The Illusion of Paying Teachers For Student Performance

By Wellford W. Wilms & Richard R. Chapleau

Frustrated by 25 years of failed school reforms, a growing number of districts are adopting "pay for performance" plans. These plans offer cash payments to teachers and administrators for boosting their students' scores on standardized tests. Yet history shows that any pay-for-performance gains are mostly illusions. Not only do they fail to improve student achievement, they are also destructive, encouraging administrators and teachers to cheat by manipulating statistics, or by teaching to the test. Inevitably, children wind up the losers because curricula are narrowed to include subjects that can be taught by drill and repetition and that are easily measured.

For all of the flaws in the idea, a bigger issue is at stake: our inability to resist these "political fixes" that divert efforts to address the root causes of education's failures at the schoolhouse level.

Pay-for-performance was first tried in England around 1710. Teachers' salaries were based on their children's scores on examinations in reading, writing, and arithmetic. This early payment-for-results system had great appeal because it promised to help keep children from poor families in school, where they might learn the basics. It became fixed in the English system of education in 1862 as part of the Revised Education Code, where it remained for...