Joanne Jacobs
Apr 24, 20171 min
Merit pay for teachers can lead to higher test scores for students, reports Ed Week‘s Teacher Beat. In the U.S., teacher participation in a merit-pay program was linked to three extra weeks of schooling, concluded a Vanderbilt meta-analysis of 44 studies.
Incentive-pay programs that provided on-the-job training for teachers –a requirement of the federal Teacher Incentive Fund — had little effect on student achievement, the study found.
The authors did find that merit-pay programs aimed at groups of teachers who worked together to earn incentive pay, as opposed to individuals competing against one another, resulted in an effect more than two times the average. “The group incentive-pay system may encourage teachers to collaborate more, and so teachers end up learning new instructional practices or new ways to approach the curriculum,” Springer conjectured. “As a result, they become better teachers.”