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…

We use a field experiment in Tanzania to compare the effectiveness on learning of two teacher performance pay systems. The first is a Pay for Percentile system (a rank-order tournament). The second rewards teachers based on multiple proficiency thresholds. Pay for Percentile can (under certain conditions) induce optimal effort among teachers, but…

A small number of districts in Ohio from a variety of locales have adopted merit pay provisions. Using Springer's (2009) taxonomy of teacher compensation, we analyzed compensation provisions of these districts. We asked: What are the characteristics of these districts? What criteria are used to determine merit? Who is determining who receives…