FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
- How can a PICCS school ensure equity in performance-based compensation amongst teachers?
Is PICCS going to require more time and effort from already busy teachers?
How can we ensure that we have buy-in across faculty and avoid miscommunications about PICCS and performance based compensation?
How is PICCS not just an “add-on” atop what we are already doing?
How will schools that are experiencing financial hardship make the financial match in Years 2-5 and beyond?
- Are the practices and professional development offered through PICCS the best available?
- Will PICCS inhibit teachers from taking risks?
- How can we assure that we have clear measures for goals that are tied to compensation?
- How can a PICCS school ensure equity across subjects?
- Will PICCS professional development mesh with our current and future professional development?
- How can a PICCS teacher get access to PICCS professional development?
- Will the PICCS program help us better understand child development?
- How will PICCS support drive decision-making among teachers as they increase their use of data to make decisions about instruction?
- Will PICCS schools have time for teachers to collaborate on these initiatives?
- How do we measure student growth in Kindergarten through 8?
- What if, as a teacher, I feel that I don’t want to add monetary value to student growth if I already see student growth as my job?
- What about teachers who have students that achieve growth but don’t hit specific school-wide attainment benchmarks? Will those teachers be penalized?
- Won’t performance pay just encourage competition amongst teachers?
How can a PICCS school ensure equity in performance-based compensation amongst teachers?
PICCS has high standards for approving each school’s performance-based compensation plan (PBCP). Our utmost concern is equity among teachers of different grades and subjects and across the faculty; we plan to work with schools to ensure that these issues are addressed to each school’s satisfaction, keeping in mind that each school’s performance-based compensation plan is created and written by the a school team of teachers and school leaders.
Ensuring equitable access to performance-based compensation is addressed in the PICCS PBCP Framework, which is a document that outlines requirements and recommendations for writing your plan. Each school leader has a copy of the Framework.
Once a school writes their PBCP based on the Framework, PICCS will provide access to a panel of experts in compensation reform, which will review and ultimately approve each plan. Should the panel foresee potential issues in your PBCP with regards to equity, clarity or rigor, they will make suggestions for recourse. Additionally, we encourage schools new to PICCS to reach out to the original cohort of PICCS charter schools to ask teachers and school leaders how they guarantee fairness.
Above all, the more input teachers have into the measures and goals of their school’s PBCP, the greater the likelihood of the plan being perceived as equitable.
Is PICCS going to require more time and effort from already busy teachers?
PICCS is designed to provide teachers with tools and resources that make the work that teachers already do more effective.
Whether it is through timed protocols during common planning time, scanning in teacher created assessments, or creating a lasting curriculum map, PICCS aims to make efficient use of teacher time. For the original cohort of PICCS schools, the transition from a school’s previous operational model to the PICCS model can require additional effort. However, once a school attains full integration of the PICCS model with its typical daily operation, PICCS will not feel like an “add-on” or additional work. A PICCS teacher was quoted in our external evaluation as saying,
"…we are not working harder; we are working smarter because of PICCS."
Another PICCS teacher was quoted in our evaluation as saying,
"This overall program has been beneficial—not just the [Performance based compensation]. My first year, when they were trying to implement PICCS, I was overwhelmed. There was so much work. But eventually as the program went on, we started learning more and I began to see the benefit: how PICCS is supposed to make us more reflective of our teaching, encourage deeper content, help us to be more focused and intentional, and help our students achieve even higher standards."
How can we ensure that we have buy-in across faculty and avoid miscommunications about PICCS and performance based compensation?
We are eager to work with you on this piece. We have found that within school communication is invaluable to the success of implementation of performance based compensation. The group that provides technical assistance to TIF grants agrees; they provide web resources on their website regarding communication of performance based compensation. (http://www.cecr.ed.gov/planning/communicating/).
As part of the PBCP, each school is required to write a communications plan that details how the PBCP and other PICCS components will be shared and understood by each stakeholder group, particularly teachers. We encourage schools that are new to PICCS to reach out to the original cohort of PICCS schools to seek suggestions on clear communication.
The ultimate goal is that each teacher is able to articulate exactly what he/she has to accomplish in order to receive additional compensation, including but not limited to that teacher’s student growth goals, leadership goals, and school wide goals. Attaining this level of communication requires ongoing meetings, presentations and focus groups with faculty throughout the year. We also encourage school leaders to have one-on-one meetings with teachers throughout the year to discuss the compensation plan and the teacher’s progress towards reaching those goals.
How is PICCS not just an “add-on” atop what we are already doing?
The PICCS model offers embedded professional development, a robust data system, training in "Using Data", coaching in Professional Learning Communities and peer review, training in mapping your curriculum and building assessments, and much more. In most cases, we find that the PICCS model aligns with the school leader’s current or future vision for the school.
Therefore, PICCS has the capacity to enhance what the school is already doing or will eventually be doing anyway. We are prepared to work with your school to align PICCS with your school’s current and future operational plans to ensure that PICCS doesn’t feel like an "add-on".
How will schools that are experiencing financial hardship make the financial match in Years 2-5 and beyond?
