Teacher Incentive Fund Stakeholder Support and Planning Period Oversight

We found weaknesses in the Department’s processes for reviewing and evaluating Teacher Incentive Fund program (TIF) applications with regard to the involvement and support of stakeholders, a required element of the application. Non-Federal reviewers accepted varying levels of evidence of the support of teachers, principals, other personnel, and unions, and their overall evaluations of stakeholder support were unclear. We found that Department staff interpreted reviewer comments to indicate that applications demonstrated adequate stakeholder support when the comments did not clearly support that interpretation. As a result, the Department increased its risk of providing funding to grantees that did not adequately demonstrate stakeholder support, which increases the risk that a grantee will face significant challenges in meeting its project objectives. We also determined that the Department needed to improve its process for monitoring TIF grantees during the 1-year planning period that was in effect if the grantee did not have all of the required TIF core elements in place at the time of application. We found that monitoring activities related to developing missing core elements were inadequate for 13 of the 14 TIF planning period grantees (93 percent) that we reviewed. The Department did not begin to monitor grantees’ progress toward developing missing core elements until almost 6 months after awards were made, and subsequent monitoring activities were insufficient and inconsistent. We found that 7 of these 14 grantees (50 percent) had not fully developed one or more core elements at the end of the planning period. We also noted that 28 of the 54 total planning period grantees (52 percent) from the FY 2010 TIF competition were not ready for implementation after the 1-year planning period. The Department placed these grantees into “implementation with conditions” status, which meant that the grantees could not make any incentive compensation payouts until they successfully developed all core elements, similar to the terms under which they operated during the 1-year planning period. These 28 grantees received about $177 million of the $364 million (49 percent) initially awarded to planning period grantees. Based on our findings, we made a number of recommendations, including that the Department ensure that requirements for demonstrating stakeholder support are adequately defined and that it develop a formal monitoring plan for the TIF program that includes specific monitoring tools and processes related to the unique programmatic risks associated with grantees that have not yet successfully developed required core elements.