Inside School Research: Texas Merit-Pay Pilot Failed to Boost Student Scores, Study Says:
"Back in August, I told you about some early results from a study of a performance-pay program that was being tested in the Lone Star State.
Piloted between the 2005-06 and the 2008-09 school years, the now-defunct Governor's Educator Excellence Grants, or GEEG, program distributed more than $10 million a year in federal grants to 99 Texas schools that managed to turn in high scores on state tests despite enrolling large numbers of students from low-income families. The program differed from some other merit-pay schemes, though, because it required schools to involve teachers in designing the performance-incentive plans for their own schools."
In the earlier study, which was conducted by researchers from the National Center on Performance Incentives, at Vanderbilt University, we learned that, when given a say, teachers tend to be remarkably egalitarian. They favor relatively modest awards and spread them widely.
In the new study, released just this month by the same group of researchers, we learn whether the pay incentives for teachers translated to any improvements in their students' test scores. The answer, in a word, is no. The third-year findings indicate that, overall, the program had a "weakly positive, negative, or negligible effect on student test-score gains."
"Back in August, I told you about some early results from a study of a performance-pay program that was being tested in the Lone Star State.
Piloted between the 2005-06 and the 2008-09 school years, the now-defunct Governor's Educator Excellence Grants, or GEEG, program distributed more than $10 million a year in federal grants to 99 Texas schools that managed to turn in high scores on state tests despite enrolling large numbers of students from low-income families. The program differed from some other merit-pay schemes, though, because it required schools to involve teachers in designing the performance-incentive plans for their own schools."
In the earlier study, which was conducted by researchers from the National Center on Performance Incentives, at Vanderbilt University, we learned that, when given a say, teachers tend to be remarkably egalitarian. They favor relatively modest awards and spread them widely.
In the new study, released just this month by the same group of researchers, we learn whether the pay incentives for teachers translated to any improvements in their students' test scores. The answer, in a word, is no. The third-year findings indicate that, overall, the program had a "weakly positive, negative, or negligible effect on student test-score gains."