Schools must provide CEI-PEA with financial assurances indicating how the school will provide the required match to our compensation payouts each year.
How the school secures those funds is specific to each school and Board of Trustees. For example, some schools find that the savings accrued in using PICCS paid-for professional development instead of PD and technology paid for by the individual school provide some budgetary leeway to meet the match.
At the school’s request, PICCS can provide access to experts in compensation reform and budgeting who can work with the school leader in 1)
arranging their budget to ensure the match using available school funds and
2) sustaining a compensation system beyond the years of the grant.
Are the practices and professional development offered through PICCS the best available?
We do careful research before engaging consultants or particular PD models.
Often times, we ask a sample of our charter schools to pilot a new PICCS practice (e.g. a principal evaluation tool) and seek their opinion on the validity and usefulness of the practice before we bring it to the entire charter school consortium. In fact, much of the PD that we engage in comes from suggestions made by school leaders and teachers as far as what they need and from what vendor they think is best.
Will PICCS inhibit teachers from taking risks?
PICCS encourages risk taking and innovation! Schools have the opportunity to create a unique and rigorous plan for encouraging teachers to go above and beyond.
Additionally, PICCS teachers have the opportunity to take risks by engaging in a rigorous peer review process to develop, refine and publish model units of instruction. Just as educators in higher education engage in peer review processes to validate their research, so too PICCS educators engage in the process to validate and ultimately publish their work in order to contribute to the overall field of education. In a variety of ways, PICCS invites each participating teacher to take his or her professional practice to the next level. One teacher from a PICCS school wrote that
"PICCS has helped elevate us to another level. Teachers are looking at data more intensely and through different lenses."
How can we assure that we have clear measures for goals that are tied to compensation?
When your school writes your PBCP, you will follow a Framework that will guide the creation of your plan. School Leaders have a copy of this Framework, which details how to tie clear measures to each goal. Throughout your planning process, PICCS is available to meet with your school based team PBCP committee to provide guidance on measurable outcomes.
Lastly, each school’s plan is assessed for clarity, equity, and rigor by an external panel of experts on compensation. This panel will provide feedback on your PBCP and provide suggestions to ensure that each goal is tied to a fair and clear measure if necessary.
How can a PICCS school ensure equity across subjects?
Measures of student growth should be as consistent as possible across subjects to insure equity among teachers. Teachers in non-tested subjects/grades must have opportunities to receive an incentive beyond school-level incentive (i.e. teachers’ formula must include individual and grade level related incentives). Also, the non-core teachers (Art, PE, Resource Room, Title teachers, etc.) must have an equitable payout system, 51% of which is also based on a student-to-teacher growth outcome.
We feel equity across teachers of various subjects is integral to promoting a positive, inclusive and supportive school culture.
Will PICCS professional development mesh with our current and future professional development?
PICCS professional development is so robust that it has the capacity to one day become the school’s primary professional development plan. However, we understand the schools often have commitments and priorities that aren’t directly connected to PICCS work. Therefore, we have consultants that are eager to help schools align PICCS with the work schools are already doing.
We will not let PICCS become an "add-on" in your schools; our goal is to support the direction your school has chosen as much as possible.
How can a PICCS teacher get access to PICCS professional development?
PICCS staff will communicate PD opportunities to principals and school leaders and we rely on the school leaders to communicate those opportunities to teachers using their judgment. PICCS also holds annual conferences to update teachers on what is available through the project.
Should you ever have an interest in a particular area of development, we recommend that you speak with your school leader about your interest in accessing that professional development through PICCS.
Will the PICCS program help us better understand child development?
The PICCS program has the potential to support increased understanding about child development and other issues central to effective teaching because it promotes the growth of the data culture in a school.
The PICCS School Improvement Engine was built to support four fundamental processes, which teachers routinely carryout in school data cultures, namely Diagnosis, Prescription, Monitoring, and Remedying. Each process is designed to answer a specific question:
Diagnosis - What does each of my students need to achieve success?
Prescription - How do I customize curriculum and instruction to meet those needs?
Monitoring - How do I know that my modifications are working so that students are thriving?
Remedying - How can I use what I’ve learned and developed to help other teachers?
The incorporation of increased understanding about child development and other issues can be accomplished in Diagnosis when teachers also ask "What can I learn from the research that will help me serve the needs of my students so they can achieve success?"
How will PICCS support drive decision-making among teachers as they increase their use of data to make decisions about instruction?
PICCS has developed an agreement with Technical Education Research Centers (TERC) to bring Using "Data for School Improvement" to participants to capacity to make their data-driven school improvement processes successful and to help make increased student achievement a reality.
Through a series of workshops, Using Data guides educators and administrators to work collaboratively with data in order to identify root causes, implement research-based solutions, take action, and monitor the changes made in their schools and communities. Using Data was selected because research indicates it effectively supports teacher as they use data to drive their instructional decision making.
Will PICCS schools have time for teachers to collaborate on these initiatives?
Because PICCS is a not a school *district* model, but a consortium of independent charter schools, there are many decisions such as scheduling that are left to school leadership, hopefully with teacher input.
