It isn’t clear if a $90 million program designed to recruit and retain math and science teachers in middle and high school is working, the Alabama Commission on the Evaluation of Services wrote in a report released last week.
The Teacher Excellence and Accountability for Mathematics and Science, or TEAMS, Program, launched at the start of the 2021-22 school year, “deviates from implementation best practices, lacks defined goals and maintains vague performance metrics,” the report’s authors wrote.
The law establishing the program lacked a specific set of measurable goals, ACES noted, leaving an evaluation of the program without metrics by which to judge the success of the program.
“Without established benchmarks, the overall success of the program cannot be determined in a verifiable way,” ACES stated.
Addressing those findings, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Education said they appreciate the authors’ findings and that they’ve identified similar issues in internal reviews of the TEAMS program.
The department has a different view about how to judge the program overall, however.
“The TEAMS program is working,” Communications Director Michael Sibley told AL.com. “Alabama now has more high-quality math and science teachers than ever before. We look for continued success and will make any positive changes necessary.”
Initially, the most notable aspect of the TEAMS program was how much more eligible teachers could be paid – up to $20,000 more depending on a teacher’s credentials and whether they teach in a hard-to-staff school. Middle and high school math, science and computer science teachers are eligible for the higher pay.
Lawmakers allocated $90 million to the program for each of the past two school years, though only $38 million was spent in the first year and $59 million has been spent for year two, which is still underway. Outside of direct costs associated with TEAMS, lawmakers allocated $1 million for a marketing campaign to highlight the program.
Teachers have to apply for an allocated TEAMs position; school districts receive one math and one science position for every 105 sixth through 12th grade students enrolled in a school district. Teachers deemed eligible must sign a contract agreeing to complete required training and to have or to be working on a professional credential – either National Board Certification or a STEM credential.
According to information the Alabama Department of Education provided to ACES, one-third of the 7,500 allocated TEAMS positions statewide were filled by a TEAMS-contracted teacher.
But that doesn’t mean the other 5,000 positions weren’t filled, authors noted, just that TEAMS contracts weren’t signed. The state department did not track whether allocated TEAMS positions were filled by highly-qualified teachers who chose not to sign the contract or if those positions were filled by teachers not certified properly.
One early win noted in the report is that districts reported more fully credentialed math and science teachers teaching during the 2022-23 school year. Further, 29 TEAMS teachers came from outside of Alabama to teach, according to reports from the 55 school districts surveyed.
An unintended consequence of paying TEAMS teachers from a higher salary schedule is that the difference in pay caused morale issues among teachers teaching subjects other than math, science and computer science, according to the report. Nearly half of administrators surveyed for the report said the program negatively affected staff morale.
“The leading motivation to sign a TEAMS contract is higher pay, but the incentive negatively affected the morale among other teachers within the system,” the report found.
Improving student achievement in math and science is also a goal, but ACES found no achievement goals have been set. Additionally, the state only requires annual testing in sixth, seventh, eighth and 11th grade.
Even in the tested grades, ACES found, the state currently does not link test scores to individual teachers and therefore can’t measure the impact of a student taught by a TEAMS teacher. Authors recommended the department develop accurate measures and goals for student growth.
The report’s authors noted the short amount of time Alabama Department of Education had to get the program up and running but were critical of implementation, starting with not knowing how many highly-qualified math and science teachers were teaching in Alabama’s classrooms before the TEAMS program began.
“Without determining how many of these teachers existed and where they were located throughout the state,” according to the report, “the growth and progress toward this outcome are difficult to measure.”
Authors said the teacher application and verification process is very slow and paper-heavy, and requires school officials to enter the information manually. That makes it difficult to get teachers into the system. The state department plans to begin automating the credential verification process this summer, but that process won’t be completed until next summer.
ACES noted other problems with the TEAMS program, including the requirement that TEAMS teachers teach only one course not on the list of approved courses. That course, however, still must be designed to improve student achievement in math, science or computer science. Nearly half of the surveyed administrators said that limitation was a “significant issue,” according to the report.
ACES issued nine recommendations for improvement, including streamlining the application process for teachers wanting to become a TEAMS teacher to establishing benchmarks and developing metrics that measure student growth associated with TEAMS teachers.
ACES has completed multiple evaluations of other education-related programs since it was created in 2019.