Reaction Pours In to Performance-Pay Study
A rigorous experimental study of an incentive-pay program for teachers finds no effects on student achievement, an indication that teachers didn't change their practice in such a way as to cause student scores to rise.
The study was explicitly designed to answer the question of whether monetary incentives alone can spur improvements to teaching. The answer, by this study at least, appears to be no. Read my full Education Weekstory for the details of the study, the findings, and how they fit within the body of experimental research on merit pay.
But equally as important as the findings are how they're interpreted in our little corner of the edu-policy world, and how they might shape future policymaking—what we in the journalism profession call the "day two" story.