IES Blog

In celebration of IES’s 20^th anniversary, we’re telling the stories of our work and the significant impact that—together—we’ve had on education policy and practice. As IES continues to look towards a future focused on progress, purpose, and performance, Dr. Matthew G. Springer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discusses the merit pay debate and why the staying power of IES will continue to matter in the years to come.

Merit Pay for Teachers

There are very few issues that impact Americans more directly or more personally than education. The experience of school leaves people with deep memories, strong opinions, and a highly localized sense of how education works in a vast and diverse country. Bringing scientific rigor to a subject so near to people’s lives is incredibly important — and maddeningly hard. The idea of merit pay inspires strong reactions from politicians and the general public, but for a long time there was vanishingly little academic literature to support either the dismissive attitude of skeptics or the enthusiasm of supporters.

Given the stakes of the merit pay debate—the size of the nation’s teacher corps, the scale of local, state, and federal educational investments, and longstanding inequities in access to highly effective teachers—policymakers desperately need better insight into how teacher compensation might incentivize better outcomes. Critics worry merit pay creates negative competition, causes teachers to focus narrowly on incentivized outcomes, and disrupts the collegiate ethos of teaching and learning. On the other hand, supporters argue that merit pay helps motivate employees, attract and retain employees in the profession, and improve overall productivity.

Generating Evidence: The Role of IES-Funded Research

That’s precisely the kind of need that IES was designed to meet. In 2006, with the support of IES, I joined a group of research colleagues to launch the Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) to test some of the major theories around merit pay. We wanted to apply the most rigorous research design—a fully randomized control trial—to the real-world question of whether rewarding teachers for better student test scores would move the needle on student achievement.

But orchestrating a real-world experiment is much harder than doing an observational analysis. Creating a rigorous trial to assess merit pay required enormous diplomacy. There are a lot of stakeholders in American education, and conducting a meaningful test of different teacher pay regimes required signoff from the local branch of the teacher’s union, the national union, the local school board and elected leadership, and the state education bureaucracy all the way up to the governor. Running an experiment in a lab is one thing; running an experiment with real-world teachers leading real, live classrooms is quite another.

With IES support to carry out an independent and scientifically rigorous study, POINT was able to move forward with the support of the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools. The results were not what most anticipated. 

Despite offering up to $15,000 annually in incentive pay based on a value-added measure of teacher effectiveness, in general, we found no significant difference in student performance between the merit-pay recipients and teachers who weren’t eligible for bonuses. 

As with all good scientific findings, we strongly believed that our results should be the start of a conversation, not presented as the final word. Throughout my career, I’ve seen one-off research findings treated by media and advocacy organizations as irrefutable proof of a particular viewpoint, but that’s not how scientific research works. My colleagues and I took care to publish a detailed account of our study’s implementation, including an honest discussion of its methodological limitations and political constraints. We called for more studies in more places, all in an effort to contest or refine the limited insights we were able to draw in Nashville. “One experiment is not definitive,” we wrote. “More experiments should be conducted to see whether POINT’s findings generalize to other settings.”

How IES-Funded Research Informs Policy and Practice 

Around the time of the release of our findings, the Obama administration was announcing another investment in the Teacher Incentive Fund, a George W. Bush-era competitive grant program that rewarded teachers who proved effective in raising test scores. We were relieved that our study didn’t prompt the federal government to abandon ship on merit pay; rather, they reviewed our study findings and engaged in meaningful dialogue about how to refine their investments. Ultimately, the Teacher Incentive Fund guidelines linked pay incentives with capacity-building opportunities for teachers—things like professional development and professional learning communities—so that the push to get better was matched by resources to make improvement more likely.  

While we did not have education sector-specific research to support that pairing, it proved a critical piece of the merit pay design puzzle. In 2020, for example, I worked with a pair of colleagues on a meta-analysis of the merit pay literature. We synthesized effect sizes across 37 primary studies, 26 of which were conducted in the United States, finding that the merit pay effect is nearly twice as large when paired with professional development. This is by no means the definitive word, but it’s a significant contribution in the incremental advancement of scientific knowledge about American education. It is putting another piece of the puzzle together and moving the education system forward with ways to improve student opportunity and learning.

