative provided teachers and principals in Henrico County’s highest-need schools with incentive pay tied directly to effective and engaging classroom instruction. The result was marked growth in student achievement.

Prince William County Public Schools, Virginia: CTAC supported Prince William County Public Schools (PWCS) with technical counsel and program evaluation of its Teacher Incentive Fund-supported initiative, Teacher Incentive Performance Award (TIPA). The TIPA initiative strengthened teacher practice and improved student outcomes in the lowest performing schools in the division.