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UFT/Miller Photography
Education Dive
Study: Teacher merit pay linked to higher student test scores
Linda Jacobson
Feb. 24, 2020
Dive Brief:
Merit pay programs for teachers are associated with a significant
increase in student test scores, according to a new review of 37
studies, including 26 conducted in the U.S. But the effects depend of
how the program is designed.
Programs combined with professional development produced the greatest
results. “Integrating merit pay with effective professional development
opportunities suggests an important route for future research into pay
incentives,” wrote the researchers, led by Lam Pham of Vanderbilt
University. They note even if teachers are working harder, they may not
always know how to improve their practices.
Higher award amounts also produced stronger results, as did programs
that provide merit pay to top-ranking teachers rather than to a group
of teachers. Results in elementary schools were greater than at the
middle school level. There were not enough studies at the high school
level to provide a reliable estimate.
Dive Insight:
Merit pay, also called pay-for-performance or performance pay, is based
on the belief teachers would work harder to improve student performance
if they were paid extra for their efforts. But critics of such programs
have said student outcomes are affected by a lot that teachers can’t
control, and that at higher grade levels, students have multiple
teachers and it’s not always clear which teacher contributed to the
gains.
Such a program was the primary issue in last year's strike in Denver
Public Schools, where teachers argued the district’s ProComp system,
which was meant to attract and retain high-quality teachers to
underperforming schools and hard-to-fill positions, had grown too
complex and made it difficult for teachers to predict their income from
year to year.
The researchers identified differences between merit-pay programs
inside and outside the U.S. The programs outside the U.S. tend to last
longer — 5.9 years compared to 3.5 years in the U.S. — and the award
amounts in other countries tend to be larger, which could explain why
the impact of those programs was greater.
But they also note the effectiveness of the programs seems to wear off
after several years, maybe “because similar teachers continue to win
the awards and come to expect them as part of their standard salary
whereas teachers who consecutively fail to win incentives stop seeing
them as attainable,” the authors wrote.
They also tested whether the positive impact on student performance
extended to areas that weren't part of the criteria for receiving the
bonus, but found that not to be the case. “Perhaps teachers are
teaching only test-taking skills, focusing solely on the incentivized
test, or even cheating,” they wrote, “but authorities hoping to
implement merit pay would do well to expect only effects on the
incentivized outcome.”
Other research has shown principals play an important role in
understanding performance pay systems, explaining them to teachers and
ensuring good two-way communication between the district and teachers.
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