This article draws on recent insight regarding the distribution and mobility of highly effective teachers, student access to top-performing educators, and research on the effectiveness of strategic compensation reforms to argue that the single-salary pay schedule has resulted in disturbing inequities for students and inefficiencies in resource…

Empirical research investigating the association between teacher pay incentives and student test scores has grown rapidly over the past decade. To integrate the findings from these studies and help inform the debate over teacher merit pay, this meta-analysis synthesizes effect sizes across 37 primary studies, 26 of which were conducted in the…

Federal incentives and requirements under the Obama administration spurred states to adopt major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. We examine the effects of these reforms on student achievement and attainment at a national scale by exploiting the staggered timing of implementation across states. We find precisely estimated null effects,…

Theory suggests that strategic compensation can not only serve as a powerful motivational incentive to increase worker performance, but also improve the composition of the workforce through the attraction and retention of high performers and discouragement of lesser performers from entering or staying in the profession. This study tests the…

Pay-for-performance is a popular public education reform, but there is little evidence about the characteristics of a well-designed incentive pay plan for teachers. Some of the literature suggests that effective incentive plans must offer relatively large awards to induce behavioral changes. On the other hand, the experimental economics literature…

The Governor's Educator Excellence Grant (GEEG) program was federally- and state-funded and provided three-year grants to schools to design and implement performance pay plans from the 2005-06 to 2007-08 school years. GEEG was implemented in 99 high poverty, high performing Texas public schools. Performance pay for teachers entered Texas state…

District Awards for Teacher Excellence (D.A.T.E.) is a state-funded program in Texas that provides grants to districts for the implementation of locally-designed incentive pay plans. All districts in the state are eligible to receive grants, but participation is voluntary. D.A.T.E. incentive pay plans were first implemented in Texas districts…

The Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) was a three-year study conducted in the Metropolitan Nashville School System from 2006-07 through 2008-09, in which middle school mathematics teachers voluntarily participated in a controlled experiment to assess the effect of financial rewards for teachers whose students showed unusually large gains…

Paying teachers varying amounts on the basis of how well their students perform is an idea that has been winning increasing support, both in the United States and abroad, and many school systems have adopted some version of it. Proponents claim that linking teacher pay to student performance is a powerful way to encourage talented and highly…

The Governor's Educator Excellence Grant (GEEG) program is part of a long history of performance pay programs and policies in Texas. The GEEG program was state-funded and provided grants to schools to implement three-year locally-designed performance pay plans. During the 2005-06, 2006-07, and 2007-08 school years, the GEEG program operated in 99…

In the 2007-2008 school year, the New York City Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers jointly implemented the Schoolwide Performance Bonus Program in a random sample of the city's high-needs public schools. The program lasted for three school years, and its broad objective was to improve student performance through…

The District Awards for Teacher Excellence's (D.A.T.E.'s) first year of implementation in 2008-09 occurred at a time when Texas was operating several state-funded performance pay programs. The three-year Governor's Educator Excellence Grant (G.E.E.G.) program was coming to its expected completion, while the Texas Educator Excellence Grant…

District Awards for Teacher Excellence (D.A.T.E.) is a state-funded program in Texas that provides grants to districts for the implementation of locally-designed incentive pay plans. All districts in the state are eligible to receive grants, but participation is voluntary. D.A.T.E. incentive pay plans were first implemented in Texas districts…

This study describes the teacher pay for performance plans designed and implemented by the public schools participating in the Governor's Educator Excellence Grant (GEEG) program in Texas. GEEG is a federally funded, incentive pay program that awarded non-competitive grants, ranging from $60,000 to $220,000 each year for three years, to 99 Texas…

The history of performance pay programs and policies in Texas provides a backdrop to the state's Texas Educator Excellence Grant (TEEG) program and the Districts Awards for Teacher Excellence (DATE) program. The TEEG and DATE programs are state-funded and provide grants to schools and districts to implement locally-designed performance pay plans.…