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Class Struggle
By Jay Mathews

First controlled study: Teacher merit pay doesn't work

Here is another blow to the scientifically battered but still fashionable idea of bonus pay for teachers: It didn't work in a controlled experiment in Nashville.

The news release by Vanderbilt University's Peabody College says this is “the first scientific study of performance pay ever conducted in the United States.” That is difficult to believe, given that we have been trying out merit pay schemes for half a century, but I don't know of any other randomized investigations of the issue.

Almost 300 middle school math teachers volunteered for the project, designed by researchers from Vanderbilt and the RAND Corp. About half were randomly assigned to the treatment group and given bonuses of up to $15,000 each for raising student scores above usual levels. The other half got no bonuses. After three years, there were no significant differences between the two group's results.

Okay, that is not a big sample. I suspect we will see larger experiments in the future. But it does buttress the views of many teachers I know that they are not in this for the money. They would be happy to get it, but they are not going to shortchange kids if it doesn't come.

Here are some of the details as described by the Vanderbilt news release:

The annual bonus amounts were $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000. Over the course of the experiment, POINT [Project on Incentives in Teaching] paid out more than $1.27 million in bonuses. Overall, 33.6 percent of the original group received bonuses, with the average bonus being approximately $10,000.

Teacher attrition occurred during the experiment. About half of the 296 teachers who initially volunteered remained through the end of the third year. The teachers who left the study either left the school system, moved to other grades or stopped teaching mathematics. Only one participating teacher specifically asked to be removed from the experiment.

While there was no overall effect on student achievement across the entire treatment group, the researchers found a significant benefit for fifth graders in Year 2 and Year 3 of the experiment: fifth graders taught by teachers who earned bonuses did show gains in test scores. However, the effect did not carry over to sixth grade when students were tested the following year.