The Year In Research On Market-Based Education Reform: 2013 Edition
In the three most discussed and controversial areas of market-based education reform – performance pay, charter schools and the use of value-added estimates in teacher evaluations – 2013 saw the release of a couple of truly landmark reports, in addition to the normal flow of strong work coming from the education research community (see our reviews from 2010, 2011 and 2012).*
In one sense, this building body of evidence is critical and even comforting, given not only the rapid expansion of charter schools, but also and especially the ongoing design and implementation of new teacher evaluations (which, in many cases, include performance-based pay incentives). In another sense, however, there is good cause for anxiety. Although one must try policies before knowing how they work, the sheer speed of policy change in the U.S. right now means that policymakers are making important decisions on the fly, and there is great deal of uncertainty as to how this will all turn out.
Moreover, while 2013 was without question an important year for research in these three areas, it also illustrated an obvious point: Proper interpretation and application of findings is perhaps just as important as the work itself.
After something of a lull since the release of seminal analyses a few years ago, the research on teacherperformance pay may be picking up again, as several states are in the earlier stages of implementing various types of incentives along with their new evaluation systems. This year, the first shot was fired – a study of D.C.’s teacher evaluation system (IMPACT), by which teachers receiving “highly effective” ratings are eligible for large salary increases.
Although the study’s performance pay-relevant component focused solely on the (relatively small) group of teachers near the “highly effective” threshold, the researchers did find an association between receiving an IMPACT score near that threshold and improvement in those scores the following year, at least in the second year of the system’s