A new Mathematica study revisits the effects of pay-for-performance on educators. It evaluates the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF), which was established by Congress in 2006 and provides grants to support performance-based compensation for teachers and principals in high-need schools.
The TIF program has four components: measuring teacher and principal effectiveness using both student growth and classroom observations; offering bonuses based on effectiveness; enhancing pay for taking on additional roles or responsibilities; and providing professional development to help educators understand the pay-for-performance system.
From 2006 to 2012, the United States Department of Education awarded $1.8 billion to support 131 TIF grants. Mathematica’s study examines implementation of all sixty-two 2010 TIF grantees during the 2013–14 school year (for most of the grantees, this was three years into implementation).
It also separately reports impacts for a ten-district subset of 2010 grantees that participated in a random assignment study. Treatment schools were meant to all four TIF program components; they also received guidance on how to structure the bonuses, including admonitions that the bonuses should be substantial, differentiated, and challenging to earn. Control schools didn’t receive this guidance and were instead meant to implement every component except for the performance bonuses (they did receive an automatic bonus of approximately 1 percent of their annual salary as a benefit of participating).
There were five key findings:
- Eighty-eight percent of districts reported implementing at least three of the four required components. They were least likely to report offering professional development to teachers, and least likely to use both growth and observations of school practices to measure principal effectiveness.
- Communication was lacking. About 40 percent of treatment teachers were unaware that they could earn a performance bonus, and many also thought the maximum bonus they could earn was no more than two-fifths the size of the actual maximum bonus that districts awarded.
- Most teachers (70 percent) received a bonus, suggesting that the pay bumps did not meet the Department of Education requirement of being “challenging to earn.” And it appears that many got the bonus via the observation component of the growth measure, not for assessment results. More than half of teachers received a higher year-three rating on classroom observations than on student achievement growth. The average bonus was about $1,850, which amounts to about 4 percent of the average teacher salary but is less than the 5 percent guidance for substantial bonuses specified in TIF. At least three-quarters of principals also received bonuses—an average of about $4,000—but they weren’t differentiated or “challenging to earn” either.
- Despite initially posting better school and/or classroom achievement growth in year one, educators in both treatment and control schools earned similar growth ratings by year three.
- Pay-for-performance had small positive impacts on students’ math and reading achievement. After three years, the average student in a control school earned a math score at approximately the thirty-fourth percentile of student achievement statewide, whereas the average student in a treatment school earned a math score at approximately the thirty-sixth percentile. The intervention also lifted reading achievement for the average student from the thirty-sixth to the thirty-seventh percentile. The differences in both math and reading amount to a gain of about four weeks of additional learning in a typical school year and were similar in size to the effects achieved after two years of implementation. In other words, no more growth occurred as a result of an additional year of implementation.
There’s been much discussion of how pay-for-performance should be structured, but if it is watered down and treated like a small bump for everyone instead of a big jump for the most effective teachers, it is likely to end up being an ineffective intervention. A more effective strategy would be to differentiate base pay, which so few districts are willing to do.
SOURCE: Alison Wellington, Hanley Chiang, Kristin Heallgren, Cecilia Speroni, Mariesa Herrmann, and Paul Burkander, "Evaluation of the Teacher Incentive Fund: Implementation and Impacts of Pay-for-Performance After Three Years," Mathematica (August 2016).
