Performance Pay For K-12 Teachers is Ineffective and Inefficient--Allocate More Money to Things that Really Work

 

Performance Pay for Teachers: What the Research Actually Shows

The Republican candidate for Governor has championed performance pay as a key K-12 education reform. This approach is appealing to people who see teachers as individual independent actors rather than part of an interdependent coherent system.

Success of students in K-12 depends upon the effectiveness of curriculum, professional development, administrative leadership, effective system wide discipline and inspiration. The best schools work together in teams. Their accountability systems are based on deploying supportive accountability. Teachers mentor each other; they meet in teams to assess what is not working; they conduct observations and receive regular supportive reviews.

Paying teachers bonuses doesn't generally make them work harder or work smarter. Improving curriculum, providing better professional development, a better disciplinary and counseling support, mentoring and better leadership, and interventions for students who need extra support — these are all things that improve teaching results; diverting that money to a bonus system detracts from the things that work.

That's why much of the research fails to identify significant benefits from pay for performance systems.

Minnesota Has Already Run This Experiment — For Twenty Years

Since 2005, the state's Q Comp program has offered districts extra funding in exchange for adopting pay-for-performance plans, making it one of the largest and longest-running experiments of its kind in the country. The first rigorous study of Q Comp, by University of Minnesota economists Aaron Sojourner, Elton Mykerezi, and Kristine West, found a consistent zero average effect of Q Comp participation on both reading and math achievement. A later, peer-reviewed version of their work refined that finding: districts that paired the pay component with real professional development, career ladders, and evaluation systems saw a modest gain — about 0.03 standard deviations — and even that gain was concentrated among the least experienced teachers, not the veterans a bonus is supposedly meant to motivate. In other words, where Q Comp helped at all, it wasn't the bonus check doing the work. It was the professional development and structure wrapped around it.

The Best-Designed National Experiments Found Nothing

Nashville's POINT study put nearly 300 middle-school math teachers into a genuine randomized trial, offering bonuses of up to $15,000 for value-added test-score gains. The researchers who designed it wanted to answer the most basic version of the question — does bonus pay alone improve student outcomes — and their answer was no. New York City ran an even larger version: a $75 million schoolwide bonus program across more than 200 schools, evaluated independently by both RAND and Harvard economist Roland Fryer. Neither found any improvement in student achievement at any grade level. Fryer's analysis turned up something worth pausing on: more than 80 percent of the schools that won bonus money simply split it evenly among the staff, rather than rewarding the "best" teachers individually. Given the choice, teachers themselves treated the money as a shared resource for a shared enterprise — not as an individual prize.

Where Real Gains Show Up: Selection, Not Bonuses

Washington DC's IMPACT system is the strongest positive result in this literature, and it's instructive precisely because of how it worked. Researchers Thomas Dee and James Wyckoff found that the dismissal threat facing low-rated teachers increased their voluntary departure by 11 percentage points and improved the performance of those who chose to stay by more than a quarter of a standard deviation. The districtwide achievement gains that followed were attributed mainly to that turnover — weak teachers leaving high-poverty schools — not to cash incentives changing how existing teachers taught. IMPACT is a story about a rigorous evaluation system with real consequences, layered on top of intensive observation and support. It is not a story about handing "good teachers" a check.

The pattern across all of it is the same one Minnesota's own data shows: pay-for-performance bonuses, standing alone, don't move outcomes. What moves outcomes is the system around the teacher — curriculum, coaching, evaluation with teeth, and the structures that let struggling teachers get better or move on. A bonus for the winners is a poor substitute for building that system.

Where the Money Should Go

We need more money in education, but that additional money needs to be allocated to strategies with proven results: adoption of system wide effective practices; authentic professional development that actually improves teaching, systemic improvement in school wide teaching systems, effective counseling support for students with emotional challenges, high quality tutoring interventions, and disciplinary supports that maintain the learning atmosphere but keeps kids in school.