Establishing the education reform program, Race To The Top, over two and a half years ago, President Barack Obama called for innovative ways to reward the most effective teachers.

In our last update on this promise, we found that developing new ways to compensate teachers was one criteria for winning a Race To The Top grant. Now, grants have been given out, and there are multiple winners that have initiated new methods of rewarding teachers. States including New York, Ohio, Florida and Rhode Island are developing new ways to measure teacher effectiveness.

In addition to creating the Race To The Top, President Obama successfully expanded and revised the Teacher Investment Fund (TIF). The TIF was established by President George W. Bush in 2006 to provide grants to schools that utilize merit-based salary plans for teachers and principals.

Obama increased funding for TIF (from $97 million in fiscal year 2009 to $400 million in fiscal year 2010 – and $200 million more from the stimulus) and also altered the criteria for grant recipients to place "more emphasis on teacher evaluations and professional development," according to Education Week.

In September 2010, the Department of Education gave out $442 million worth of TIF grants to 62 schools across the country. Winners of the funds demonstrated a commitment to new methods of rewarding teachers.

For instance, at least five school systems included mentor programs into their proposals. One was the REACH initiative in the Austin Independent School District, in Texas, which hires 32 full-time mentors whose "sole job is to support novice teachers," said David Lussier, the district"s Executive Director of Educator Quality. Each mentor works with a group of 8 to 10 new teachers. Both the mentors and the teachers receive extra incentives and compensation for improvements in performance. Lussier said TIF funds have been "vital" to increasing teacher salaries in his district and have also been "a catalyst for a lot of the innovation that has taken place around educator quality."

Lussier added that the TIF grant has been used not just for expanding the mentoring program, but also for developing new teacher evaluation practices. "We"ve been developing multiple measures of performance for all teachers, we've been using value-added data...we've been providing more targeted professional development, [and] we've been rewarding high-quality principals, not just teachers," he said.

Obama recently included a $5 billion proposal in his 2013 budget, released Feb. 13, 2012, targeted at more innovation in teaching. The initiative, called RESPECT (Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching), is another competitive grant program that focuses on professional development, as well as "recognizing, rewarding, and learning from great teachers and principals," as Arne Duncan put it in a town hall meeting two days after the budget was released. The latest budget also includes a "$100 million increase to the nearly $300 million Teacher Incentive Fund," according to Education Week.

The Obama administration has hit some bumps in the road on this promise. In the 2012 fiscal year appropriation, funding for TIF took a hit, dropping from $400 million to around $300 million. Jo Ann Webb, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, says the Department currently has $284 million that "will go towards new awards." Webb said applications for the grants will be invited in late May.

Additionally, in the deal reached on the fiscal 2012 spending bill, the administration failed in a bid to restructure the teacher-quality programs into three new competitive programs, according to an account in Education Week. Obama has included similar proposals in his 2013 budget, but, as Education Week noted, "Any new spending program—particularly one with a $5 billion price tag—isn't likely to become a reality."

Obama hasn't gotten everything he has proposed in to promote improved teacher performance, but he has put programs in place toward that end. We rate this a Promise Kept.