New Report: Teacher Incentives and Student Achievement

Posted by on March 20, 2011

So much for that

New York City’s $75 million experiment in teacher incentive pay — called “transcendent” when it was launched in 2007 — did not increase student achievement at all, according to a new study by Harvard economist Roland Fryer. “If anything,” Fryer writes, “student achievement declined,” measured by state math and English test scores as the main indicator of academic achievement. The program, first funded by private foundations and then by taxpayer dollars, also had no discernible impact on whether teachers stayed at their schools or in the district, and how teachers described their job satisfaction and school quality in a survey. The program had a “negligible” effect on a list of other measures that include student attendance, behavioral problems, Regents exam scores, and high school graduation rates. The experiment targeted 200 high-need schools and 20,000 teachers between the 2007-2008 and 2009-2010 school years. The study adds to the body of research on teacher incentive pay that is less positive than the popular conversation surrounding the issue. Fryer himself was an early advocate of experimenting with financial incentives to improve student achievement, but characterizes the literature as “ambivalent.” The Bloomberg administration quietly dropped its program last year.

Read more: http://gothamschools.org/2011/03/07/study-75m-teacher-pay-initiative-did-not-improve-achievement/

See an abstract of the report: http://www.nber.org/papers/w16850