Corrected: A previous version of this story misquoted William L. Sanders at the SAS Institute. In fact, he said, 鈥淭here鈥檚 very little risk that if someone is highly effective in one set of circumstances, they鈥檙e going to be ineffective in another.鈥�
While much of the national debate over performance incentives for teachers has centered on bonuses based on student test scores, a new book suggests that such incentives come in all shapes and sizes, and offers some new research on little-studied aspects of those strategies.
In the book, , researchers recruited by the , offer findings on the wide landscape of performance incentives used in schools in this country and around the world. For instance, they explore how promises of better pay can be used to entice teachers to hard-to-staff schools, track what happens when teachers design their own performance-pay plans, look at the legal aspects of traditional pay-for-performance plans, and present studies from abroad on educators鈥� experiences with cash inducements. Growing out of a national conference the center hosted in 2008, the 336-page volume was published last month by the Brookings Institution Press of Washington.
鈥淭he policy context and the direction in which school districts and state education agencies are moving is toward reforming teacher compensation,鈥� said Matthew G. Springer, the book鈥檚 editor and the director of the federally funded center in Nashville, Tenn. 鈥淢ost people would agree that there鈥檚 likely to be a more effective and efficient strategy than a single-salary schedule.鈥�
Weeding Out
Two chapters, for example, explore the potential of performance incentives for weeding out ineffective teachers and retaining good ones early in their careers. To get some baseline information for that question, researchers Martin R. West and Matthew M. Chingos drew on data from Florida to see whether bad teachers left on their own鈥攅ven without performance incentives. They focused on 5th grade teachers across the state who entered the profession between the 2001-02 and 2004-05 school years, and followed each one for up to five years.
SOURCES: Daniel Goldhaber, Michael DeArmond, and Scott DeBurgomaster, Performance Incentives: Their Growing Impact on American K-12 Education
What they found was that the teachers who were least effective, as judged by their students鈥� learning gains, were more likely than other teachers to leave the schools where they had started their careers. They tended to find jobs, however, elsewhere in the Florida public school system.
鈥淪o the system as a whole is remarkably unresponsive to teacher quality,鈥� said Mr. West, an assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. 鈥淧erformance pay could be part of a set of policies to change that.鈥�
In another chapter, Mr. Springer and co-author Lori L. Taylor share that seemed to accomplish just that: Teachers who qualified for bonuses were more likely to stay on the job, while teachers who got no awards were more likely to leave their schools.
The findings are based on a three-year study of a now-defunct program known as the Governor鈥檚 Educator Excellence Grant program, which distributed grants ranging from $60,000 to $220,000 to 100 of the highest-performing high-poverty schools in Texas.
Modest Sums, Shared
Unlike some other pay-for-performance programs, though, that one required schools to involve teachers in deciding how to distribute the money. The researchers found that the teachers preferred giving modest awards and spreading them widely, rather than offering fewer, larger cash bonuses. Most of the bonuses, in fact, were less than the minimum $3,000 recommended by the state.
Teachers favored plans that gave a relatively small amount of money to a larger number of educators.
SOURCE: Lori L. Taylor, Matthew G. Springer, Mark Ehlert, Performance Incentives: Their Growing Impact on American K-12 Education
鈥淭eachers that received $1,300 or more were more likely to stay in school than would have been expected without the bonus,鈥� Mr. Springer said. 鈥淎t $3,000, teachers鈥� probability of turnover was cut in half.鈥� However, the latest findings from this study, released separately by the center last week, suggest that the program failed to translate into any significant gains in achievement for students鈥攑ossibly because the bonuses were so modest.In another chapter, William L. Sanders, the Tennessee researcher known for pioneering the use of 鈥渧alue added鈥� assessments in education, offers data showing how performance incentives might be used to attract good teachers to hard-to-staff schools. Value-added calculations are used to measure teacher effectiveness based on the learning gains their students make from one school year to the next, rather than students鈥� overall achievement.
Mr. Sanders and his co-authors calculated value-added scores for a sample of 6,000 teachers of grades 4-8 across Tennessee and in its four largest school districts. The researchers found that teachers judged to be highly effective remained highly effective when they switched schools鈥攅ven when moving from a relatively affluent school to one with a higher concentration of poor students.
Mr. Sanders acknowledged that the study is small鈥攐nly 76 teachers moved to more-disadvantaged schools鈥攂ut he said his findings suggest that schools can use value-added methods to reliably identify a pool of eligible teachers for incentives aimed at recruiting good teachers to hard-to-staff schools.
鈥淭here鈥檚 very little risk that if someone is highly effective in one set of circumstances, they鈥檙e going to be ineffective in another,鈥� said Mr. Sanders, who is the senior manager for value-added research and assessment at the SAS Institute, based in Cary, N.C.
