Researchers Probe Pay Incentives for Teachers
Book Explores Range of Approaches to Using Pay for Educational Change
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, Performance Incentives: Their Growing Impact on American K-12 Education , researchers recruited by the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University , 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’ 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.
“The policy context and the direction in which school districts and state education agencies are moving is toward reforming teacher compensation,” said Matthew G. Springer, the book’s editor and the director of the federally funded center in Nashville, Tenn. “Most people would agree that there’s likely to be a more effective and efficient strategy...
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