Salaries are one of the most powerful policy levers states and school districts can use to attract qualified, effective, and diverse teachers. What role do states play in supporting strategic use of salaries? This report examines the state teacher compensation policies that influence districts' potential strategic use of teacher pay. It analyzes…

Teachers are at the heart of the education process; in attempts to improve teacher quality there has been a trend in the US and elsewhere to incentivize teachers to put in more effort. This paper presents a theoretical framework for analyzing and designing different incentive schemes informed by the structure and quality of tasks constituting the…

This study encompasses the history, definition, and implementation of merit pay to identify the variables that affect student achievement and teacher retention. By reviewing 13 studies on American education relevant to the policy, this study aims to determine how merit pay influenced student achievement and teacher retention rates. In the United…

For a long time, the Swedish government has tried different reforms to counteract declining student results. One action was to implement a salary-lift for teachers perceived as especially skilled. However, changes within socially complex systems tend to create tensions and resistance among the staff. In this reform, a majority of teachers were…

Traditionally, teacher salaries have been determined solely by experience and educational attainment. This has led to chronic shortages of teachers in particular subject areas, such as math, science and special education. We study the first long-running statewide program to differentiate teacher pay based on subject area, Georgia's bonus system…

In January 2007, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) inaugurated the Teacher Performance Pay Model, 2005-2006, becoming the first school district in the nation to implement a performance pay system of this magnitude based on individual teacher effectiveness. Improvements and enhancements of that model became the "Recognize"…

This Information Capsule summarizes the history of educational reform in the State of Florida from the 1970s through the present. Although the Florida Legislature has modified accountability policies and added new reforms over the years, the "A+ Plan for Education", signed into law by Governor Jeb Bush in 1999, remains the foundation of…

Reformers in developing countries increasingly seek to raise education quality. Yet we know little about the politics of improving education. One significant and instructive case of reforms designed to boost education quality comes from Chile, where in 2016 the government enacted a sweeping reform of teaching careers. This paper first uses a…

The purpose of the "Accelerating Student Progress: Increasing Results and Expectations" (ASPIRE) Award Survey was to gain insight regarding the level of knowledge and perceptions of Houston Independent School District (HISD) teachers and staff after nine years of implementation of growth-based performance pay in HISD, as well as their…

While performance-based compensation systems in primary and secondary education are no longer a novelty in the US, they are still not yet common in the UK. Research from the US finds mixed results regarding the effects of performance-related pay on pupil achievement, but there is limited evidence around this concept from the UK. Therefore, RAND…

This brief explores the costs of developing and implementing Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) in order to help Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grantees interested in adopting SLOs anticipate and understand the costs of implementing them in a district or school. The brief focuses on the costs involved with the initial design and implementation of an…

A November 2011 Heritage Foundation report--"Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers"--presented data on teacher salaries and benefits in order to inform debates about teacher compensation reform. The report concluded that public-school teacher compensation is far ahead of what comparable private-sector workers enjoy, and that…

Purpose: This article seeks to enhance our understanding of the ever-present challenge of developing organizational capacity to implement complex education reform initiatives. We analyze the strategies in one large metropolitan education system used to address the district-level and site-level capacity challenges that surfaced as they implemented…

Denver Public Schools utilizes one of the nation's highest profile alternative teacher compensation systems, and a key element of Denver's Professional Compensation System for Teachers (ProComp) is pay for performance. This study analyzes the student achievement implications of ProComp utilizing matched student- and teacher-level data from 2003 to…

Some Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grantees are experimenting with the design and operation of teacher leader (TL) programs as part of their performance-based compensation systems (PBCS). Much of the impetus for this is the U.S Department of Education TIF 4 requirement that grantees' PBCS should provide for "additional responsibilities and…