That’s the spirit IES encourages—open experimentation, modesty in drawing conclusions, and an eagerness to gather more data. Most importantly, we wanted our findings to spark conversation not just among academic researchers but among educators and policymakers, the people ultimately responsible for designing policy and implementing it in America’s classrooms.

Pushing that public conversation in a productive direction is always challenging. Ideological assumptions are powerful, interest groups are vocal, and even the most nuanced research findings can get flattened in the media retelling. We struggled with all of that in the aftermath of the POINT study, which arrived at a moment of increased federal interest in merit pay and other incentive programs.  Fortunately, the Obama administration listened to rigorous research findings and learned from the research funding arm of the U.S. Department of Education.

This is why the staying power of IES matters. The debates around education policy aren’t going away, and the need for stronger empirical grounding grows alongside the value of education and public investment. The POINT experiment didn’t settle the debate over merit pay, but we did complicate it in productive ways that yielded another critically important finding nearly eight years later. That’s a victory for education science, and a mark of progress for education policy.

Matthew G. Springer is the Robena and Walter E. Hussman, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Education Reform at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education.

This blog was produced by Allen Ruby (Allen.Ruby@ed.gov), Associate Commissioner for Policy and Systems Division, NCER.  

Some of the most consequential COVID-19-related decisions for public education were those that modified how much in-person learning students received during the 2020-2021 school year. As part of an IES-funded research project in collaboration with the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) on COVID’s impact on public education in Virginia, researchers at the University of Virginia (UVA) collected data to determine how much in-person learning students in each grade in each division (what Virginia calls its school districts) were offered over the year. In this guest blog, Erica Sachs, an IES predoctoral fellow at UVA, shares brief insights into this work.

Our Process

COVID-19 has caused uncertainty and disruptions in public education for nearly three years. The purpose of the IES-funded study is to describe how Virginia’s response to COVID-19 may have influenced access to instructional opportunities and equity in student outcomes over multiple time periods. This project is a key source of information for the VDOE and Virginia schools’ recovery efforts. An important first step of this work was to uncover how the decisions divisions made impacted student experiences during the 2020-21 school year. This blog focuses on the processes that were undertaken to identify how much in-person learning students could access.

During 2020-21, students were offered school in three learning modalities: fully remote (no in-person learning), fully in-person (only in-person learning), and hybrid (all students could access some in-person learning). Hybrid learning often occurred when schools split a grade into groups and assigned attendance days to each group. For the purposes of the project, we used the term “attendance rotations” to identify whether and which student group(s) could access in-person school on each day of the week. Each attendance rotation is associated with a learning modality.

Most divisions posted information about learning modality and attendance rotations on their official websites, social media, or board meeting documents. In June and July of 2021, our team painstakingly scoured these sites and collected detailed data on the learning modality and attendance rotations of every grade in every division on every day of the school year. We used these data to create a division-by-grade-by-day dataset.

A More Precise Measure of In-Person Learning

An initial examination of the dataset revealed that the commonly used approach of characterizing student experiences by time in each modality masked potentially important variations in the amount of in-person learning accessible in the hybrid modality. For instance, a division could offer one or four days of in-person learning per week, and both would be considered hybrid. To supplement the modality approach, we created a more precise measure of in-person learning using the existing data on attendance rotations. The new variable counts all in-person learning opportunities across the hybrid and fully in-person modalities, and, therefore, captures the variation obscured in the modality-only approach. To illustrate, when looking only at the time in each modality, just 6.7% of the average student’s school year was in the fully in-person modality. However, using the attendance rotations data revealed that the average student had access to in-person learning for one-third of their school year.

Lessons Learned

One of the biggest lessons I learned working on this project was that we drastically underestimated the scope of the data collection and data management undertaking. I hope that sharing some of the lessons I learned will help others doing similar work.

