CTAC's study, It's More Than Money, expands on findings from CTAC's 14 years of field-tested practice and research on SLOs, underscoring the strengths that SLOs bring to teacher evaluation and compensation systems. The study also sheds light on how to craft federal, state and district policies that support successful implementation. Policy implications to consider include:

• All the core elements of the SLO process matter. Policies that exclude, for example, the instructional strategies component--a common flaw--undermine SLO effectiveness. Instructional strategies such as "differentiating instruction" are not a laundry list of activities. They are research-based concepts that prompt teachers to think deeply about the why--why differentiation is critical, for example--and to plan instruction accordingly. They support rigor and comparability--features as crucial for instructional practice as they are for assessments.
• SLOs work best when integrated within a district's instructional framework. Such integration builds sustainability beyond the life of external resources such as Race to the Top funding. SLOs are the glue that binds key initiatives--Common Core implementation, data driven instruction, school improvement plans and teacher evaluation.
• Like evaluation systems, SLOs must be educationally, statistically and politically valid. This means they must make sense to people, highlighting the need to ensure that SLOs are done with rather than to teachers, and are tailored to meet local needs and priorities.
• SLOs can be core elements of new teacher evaluation systems. More than 20 states and more than 2,000 districts are already heading down this pathway.

Download It's More Than Money to read more about these findings. If you would like to discuss how to incorporate SLOs within evaluation systems, collective bargaining agreements, or state policy, please contact us at (617) 423-1444 or [email protected].