American education has gone through continuous changes over the past few decades. Most of the changes have been geared towards increasing the accountability of teachers, improving the quality of teaching, and closing the achievement gap. One of the changes that have come under close scrutiny over the past few years has been the payment of teachers. Right from the early 1900s, teachers were given a fixed salary schedule where teachers were paid based on the time on the job and higher degrees or additional education earned. However, in recent years, there has been an increasing focus on paying teachers based on measurable student achievement outcomes. Such a system is known as pay-for-performance has increasingly been adopted and has come under close scrutiny for its effectiveness. This paper conducts a literature review by analyzing the research and opinions by different authors on the pay-for-performance system.
The pay-for-performance can be defined as a reward for specific behaviors or outcomes at the team, individual, and organizational level (Odden and Kelly, 2002). The pay-for-performance system came about because of the need to have an improvement in the quality of education. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 came into focus with the aim of attracting, retaining, and rewarding teachers with the aim of increasing and improving student achievement. The Teacher Incentive Fund Grant was also established in 2007 by the Bush administration in the year 2007 in 34 states with the aim of implementing a performance-based compensation system for teachers, principals, and other educational personnel. While the overall aim and target of such systems have been to improve student achievement, it has also resulted in several other advantages and disadvantages.
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Strengths of Pay-For-Performance System
The performance-related pay system has been found to be advantageous by several authors. Dee and Wyckoff (2015) found that there was a positive association between the performance-related pay system and improvement in teacher practice and constructivist instruction between the year 2009 and 2010. The study involved conducting a survey of longitudinal teacher data collected between 2009 and 2010. The study established that 10.9% of teachers in Missouri had received the pay-for-performance in 2009 and the total amount was $1,463. The study revealed that there was a positive association between the pay-for-performance system and constructivist instruction.
The pay-for-performance system is based on economic theory. The economic theory suggests that programs that offer gain for a group could be used to improve teacher retention, cooperation, and work effort (Jones, 2013). Pepper and Gore (2015) also theorized the behavioral agency theory which observed that the behavior of men can be altered through extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation can come about in the form of bonuses, benefits, and monetary compensations. Such forms of extrinsic motivations have been applied in the teaching profession in order to improve teacher behavior and lead to quality teaching and higher student achievement outcomes.
The aim of implementing pay-for-performance systems is to realize significant benefits in terms of student achievement. Simpson (2018) carried out a study to determine how teachers make sense of performance pay systems. The study was carried out in high-needs schools and found a positive correlation between student achievement and the pay-for-performance systems. Simpson (2018) showed that the elimination of performance pay systems can result in an increase in teacher attrition at high-needs schools and can lead to a decline in student achievement. The study expanded the literature on the effects of pay-for-performance systems and served as an encouragement to leaders, school leaders, and teachers to develop such incentive plans.
Weaknesses of Pay-For-Performance System
The pay-for-performance has significant strength in improving student achievement. However, one of the weaknesses of the pay-for-performance system is that it can result in several scandals where teachers falsify test scores in order to show improvement in student achievement. Stout (2013) identified that there are several unintended behavioral consequences of the pay-for-performance system. He noted that such a system tempts employees to engage in opportunistic and sometimes illegal behavior. Morgan (2016) identified that the high-stakes of standardized tests used to evaluate schools and teachers resulted in cheating among teachers and educators in Atlanta Public School. The individuals caught in the case were found indicted for conspiring in order to alter student test scores so as to earn cash bonuses.
The pay-for-performance has thus been widely criticized in other institutions apart from the teaching profession for leading to selfishness and opportunism. Stout (2013) critiqued the pay-for-performance by observing that it could lead to an end result of unethical, uncooperative, and illegal employee behavior. There were other organizations that were identified for engaging in wrongdoing as a result of the pay-for-performance system. The incentive pay was blamed for the Enron accounting frauds that took place in the 1990s (Stewart, 2006). Additionally, incentive contracts have been linked to being one of the causes of the 2008 credit crisis. This is because incentive pay enticed bank executives into embracing risky lending practices and investing and approving loans to unqualified buyers (Stiglitz, 2009). Such dire consequences of incentive pay can be compared to the teaching profession which has also experienced negative outcomes.
The relationship between pay for performance system and improvement in business activity can also be put into consideration. Bates (2016) considered some of the lessons that education and business can learn from each other. He noted that while the pay-for-performance compensation schemes have proved to be effective in some areas of business, they are not universally applicable and they are ill-suited for application in education reforms. States that are moving away from uniform salary schedules and using pay-for-performance for teachers can learn from its effectiveness and weaknesses in businesses.
