Investing in Excellence: Elevating Teacher Effectiveness for Student Success in Beech Grove City Schools

In the fall of 2021, Beech Grove City Schools (BGCS) received a federal Teacher and School Leader (TSL) Incentive Program grant to strengthen their human capital management system and create opportunities for professional growth. Through this grant, BGCS partners with the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET) to enhance their implementation of the TAP System for Teacher and Student Advancement (TAP System). Through the TAP System, BGCS offers educators career pathways, provides professional learning to improve classroom instruction, builds supportive school cultures, and recognizes effective educators through performance-based compensation. Through the first two grant years, BGCS has made progress in enhancing educator effectiveness, retaining effective educators, and improving student performance.

It has been inspiring to witness beautiful alignment of once fragmented improvement strategies through our engagement with NIET. A recent needs assessment conducted by NIET provided us with affirming insights that celebrated the already strong practices in place while simultaneously challenging us to go deeper. NIET is a catalyst for moving our district from procedural to conceptual thinking and learning.

Dr. Laura Hammack, Superintendent

Throughout the two grant years, teachers have advanced their effectiveness while continuing to teach in BGCS, and student performance has benefited from the improved teacher effectiveness. The findings include:

• 94% of teachers were rated effective or higher in the second grant year.
• 99% of effective teachers from the second grant year were retained into the third grant year.
• Student growth on state assessments exceeded that of comparison groups from before the grant to the second year.

These findings underscore the effectiveness of BGCS in implementing a system and structure to sustain high levels of teaching and learning to accelerate student achievement.

The improvement in our ability to attract, retain, and recruit staff is a direct result of the job-embedded coaching and professional development we have implemented with the support of NIET. There is a collective desire to improve our learning community because we are all focused on the same goal which is to increase our student achievement to open pathways to success for our students.

Mary Story, Director of Teacher and School Leaders