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Performance pay is a fraught topic among teachers. Many are dubious about competing with each other for cash and question prevailing methods for awarding bonuses. To some, merit pay has often been tried and usually failed.
These sorts of policies remain relatively rare, but two new studies suggest performance pay may deserve a second look, particularly when paired with additional resources. The papers, one from South Carolina and another from Texas, both find evidence that salary incentives for teachers benefit students.
In the South Carolina paper, University of Michigan researcher Sarah Cohodes and colleagues studied a comprehensive teacher improvement program funded by the federal government. This effort included pay incentives linked to student test scores, career advancement opportunities, and additional professional development.
The researchers compared students in middle schools that adopted this program, starting in 2007, against similar schools that didn’t participate. They found benefits that carried on into high school. Students’ 10th grade test scores rose and their chances of graduating high school increased, by about 4 percentage points.
Cohodes notes that when a similar program was adopted in Chicago without individual performance pay based on test scores, there were not clear gains for students. But she also believes that the comprehensive nature of the program made a difference in South Carolina. Teachers reported a more positive school climate, perhaps because the initiative raised some of their salaries and created a schoolwide focus on boosting student achievement.
"The merit pay is a key component. I just think it's not the only thing,” Cohodes says.
In Texas, Jacob Kirksey, a professor at Texas Tech University, studied an ongoing initiative that offers extra money to school districts that participate in a merit-pay plan. Teachers designated as high performing earn salary increases of several thousand dollars or more, paid for by the state.
Kirksey, who consults with some districts on implementing the program, found that test scores rose. Small benefits of the program emerged soon after it was adopted and then grew in the following few years. Teacher retention also increased, and effective teachers in particular were more likely to stay.
This is a key point: While merit pay has sometimes been framed as a way of getting teachers to work harder, the biggest effect may come from reshaping who enters, remains in, and exits the profession.
With some notable exceptions, prior research has also found benefits of teacher performance pay. Yet these schemes sometimes fizzle. President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative encouraged merit pay as part of a broader effort to reform how teachers were evaluated and paid. This garnered intense pushback, proved difficult to implement, and had no clear effect on student learning, according to later research. It also came in the context of significant budget cuts to schools.
It’s not clear what precisely made the South Carolina and Texas programs succeed. One possibility: They both came with meaningful amounts of new money, which may have made the programs easier to implement and to sustain.
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