Evaluation of TNTP’s EIR mid-phase proposal Turnaround Leadership Teams Strategy

In 2017, TNTP (formerly called The New Teacher Project) received an $8 million mid-phase Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant from the U.S. Department of Education to implement the Turnaround Leadership Teams Strategy (TLTS) in two school districts in the southeastern United States. The TLTS program aimed to support professional growth for school leaders and teacher leaders; improve instructional practices, school culture, and family engagement in school activities; and, ultimately, increase student achievement. 

TNTP contracted Mathematica to conduct an independent evaluation of the effectiveness of the EIR-funded program, a requirement for all EIR grantees. This evaluation utilized a rigorous random assignment design. Under the EIR grant, TNTP added a new cohort of TLTS schools each program year while continuing supports to schools already enrolled in the program. In collaboration with the two participating districts, TNTP and Mathematica used school performance data to identify the elementary and middle schools in the participating districts most likely to benefit from program participation. From these identified schools, Mathematica randomly selected an intervention group of schools to participate in TLTS and a comparison group of schools to proceed as usual (without TNTP supports). After two years of program implementation, to evaluate the impact of the TLTS program, Mathematica collected and analyzed data from each school on (a) student achievement after one and two years of program implementation and (b) teacher perceptions and practices after two years of program implementation. The final evaluation report presents the final findings from this impact evaluation, as well as findings related to analyses of implementation fidelity, scale-up fidelity, and per-student costs.