MCSV thinks it makes good sense for school systems to develop and implement teacher incentive systems to reward superior performance. There is little objective evidence that teacher experience and education levels explain improved educational outcomes. Yet, the few experiments with teacher incentives do show real promise to improve performance both of teachers and students. A recent elementary school experiment in Little Rock, Arkansas was quite impressive. The attached article mentions that the State of Texas and Florida are mandating that a portion of teacher compensation reflect performance.
The business world has used incentives for many decades to enhance performance. While not all incentives are effective, well conceived and refined incentive plans produce superior results in business and will in education. We acknowledge and believe that teachers provide a noble service in most communities. But why not compensate those truly extraordinary teachers for their results?
Authors & researchers Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgren document the ability of principals to identify superior performance in teachers in their research report When Principals Rate Teachers. We encourage everyone to read on...
In their own words as posted on the Hoover Institution Web Site:
"Elementary- and secondary-school teachers in the United States traditionally have been compensated according to salary schedules based solely on experience and education. Concerned that this system makes it difficult to retain talented teachers and provides few incentives for them to work to raise student achievement while in the classroom, many policymakers have proposed merit-pay programs that link teachers’ salaries directly to their apparent impact on student achievement.
Until recently, only a handful of isolated districts had attempted such programs. Now entire state systems are moving toward merit pay, with new policies established recently in Florida and Texas requiring districts to set teachers’ salaries based in part on the gains their students are making on the state’s accountability exam.
Implementing a merit-pay system, however, comes with challenges. Students often have more than one teacher but take only one high-stakes test. How do we know which teacher to reward? If students are not tested annually in each subject, how do we determine the merit of a teacher in a year without testing? How do we fairly assess the impact of a teacher during a testing year if we do not know how students performed during the previous school year? Can a merit-pay system overcome these obstacles?
One option is to turn to principals and ask them to help determine the size of pay raises. Such subjective performance assessments are already used to evaluate untenured teachers, and they play a large role in promotion and compensation decisions in other occupations. While principals can and do judge teachers’ performance, however, there is little good evidence on the accuracy of their judgments.
The research reported in this paper fills this gap. We found that principals in a western school district did a good job of assessing teachers’ effectiveness. In fact, principals are quite good at identifying those teachers who produce the largest and smallest standardized achievement gains in their schools (the top and bottom 10–20 percent). They are less able to distinguish among teachers in the middle of this distribution (the middle 60–80 percent), suggesting that merit-pay programs that reward or sanction teachers should be based on evaluations by principals and should be focused on the highest- and lowest-performing teachers. "
Click on the previous link to see the abridged version of this report.
For the full unabridged research report click here.
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