• Clearly define terminology and keep records of all decisions with examples in a shared file. It will help prevent confusion and resolve disagreements within the team or with partners. Research on COVID-19 in education was relatively new when we started this work. We encountered two terminology-related issues. First, sources used the same term for different concepts, and second, sources used different terms for the same concept. For instance, the VDOE’s definition of the “in-person modality” required four or more days of access to in-person learning weekly, but our team classified four days of access as hybrid because we define “fully in-person modality” as five days of access to in-person learning weekly. Without agreed-upon definitions, people could categorize the same school week under different modalities. Repeated confusion in discussions necessitated a long meeting to hash out definitions, examples, and non-examples of each term and compile them in an organized file.
• Retroactively collecting data from documents can be difficult if divisions have removed information from their web pages. We found several sources especially helpful in our data collection, including the Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the internet, to access archived division web pages, school board records, including the agenda, meeting minutes, or presentation materials, and announcements or letters to families via divisions’ Facebook or Twitter accounts.
• To precisely estimate in-person learning across the year, collect data at the division-by-grade-by-day level. Divisions sometimes changed attendance rotations midweek, and the timing of these changes often differed across grades. Consequently, we found that collecting data at the day level was critical to capture all rotation changes and accurately estimate the amount of in-person learning divisions offered students.

What’s Next?

The research brief summarizing our findings can be downloaded from the EdPolicyWorks website. Our team is currently using the in-person learning data as a key measure of division operations during the reopening year to explore how division operations may have varied depending on division characteristics, such as access to high-speed broadband. Additionally, we will leverage the in-person learning metric to examine COVID’s impact on student and teacher outcomes and assess whether trends differed by the amount of in-person learning divisions offered students.

Erica N. Sachs is an MPP/PhD Student, IES Pre-doctoral Fellow, & Graduate Research Assistant at UVA’s EdPolicyWorks.

This blog was produced by Helyn Kim (Helyn.Kim@ed.gov), Program Officer, NCER.

The Department of Education’s (ED) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, administered by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), funds entrepreneurial developers to create the next generation of technology products for students, teachers, and administrators in education and special education. The program, known as ED/IES SBIR, emphasizes an iterative design and development process and pilot research to test the feasibility, usability, and promise of new products to improve outcomes. The program also focuses on planning for commercialization so that the products can reach schools and end-users and be sustained over time.

In recent years, millions of students in tens of thousands of schools around the country have used technologies developed through ED/IES SBIR, including more than million students and teachers who used products for remote teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

ED/IES SBIR Announces 2022 Awards

IES has made 10 2022 Phase I awards for $250,000*. During these 8 month projects, teams will develop and refine prototypes of new products and test their usability and initial feasibility. All awardees who complete a Phase I project will be eligible to apply for a Phase II award in 2023.

IES has made nine 2022 Phase II awards, which support further research and development of prototypes of education technology products that were developed under 2021 ED/IES SBIR Phase I awards. In these Phase II projects, teams will complete product development and conduct pilot studies in schools to demonstrate the usability and feasibility, fidelity of implementation, and the promise of the products to improve the intended outcomes.

IES also made one Direct to Phase II award to support the research, development, and evaluation of a new education technology product to ready an existing researcher-developed evidence-based intervention for use at scale and to plan for commercialization. The Direct to Phase II project is awarded without a prior Phase I award. All Phase II and the Direct to Phase II awards are for $1,000,000 for two-years. Across all awards, projects address different ages of students and content areas.

The list of all 2022 awards is posted here. This page will be updated with the two additional Phase I awards after the contracts are finalized.

The 2022 ED/IES SBIR awards highlight three trends that continue to emerge in the field of education technology.

