The Teacher Compensation Project, directed by Allan Odden, is studying alternative approaches to teacher compensation, including the design, implementation, and impact of individual incentives and school-performance awards.
As part of the project’s dissemination activities, Odden, a prominent expert in school finance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, conducts seminars with states and districts to share its research findings. He also provides technical assistance to some districts and has formed a partnership with the Teacher Union Reform Network to put some of his ideas into practice. The ground rule: Both union and management must want to work together on compensation issues.
The project has produced numerous papers and studies on management theories about compensation, the history of teacher pay, and case studies of states and districts that are changing teacher salary systems. Last year, Odden and Carolyn Kelley, a researcher with the project, published Paying Teachers for What They Know and Do: New and Smarter Compensation Strategies To Improve Schools (Corwin Press).
More information is available on the project’s Web site, including background on teacher compensation, a description and history of the project, examples of state and local teacher-compensation reform initiatives, related publications, and additional resources. The Web address is: www.wcer.wisc.edu/cpre/teachercomp.
—Ann Bradley
