Does Rewarding Teachers with Merit-Based Pay Improve Student Performance?

Merit-based pay programs in schools are based on the belief that teachers work harder to improve student performance if they are better paid based on performance. Researchers from different universities united to make a meta-analysis of 37 studies, 26 of them in the United States, about programs based on merit. The purpose of the study is to shed light on the debate about the effectiveness of such programs.

Among studies conducted in the United States, 17% focus on the effect of the programs designed as competitions by rank order; 28% report on group incentives, 24% analyze those programs that include professional development, and 38% talk about programs that use different teacher-effectiveness measures to determine the amount of the motivation.

One of the biggest challenges facing incentive programs is that K-12 schools often do not have well-defined objectives nor the limit of the responsibilities of the teachers. This becomes a problem when one wants to establish performance measures because they end up being inaccurate. The effort of the teachers and the learning outcomes of the students must be valid and able to be communicated effectively. About that point, the analysis mentions that beyond defining what student performance means, it is also essential to determine the objectives because schools can have multidimensional goals such as academic mastery, character development, and professional preparation, among others. One study indicates that focusing on a single objective can affect student performance. As an example, the study mentions that linking incentives to test scores can cause teachers to focus only on the content or the skills needed to pass the test.

One of the studies included in the meta-analysis evaluates two ways to pay these types of incentives: the first is to increase or spread the teachers’ efforts to achieve the desired results. The second is to use merit pay to attract and retain the highest performing teachers. Part of the decision to financially support the program comes from teachers’ discontent with the single-pay model, where there is a minimal relationship between the achievement and the experience of the teacher (which affects their salary) to students’ results. On this point, the studies emphasize the importance of defining student performance and considering whether it is measured as just a test score, grades, assignments, graduation average, and so on.

Of the problems that confront merit-based programs, the meta-analysis describes that many schools do not monitor the actions of the teachers, so they are not asked to specify details about how student outcomes were improved. This results in teachers choosing the learning methods of their preference that facilitate accomplishing the criteria. Another problem is that student’s performance does not depend exclusively on the teacher; if a student has problems at home, this affects his or her grades, regardless of the teacher’s performance. Another conflict is that teachers cannot be evaluated in the same way because in the case of primary school teachers, for example, they interact with the same students all day while those teaching in high school or a university sees different groups of students. Therefore, elementary school teachers have more impact, and their students can perform better than those whose influence is limited.

Other studies analyze merit-based pay when group incentives are applied that can lead to a better sense of competence, or, failing that, they may suffer problems of teachers who are clinging to the good results of others. By comparing programs implemented in the United States with those in other countries, the meta-analysis found that in the United States, programs are implemented for 3.5 years on average, while in other countries for 5.9 years. Differences in the types of motivation were also discovered; in the former case, the incentive represents 10.1% of the pay per capita, and in the latter case, 45.5% of salary per capita. According to the results, those implemented outside the United States reported a more significant effect but indicate that the differences are not statistically significant at the conventional level due to the diverse environments.

The studies that criticize merit-based pay argue that such a system can be very costly because when the incentives are too low, the teachers are not motivated, so the incentives must be high. The study concludes that for a merit program to work, it must align the students’ scores to teacher motivation. The analyses that included professional development in the studies were the ones that shed the most light on whether merit programs can effectively influence the outcome of the students and incentivize the teachers to improve.

Finally, the meta-analysis emphasizes the criticism of merit pay programs as they are not usually permanent, either because incentives end up running out or because incentives are often always awarded to the same teachers, discouraging those who have never achieved the incentives. Also, the duration of the incentive programs is usually short, 3.9 years in the United States, making it difficult for schools to attract or retain educators when the application is over, creating even more problems in the long run. Although salary incentives continue to generate debate, these programs are prevalent due to the desire to motivate and reward educators for improving the performance of their students and helping the institution to achieve its goals.

Paulette Delgado

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0