Texas Educator Excellence Grant (TEEG) Program

The history of performance pay programs and policies in Texas provides a backdrop to the state's Texas Educator Excellence Grant (TEEG) program and the Districts Awards for Teacher Excellence (DATE) program. The TEEG and DATE programs are state-funded and provide grants to schools and districts to implement locally-designed performance pay plans. Starting in the 2006- 07 school year, the TEEG program operates annually in more than 1,000 schools, while 203 districts implemented district-wide performance pay plans using DATE funds in the 2008-09 school year. Performance pay for teachers entered Texas state policy deliberations during the 1980s, a decade marked as one of the most active periods of school reform in Texas. As early as the Texas Teacher Career Ladder program in 1984, policymakers attempted to reform the single-salary schedule and introduce performance pay for educators. Several lessons emerge from these first generation programs and play a significant role in the design and implementation of TEEG and DATE. Lessons learned include that (1) adequate, sustainable funding is imperative; (2) teacher involvement in program design fosters school personnel buy-in; (3) performance pay should reward educators for their contribution to student achievement outcomes as well as teacher and staff collaboration; and (4) programs will benefit from comprehensive, independent program evaluation. This report presents findings from the second year of a multi-year evaluation of the TEEG program and preliminary findings about the design and implementation of the DATE program.