What is TIA, and How Can MusicFirst Help?
The Texas Incentive Allotment, known as TIA, is a program that helps school districts recognize and reward outstanding teachers. Through TIA, educators can earn additional compensation based on their effectiveness in the classroom and the growth of their students. You read that correctly! Bonuses for being an exemplary music or arts educator!! While many people associate TIA with tested subjects such as math and reading, Fine Arts teachers can also participate. Music, art, theatre, and dance educators can demonstrate student growth through performance assessments, portfolios, and other approved measures that reflect the unique nature of their subjects. As more districts include Fine Arts in their TIA plans, exceptional arts educators have new opportunities to be recognized for their impact on students while helping their schools access additional funding to support teaching and learning. For the past few years, MusicFirst has been partnering with districts around the state of Texas to create custom assessments to measure student growth over time in their music and arts education - a topic near and dear to my heart. Yesterday we ran a webinar, hosted by Frank Coachman, with several Fine Arts Directors across the state to see how this novel program is going, and how their partnership with MusicFirst has helped them implement this initiative. ICYMI - here’s that webinar:
The MusicFirst team for TIA - headed up by Dr. Keith Dye (the former Associate Dean of Undergraduate and Curricular Issues for the College of Visual & Performing Arts and Professor of Music Education in the School of Music at Texas Tech University) - is uniquely qualified and experienced to deliver high quality, customized assessments to fit the unique needs of each individual district. There are companies out there that “claim” that they can also be used for TIA assessments, but in my humble opinion, they simply can’t. TIA assessments are WAY more complex than just offering “multiple choice questions”. That’s not how it works. What I love about the webinar that we ran yesterday is hearing directly from the Fine Arts Administrators themselves about the complexity of the program as well as the need for customized assessments across ALL of the arts. Keith & I both wrote our doctoral dissertations about online assessment for music educators and their students. The deep knowledge and understanding that Keith and his team have are unrivaled and I am so proud of the work we are doing in Texas.
If you would like to find out how MusicFirst can help you get TIA assessments up and running on your district, fill out this form and then set up an appointment to meet with Dr. Dye today.