PERFORMANCE PAY PLAN VETTED

Gwinnett County Public Schools provided this information about these outside groups that helped validate its Performance-Based Awards:

■ The District Management Group: DMG works with 147 school districts in 27 states to help bring about measurable, sustainable improvements in student outcomes. DMG was provided with the business rules and technical requirements for the awards system, as well as the raw data used in calculating awards. They developed their own calculation model, and it matched the district’s internal calculations 100%.

■ IBM: The district’s strategic partner served as a third-party evaluator for the student growth metric calculations, redeveloping a calculation model for this specific metric. It also matched the district’s results 100%.

■ Technical Advisory Committee: A group of measurement and testing experts that meet regularly with the district to share current research and best practices in areas of testing and measurement. They are a combination of university faculty and measurement consultants. During the development of the awards system, the TAC suggested analyses that could be used to examine the fairness, reliability and validity of outcomes. They reviewed the results of those analyses, providing suggestions and determining that the level of review in Gwinnett was comparable to the analyses used for state accountability systems found in some state departments and better than those found in others. After repeated reviews of results, they continued to conclude that there did not appear to be any systematic bias.