The pay-for-performance system is bound to alter the behavior of teachers and this has come to the attention of several authors. Jones (2013) made use of data between 2003 and 2007 from the Schools and Staffing Survey to investigate teachers under pay incentives. The study revealed that pay incentives affected teacher behavior negatively. There was a wide range of negative behavior witnessed among the teachers such as working fewer hours per week, a decrease in participation of unpaid cooperative school activities, and a decrease in teacher turnover. However, the study by Jones (2013) further revealed that male teachers responded more positively compared to female teachers. States such as Florida that restricted performance pay funding to individual teachers was found to have a significant degree of teacher turnover and work effort.
Rewarding performance pay in education has been found to be a challenging endeavor. Many authors observe that the outputs of the educational system are not as tangible like that of the business sector and this results in several challenges. Razo (2014) observed that the only output where teachers can be assessed is through a grade level which is usually unique, varied, and complicated. Odden & Kelley (2002) also observed that the challenges facing performance pay in education include the outputs to measure for educators and whether pay for performance can have a significant positive impact on student achievement.
Impact on Student Outcomes
The pay-for-performance system has been found by several authors to have had a minimal impact on student outcomes. Briggs et al., (2014) explains that some of the teachers experience a decline in their pay from year to the other under the program. Such a decrease in their salaries makes teachers strongly oppose the pay-for-performance systems and they may not view them as incentives into their behavior. The result is that teachers will consider the pay systems as rather punitive and will not have a significant positive impact.
While the pay-for-performance system can be punitive for low-performing teachers, it has been found to be a good incentive for high-performing teachers. Briggs (2014) made use of data from Denver’s Professional Compensation for Teachers (ProComp) and found that only high performing teachers would benefit from the system. There is also little evidence that the pay-for-performance has succeeded to improve student outcomes in the United States. Studies in different parts of the world have shown that there could be benefits of the pay-for-performance systems in specific conditions (Woessmann, 2011). However, there are no adequate studies about whether pay-for-performance systems in the United States have significant positive effects.
One of the authoritative studies of pay-for-performance systems is the Tennessee POINT experiment that did not show statistically positive effects on the overall performance of the student (Springer et al., 2010). A quasi-experiment evaluation of the Denver ProComp was carried out by Walch (2012) who found that there were statistically significant effect sizes which could be considered small and sometimes negative. The tests varied based on the subject tested and the grade level. Other studies of the pay-for-performance in Chicago and New York City did not show any statistically significant impact on student achievement (Glazerman & Seifullah, 2012).
Teacher Motivation
The impact of pay-for-performance was investigated on how it would affect teacher motivation. Marcotte (2015) investigated whether teacher motivation has been impacted by the presence of pay-for-performance systems in Indiana public schools. The study investigated various perceptions among the teachers in terms position of their years of experience, socioeconomic status, and school accountability grade. The pay-for-performance did not show to have contributed to an increase in the motivation of teachers or resulted in a change in how they perform their work. However, the study showed that there was a significant difference in teacher motivation based on their position type. Secondary school teachers showed a higher motivation score compared to elementary teachers. Additionally, teachers that were at the start of their careers had a positive attitude towards performance pay. The results from the study showed that pay-for-performance did not result in a direct motivation for teachers. Instead, teacher motivation from pay-for-performance was dependent on several factors.
The pay-for-performance was also found to affect teacher attitude towards the entire education system. Russ (2015) investigated teacher attitudes regarding performance-based pay systems. The study investigated the purported beliefs about the anticipated outcomes and components of the pay-for-performance models. The findings generally showed that teacher collaboration and motivation was affected negatively and that there was an elevated stress level among teachers. The pay-for-performance was also associated with negative outcomes on individual student achievement and standardized tests.
The long-term effects of pay-for-performance systems should be researched widely. Most of the researchers only considered the short-term effects of the performance-based pay systems. The pay-for-performance was introduced in the previous few years and most teachers had negative attitudes towards it. It is expected that once teachers get used to the system that there could be a wide range of positive results. Further research should thus be conducted on whether the pay-for-performance can be beneficial in the long-term.
Conclusion
The results of the studies showed that there can be several effects of pay-for-performance on both the teachers and students. Most of the studies showed that there are negative effects of the pay-for-performance. The positive effect of pay-for-performance was observed among some authors who noted that there were improvements in teacher motivation. One gap that was identified in the literature was that there were no significant studies on the long-term effects and impact of the pay-for-performance systems.
References
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