Trend 1: Projects Are Employing Advanced Technologies to Personalize Learning and Generate Insights to Inform Tailored Instruction

About two-thirds of the new projects are developing software components that personalize teaching and learning, whether through artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, automated speech recognition, or algorithms. All these projects will include functionalities afforded by modern technology to personalize learning by adjusting content to the level of the individual learner, offer feedback and prompts to scaffold learning as students progress through the systems, and generate real-time actionable information for educators to track and understand student progress and adjust instruction accordingly. For example:

• Charmtech Labs and Literably are fully developing reading assessments that provide feedback to inform instruction.
• Sirius Thinking and studio:Sckaal are developing prototypes to formatively assess early grade school students in reading.
• Sown To Grow and xSEL Labs are fully developing platforms to facilitate student social and emotional assessments and provide insights to educators.
• Future Engineers is fully developing a platform for judges to provide feedback to students who enter STEM and educational challenges and contests.
• Querium and 2Sigma School are developing prototypes to support math and computer science learning respectively.
• ,Soterix is fully developing a smart walking cane and app for children with visual impairments to learn to navigate.
• Alchemie is fully developing a product to provide audio cues to blind or visually impaired students learning science.
• Star Autism Support is developing a prototype to support practitioners and parents of children with autism spectrum disorder.

Trend 2: Projects Focusing on Experiential and Hands-On Learning
Several new projects are combining hardware and software solutions to engage students through pedagogies employing game-based, hands-on, collaborative, or immersive learning:

• Pocketlab is fully developing a matchbox-sized car with a sensor to collect physical science data as middle school students play.
• GaiaXus is developing a prototype sensor used for environmental science field experiments.
• Mind Trust is a developing a virtual reality escape room for biology learning.
• Smart Girls is developing a prototype science game and accompanying real-world hands-on physical activity kits.
• Indelible Learning is developing a prototype online multi-player game about the electoral college.
• Edify is fully developing a school-based program for students to learn about, create, and play music.

Trend 3: Projects to Advance Research to Practice at Scale

Several new awards will advance existing education research-based practices into new technology products that are ready to be delivered at scale:

• INSIGHTS is fully developing a new technology-delivered version to ready an NIH- and IES-supported social and emotional intervention for use at scale.
• xSEL Labs and Charmtech Labs (noted above) are building on prior IES-funded research-based interventions to create scalable products.
• Scrible is developing an online writing platform in partnership with the National Writers Project based on prior Department of Education-funded research. 

*Note: Two additional 2022 Phase I awards are forthcoming in 2022. The contracts for these awards are delayed due to a back-up in the SAM registration process.

Stay tuned for updates on Twitter and Facebook as IES continues to support innovative forms of technology.

Edward Metz (Edward.Metz@ed.gov) is the Program Manager of the ED/IES SBIR program.

Michael Leonard (Michael.Leonard@ed.gov) is the Program Analyst of the ED/IES SBIR program.

Each generation faces its own societal challenges. Two prominent issues—the climate crisis and America’s political divide—are heavy burdens for today’s youth. Without explicit focus in schools, it is hard to imagine how children will learn to work across differences and collaborate with others to solve complex environmental problems. Youth are very capable people, and school comes alive when they feel agency and see how their efforts matter in the community. Service-learning can help teachers make instruction feel relevant and teach skills that lead to civic engagement as youth learn to design, implement, and evaluate solutions to problems that are important to them. In this interview blog, the Connect Science project team explains how they developed curriculum and professional development to support teachers to engage their students in service-learning experiences.

Can you tell us about Connect Science and what it looks like in action?

Fueled by an IES Development and Innovation grant, our team developed and evaluated a science-based service-learning approach for the upper-elementary school years. In doing so, we answered a need that teachers and schools face as they strive to create engaging experiences aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

Connect Science is a 12-week project-based learning unit for upper elementary students. Early on, teachers and students explore topics of energy and natural resources using lessons aligned with the NGSS. Teachers guide student learning on what it means to be an engaged citizen and on the social and collaborative skills needed to take action in the community. To prepare, teachers receive five days of professional development and follow-up coaching. Teachers also receive a Connect Science manual, related books, and science materials.

