In 2006 and 2007, the U.S. Department of Education awarded Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grants for the development of innovative strategies for teacher compensation. New Leaders for New Schools (NLNS), with five partner organizations--Memphis City Schools (MCS), the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), Denver Public Schools, Prince Georges County Public Schools, and a consortium of charter schools--received five of these grants and is using them to implement their Effective Practice Incentive Community (EPIC) intervention. EPIC offers performance-based awards to staff in high-performing schools in return for their agreement to work with NLNS in documenting and sharing effective teaching practices. Mathematica Policy Research Inc. was hired to evaluate the EPIC initiative. This report provides a general overview of EPIC, compares student characteristics across the three partners, and compares the data used to determine which schools receive EPIC awards with data on all the students attending these schools. Four chapters comprise this report. Chapter I provides a general overview of EPIC, compares student characteristics across the three partners, and compares the data used to determine which schools receive EPIC awards with data on all the students attending these schools. Chapters II, III, and IV present baseline characteristics by partner: Chapter II focuses on Memphis, Chapter III on DC, and Chapter IV on the charter school consortium. The results are broken out by whether or not the schools received awards, by their performance levels, and by whether or not they were eligible for EPIC. Selected baseline statistics are appended. Findings from this analysis lead to several conclusions about the baseline characteristics of schools in EPIC partner districts. Among them was that the schools that won EPIC awards resemble non-award-winning schools in terms of many student characteristics. However, schools that won EPIC awards are more likely to score high on other measures of achievement than schools that did not win EPIC awards. (Contains 16 tables and 33 footnotes.)