If your school currently has collaborative planning time, it is likely that this time will be enhanced with PICCS related efforts, which will simply bolster the work you are already doing.
However, some schools have chosen to alter their schedules in small ways to allow for more time to conduct Professional Learning Communities, collaboratively look at student data, etc.
How do we measure student growth in Kindergarten through 8?
Measures of student growth should be as consistent as possible across measures and grades to insure equity among teachers.
Teachers in non-tested grades must have opportunities to receive an incentive beyond school-level incentive (i.e. teachers’ formula includes individual and grade level related incentives). For K-8, goals must relate to tested measures to a degree and must include at least reading and math for all general education teachers. The use of a nationally normed assessment is strongly recommended such as Terra Nova, ITBS, Scantron, etc.
In addition, for untested grades, some PICCS schools choose to use portfolios as an alternative method of looking at a student’s growth. This article provides some suggestions on dealing with non-tested grades and subjects ( http://www.cecr.ed.gov/pdfs/guide/other69Percent.pdf), although PICCS doesn’t condone the authors’ suggestion of using only school wide growth.
Because state assessments are only administered on an annual basis and are limited in subject area and the grade levels tested,
PICCS schools focus on using formative assessments as part of their instructional processes.
When incorporated into classroom practice, formative assessments provide the information needed to adjust teaching and learning while they are happening. In this sense, formative assessment informs both teachers and students about student understanding at a point when timely adjustments can be made. These adjustments help to ensure students achieve targeted standards-based learning goals within a set time frame. PICCS schools have access to a range of web-based tools to help teachers develop and implement formative assessments.
What if, as a teacher, I feel that I don’t want to add monetary value to student growth if I already see student growth as my job?
The Teacher Incentive Fund goal is to recruit, retain and reward high quality teachers. Interestingly enough, many of our teachers feel that PICCS has provided them with something far more valuable than a financial reward. One of the PICCS principals wrote,
"My staff works extremely hard anyway. They do their best regardless of the bonus structure. I don’t think they would try less hard if those targets weren’t in place. But, the PICCS structure does reinforce the idea that everything is about student achievement, including what you take home—your bonus."
Every teacher gets something different out of their work with PICCS;
for some, it may be that he/she values access to electronic tools to run queries on student data while, for others, it may be the chance to participate in a peer review process with partner charter schools. That being said,
we believe that high quality teachers who show results in building data cultures and improving student growth deserve recognition by means of additional compensation.
What about teachers who have students that achieve growth but don’t hit specific school-wide attainment benchmarks? Will those teachers be penalized?
The traditional way that teachers and schools are evaluated uses attainment measures: XX% of students at or above grade level in a subject area tested through state assessments. While attainment measures provide an easy-to-understand way to figure out the overall state of student performance at a school, they are only “snapshots” that capture student performance at a specific time (the time of the assessment), in a limited way (through timed tests), and on limited skills and content areas (those tested by the state). Growth measures look at student performance over time: Johnny performed at level X in fall and level Y in spring, showing Z% of growth. This growth approach to measuring student performance is better aligned with the job of teaching as it allows teachers to look at each student’s learning profile and set growth targets that are challenging for the individual student.
PICCS schools make student growth measures a central part of their Performance-based Compensation Plan (PBCP). In fact, in order for an educator at a PICCS school to be eligible for PBC funded through the federal Teacher Incentive Fund grant, at least 51% of his or her PBCP must include student growth measures. The purpose behind emphasizing growth measures is to ensure that educators are rewarded for increasing all students’ achievement levels.
When included in performance-based compensation systems, growth measures encourage educators to help all students meet and exceed their performance targets. PICCS schools establish growth targets for each individual student, each classroom or cohort, and the entire school. Then, they tie the achievement of these targets to their PBCS.
Won’t performance pay just encourage competition amongst teachers?
For the 5 years of the project, PICCS secured enough funding for every teacher to receive a maximum incentive. In other words, teachers are not competing for limited funds.
In reality, the PICCS program stimulates and supports collaboration among teachers in several ways. Schools’ performance-based compensation plans will factor in grade level growth and school wide growth, which foster collaboration as a team of educators. Other examples include: Professional Learning Communities, Peer Review, Teacher Evaluation, and data analysis. With protocol-driven Professional Learning Communities, teachers learn and practice team participation and the increased effective use of time. With Peer Review, they build exciting, needed units of instruction with the active support of other teachers. With Teacher evaluation, teachers and principals collaborate in the teacher's growth using the Danielson Framework for Teaching. With the analysis of student performance data, teachers learn the techniques of collaborative inquiry in support the children they serve.
A PICCS teacher is quoted in our evaluation as saying,
"When teachers have a chance to share struggles in a structured meaningful way, that produces a wave of professionalism…. We want to try harder; we want to try different suggestions. PICCS [Peer Review and PLC] has given us the time to do it."
The more teachers support one another in improving teacher and learning, the more opportunity exists for all teachers to earn additional performance-based compensation.
For more information
Please visit http://www.piccs.org/evaluations.php to view the following Profilers:
PICCS Implementation Taking Hold
PICCS Students Demonstrate Progress on State Tests
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