But what does Connect Science actually look like in action? Imagine fourth graders engaged in a science unit on renewable and non-renewable resources. The students learn about different energy sources and then discuss pros and cons of each source. They become aware that non-renewable energy resources are rapidly diminishing and would not always be available to generate electricity. The awareness of this problem energizes them to promote energy conservation. Toward that goal, the students decide to educate other students and families at their school about energy use. At the next open house night, they turn their cafeteria into an energy fair where they share important information. For example, one group of students teaches about what types of energy sources were used in their state to produce electricity and another group teaches ways that people can save energy in their home. Before and after the energy fair, the students administer a pre- and post-survey on energy facts to size up what their visitors learned.

How did the IES grant support the development and pilot testing of Connect Science?

In the first two years of this grant, we developed and tested materials with teachers. In the third year, we conducted a randomized controlled trial of Connect Science involving 41 classrooms with 20 in Connect Science and 21 in a waitlist comparison group, resulting in a student sample of 868 students (423 students participated in the intervention).

We found that Connect Science impacted teacher practices and student outcomes. Teachers in the Connect Science group were more effective at engaging in the two NGSS practices that we measured: eliciting and building on prior knowledge and creating opportunities for student critique, explanation, and argument. Further, we saw higher science achievement and energy attitudes and behaviors in the intervention than control condition. The social skill results hinged on the fidelity of implementation. When teachers used more Connect Science practices, students showed improved communication and social competence. As a result of these findings, Connect Science is designated as a Promising Program by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL).

What are the implications of your findings?

Too few projects integrate academic and social learning in schools. Often, high-quality NGSS materials are developed with little thought about the social skills students need to engage in that instruction. Likewise, social and emotional learning is often taught separately from academic content. Service-learning is a framework that bridges these two areas and allows students to engage in authentic, science-based work. Given our experiences, we have a few recommendations for educators eager to use service-learning.

• Teach social, emotional, and collaborative skills with intention before launching into group work. In the elementary schools, children thrive from being in supportive caring classrooms and they respond well to lessons on active listening, respectful communication, and understanding people with multiple perspectives.
• Leverage the existing curriculum and build in service-learning experiences. Rather than adding one more new topic, look at existing curricular topics and use service-learning to facilitate deep learning on content areas that already part of the curriculum.
• Amplify youth voice. Teachers need to work with students to identify a relevant community problem and generate solutions to that problem. We carefully developed the Connect Science materials to be more teacher-directed toward the beginning of the unit and more student-directed toward the end. This approach was based both on theoretical and empirical work supporting the importance of student autonomy.

Sara Rimm-Kaufman is the Commonwealth Professor of Education at the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development. Her recent book for teachers, SEL from the Start, is based on the Connect Science work.

Eileen Merritt is a Research Scientist in the College of Natural Resources and the Environment at Virginia Tech. Her research and teaching focus on environmental and sustainability education.

Tracy Harkins is the owner of Harkins Consulting, LLC in Maine. Her focus is providing professional development and resources to engage and motivate student learners through service-learning. She will be offering an upcoming Connect Science Institute in Summer 2022.

For questions about this project, please contact Corinne.Alfeld@ed.gov, NCER program officer.

Research identifies benefits of access to same-race/ethnicity teachers for Black and Hispanic students. However, the teacher workforce is overwhelmingly White, and little is known about the system-level strategies that are successful at diversifying the profession. In recognition of Black History Month, we asked researcher Dr. David Blazar to discuss his recently awarded IES project that aims to advance the literature base on how school systems can recruit more Black teachers. This is what he shared.

What does existing research say about the need for more Black teachers?

Building on a longstanding theoretical and qualitative literature base from scholars including Gloria Ladson-Billings, Geneva Gay, Richard Milner, and many others, researchers have gathered causal evidence to support the claim of the benefit of Black teachers to Black students. Analyzing test score data from Tennessee's Project STAR experiment, Dee (2004) found that assignment to a Black teacher significantly increased the math and reading achievement of Black students.

