Teacher Performance Incentives and Student Outcomes

Randall Eberts, Kevin Hollenbeck and Joe Stone

No 00-65, Upjohn Working Papers from W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research

Abstract: This paper reviews the evidence on the effectiveness of individual merit pay systems for teachers on student achievement, and it presents new empirical results based on a system established within a collective bargaining environment. While many merit pay systems have been established in school districts across the U.S., very little empirical evidence concerning their influence on student achievement exists. A natural experiment arose in a county in which one high school piloted a merit pay system that rewarded student retention and student evaluations of teachers while another comparable high school maintained a traditional compensation system. A difference-in-differences analysis implies that this system had no effect on grade point averages, reduced the percentage of students who dropped out of courses, reduced average daily attendance, and increased the percentage of students who failed. The outcomes of this merit pay system illustrate the difficulty of instituting such a compensation system in schools. The goal of the system was to increase student retention. A student was considered to be retained in a class if the student was present during a randomly selected day of the last week of classes. The system "worked" by this measure because the school experienced a significant reduction in course noncompleters. However it is not clear that this measure was correlated with student achievement or even average attendance, and indeed, neither of these outcomes were improved.

Keywords: merit pay; teachers; student achievement; Eberts; Hollenbeck; Stone (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I2 J3 J5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
http://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art ... ext=up_workingpapers (application/pdf)
This material is copyrighted. Permission is required to reproduce any or all parts.

Related works:
Journal Article: Teacher Performance Incentives and Student Outcomes (2002)
Working Paper: Teacher Performance Incentives and Student Outcomes
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:upj:weupjo:00-65

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Upjohn Working Papers from W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research 300 S. Westnedge Ave. Kalamazoo, MI 49007 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().