Why merit pay for teachers works

A number of districts continued to experiment with pay for performance programs, including a nationally recognized plan in Fairfax, Virginia that was implemented in , but the plan was abandoned by the school district in The trend grew in national popularity in the s with federal support and funds were established creating incentives for compensation systems that include the use of test scores.

By , eight states used systems that based teacher pay in part on performance; however, not all schools in these states participated in merit pay plans. In , U. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stated merit pay for teachers was the U. Department of Education 's highest priority.

The goals of the Teacher Incentive Fund are the following: [9]. Despite support and incentives from the federal government, merit pay adoption has not been implemented at the school district level. The National Center on Performance Incentives found in a report that only about 3. A report by Stuart Buck and Jay P. Greene stated, "most were so weak that they represented no meaningful change from traditional compensation systems. Unions have also succeeded in blocking merit pay implementation in states like Florida , Iowa and Texas that have passed laws supporting the practice.

In Iowa, only three of districts applied for the Career Ladder and Pay-for-Performance grant program. Texas also struggled with implementation of their District Awards for Teacher Excellence program after only 20 percent of districts opted into the program in Some merit pay plans are designed to reward outstanding work by individual teachers.

Others are based on the assumption that student progress depends on the cooperative work of a teaching team and therefore lead to bonuses or pay increases to the entire staff of a particular school, sometimes including non-professional staff. Opponents have constantly invoked previous attempts that failed—though their only examples have been two experiments that are over years old, and another from the s, before modern notions of performance pay emerged. The conventional wisdom among educators had long been that any attempt to pin down exactly what makes for good teaching, let alone measure and reward it fairly, was doomed to fail.

Over the last decade, these views have utterly collapsed, undermining the intellectual case—weak as it was—against merit pay. Rather than try to filter out the myriad sociological influences on pupils, a nearly impossible task, Sanders used complex statistical methods to chart the progress of students against themselves over the course of a school year and measure how much "value" different teachers added.

Other education experts, including Danielson, author of several popular books on pedagogy, developed widely accepted criteria to judge good teaching, which put paid to the absurd notion that it was too elusive to define. Even so, a small number of school systems across the country, under intense pressure from parents, politicians, and administrators to improve student performance, have turned to merit pay to promote better teaching. Two years later, a ten-school pilot program, designed by administrators and teachers, got under way.

Based on how they scored, teachers then wound up in one of five salary categories, with "novices" making the least money and "accomplished" teachers the most. The pilot proved successful. A majority of teachers involved found it fair and judged the standards used as appropriate for the whole school district.

Teachers will go through evaluations every five years, though those looking to move up quickly can request an appraisal after just two years. New teachers and one-fifth of all experienced teachers are having evaluations done this year, but no one will start getting paid under the new system until Bringing in scores would have generated too much union hostility for the plan to gain acceptance, reports school superintendent Steven Adamowski. And in all likelihood, tying pay solely to test scores is a bad idea; nobody would call meritorious a teacher who boosted scores but left his students psychological wrecks because of his bullying.

Yet leaving tests out altogether also makes no sense. After all, what better way to determine how well students are doing—the only reason for the concern over teaching quality in the first place—than test scores? The district will monitor test results of students whose teachers score the highest ratings. In addition, the district will rely on student tests to award bonuses to all teachers in a school whose kids take big strides. O ne major benefit of merit systems is that they enable schools to pay teachers—especially young and ambitious teachers—fatter salaries.

Forsyth helped the state dream up the new system, looking to the market for inspiration. That finding lends support to the shared nature of teaching and learning in schools. Emerging studies also suggest that merit pay can improve teacher recruitment and retention, which has been found to contribute to many positive outcomes for students, particularly those in low-income areas.

Springer suggests continued investigation into teacher labor market outcomes, especially the effects of pay incentives on the mobility patterns of highly effective teachers, and the exit decisions of traditionally low-performing teachers. Follow eduspringer and lamdspham on Twitter.

Vanderbilt University. Although popular, merit-based payment programs face many problems, a meta-analysis concludes. Merit-based pay programs in schools are based on the belief that teachers work harder to improve student performance if they are better paid based on performance.

Researchers from different universities united to make a meta-analysis of 37 studies, 26 of them in the United States, about programs based on merit. The purpose of the study is to shed light on the debate about the effectiveness of such programs. One of the biggest challenges facing incentive programs is that K schools often do not have well-defined objectives nor the limit of the responsibilities of the teachers.

This becomes a problem when one wants to establish performance measures because they end up being inaccurate. The effort of the teachers and the learning outcomes of the students must be valid and able to be communicated effectively. About that point, the analysis mentions that beyond defining what student performance means, it is also essential to determine the objectives because schools can have multidimensional goals such as academic mastery, character development, and professional preparation, among others.

One study indicates that focusing on a single objective can affect student performance.