Fast forward 18 years, and the research findings largely remain the same while the evidence base has grown substantially (see one meta-analysis, and a research synthesis). In the second experiment on this topic after Dee, my own recent analyses currently available in a working paper not only replicate the earlier test-score impacts, but also show that

• Test-scores effects (roughly 0.2 SD) persist at very similar magnitudes 6 years later when students are in high school, a rare pattern in education research
• Black and other underrepresented teachers of color have even larger effects (upwards of 0.45 SD) on the social-emotional development of their students of color and their White students
• Black and other teachers of color are much more likely than White teachers to hold mindsets and engage in classroom practices aligned to “culturally responsive teaching,” which in turn benefits a range of student outcomes

In short: The effects of Black teachers on the outcomes of Black students are larger than those of most other interventions as documented in the broader education research literature (generally no higher than 0.1 SD).

I pair these hugely meaningful findings with three more sobering facts:

• Black teachers are underrepresented in the teacher workforce. Roughly 7% of teachers nationally are Black, compared to roughly 15% of students. These patterns have not shifted much over the last several decades, even though calls to diversify the teacher workforce started over 30 years ago.
• The mismatch between student and teacher demographics may be due to “leaks” at multiple stages of the school-to-career pipeline, including lower rates of high school graduation amongst Black students relative to their White peers, similar gaps in college graduation rates, less interest in teaching as a career, and greater financial barriers and opportunity costs even when the interest is there.
• Despite impressive work by educators, scholars, and policymakers to design multiple strategies for recruiting Black individuals into teaching, the bulk of these remain “promising practices” rather than evidence-based best practices.

How will your IES-funded study address the need for more Black teachers?

Because the underrepresentation of Black teachers in U.S. schools is notable and longstanding, researchers and school systems must work together—and quickly—to consider multiple strategies. Stating that we need to diversify the teacher workforce is neither new nor novel. The imperative was posed several decades ago, and it is time that we figure out how best to do it.

To address this challenge head on, I am collaborating with Ramon Goings, Seth Gershenson, and other scholars, as well as with state agencies and policy actors in Maryland to explore several recruitment strategies aimed at diversifying the teacher workforce, implemented at different stages of the school-to-career pipeline.

Aligned to the theoretical literature, a core feature of our study is that we focus on strategies that look locally for prospective teaching talent and are therefore known as “grow-your-own” programs. These approaches aim to align the demographics of incoming teachers with the demographics of current student populations and ensure that those incoming teachers are familiar with the local area. We further designed our study to explore multiple components of and potential solutions to the policy problem, given that recruitment is unlikely to be addressed with a one-size-fits-all approach. Even though the partnership and data come from Maryland, the recruitment strategies and our study are relevant to the recruitment strategies used in states across the country.

The three strategies are—

• Early exposure to teaching in high school through the Teacher Academy of Maryland—a career and technical education program of study—that provides high school students with an opportunity to learn about teaching as a career, gain teaching experience in a real-world classroom, and earn an associate’s degree in teaching alongside their high school diploma.
• Financial support and incentives for college students, including the recently implemented Teaching Fellows for Maryland Scholarship. Scholarships aim to decrease financial barriers and opportunity costs that may prevent Black individuals from becoming teachers.
• Career-changer programs, such as alternative-route teacher certification and residency programs that both decrease barriers to entry into the profession and focus on recruiting locally.

Our analyses will provide some of the first quantitative data linking the rollout of varied recruitment strategies and the workforce decisions of prospective Black teachers. Beyond analyses of each individual program, our findings will provide important guidance not only about how best to intervene but also when to do so. We look forward to sharing what we find and to building an evidence base alongside other scholars and funding agencies tackling this important issue.

David Blazar is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP) in the Education Policy and Leadership program. He also is the Faculty Director of the Maryland Equity Project, a UMCP initiative to improve educational outcomes and close achievement gaps through research.

This interview blog is part of a larger IES blog series on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) in the education sciences. It was produced by Katina Stapleton (Katina.Stapleton@ed.gov), co-Chair of the IES Diversity and Inclusion Council, and Wai-Ying Chow (Wai-Ying.Chow@ed.gov), the Effective Instruction program officer within the National Center for Education Research.