Now is the Time for Performance-Based Teacher Pay
Teachers prepare their classrooms for the return of in-person students. (Photo by Michael Loccisano)
With the CDC approving vaccines for children as young as five, schools across the country began to come back to life this fall, with students once again packing hallways, sports teams returning to their fields, and teachers lecturing from a whiteboard instead of a Zoom screen. But even as in-person learning resumes, teachers and administrators have found a “return to normal” to be more elusive. COVID-19 has forced school districts nationwide to take wildly new approaches to education; a return to pre-pandemic schooling won’t be achieved by just putting students back in the classroom, especially when those students have fallen an average of four months behind on reading and five months behind on mathematics after their year of pandemic education. Learning losses, social anxiety, and teacher shortages plague U.S. public schools, causing them to restructure their reopening strategies. As schools recalibrate, now is the time to implement performance-based teacher compensation across the nation.
One significant post-pandemic problem for U.S. public schools is a massive teacher shortage. Experienced educators have left teaching for a variety of reasons, from the fear of exposure to COVID-19 to the difficulties of virtual instruction. For some, especially of the large baby-boomer cohort of teachers, the pandemic simply moved their retirement plans a few years forward. As for new recruits, with vitriolic mask and vaccine wars, rising COVID-19 case counts, decreased funding, stagnant wages, overcrowded classrooms, and a year of learning loss, it’s hard to imagine many young people rushing to the field in times like these.
In most of the country, teacher pay comes from two factors: education level and tenure rewards. Performance-based compensation scales, on the other hand, offer higher salaries to teachers who demonstrate higher-than-expected performance based on student growth measures.
Performance-based compensation scales have the power to attract and retain more teachers. For recent graduates or those considering a move to teaching, getting paid based on performance means potential to move up the salary ranks faster than in a tenure-based system. Additionally, for the best veteran educators, the pay incentives of performance-based systems offer motivation to stay where they are rather than encouraging them to transition to higher-paying fields. In Texas, a 2012 study found that pay increases improved teacher retention, and that those improvements in teacher retention led to higher student achievement.
The practice of keeping the best educators where they’re needed most and motivating them to invest in their schools is ultimately critical to improving teacher quality and educational outcomes. Performance-based pay systems incentivize teachers to work towards higher degrees and undergo more professional development, involve themselves in students’ lives, and constantly refine their lessons and teaching methods.
In fact, keeping veteran teachers deeply invested in their improvement needs to be a priority of U.S. school systems. Previous studies show teachers tend to improve on measures of their students’ performance significantly over their first three years on the job. After that, teacher growth slows down significantly, and gains don’t happen as often. Performance-based pay can address this problem. Compared to tenure-based pay, it encourages active mentorship and professional development, going beyond just teacher retention and keeping educators committed to their schools.
Performance-based pay systems can also be targeted to help schools where students have fallen the most behind. Many scales will specifically reward teachers who work in the most at-need schools in the district and who take on additional roles in the school community, creating a holistic approach to performance determinations. A 2013 study across seven states found, in disadvantaged districts that have a hard time competing with the higher base wages or better support systems of well-off areas, performance-based incentives attract and retain the best and brightest educators, who see the benefits of putting in the work in the places that need it. Consequently, by bringing educators to the most at-need communities, rather than the wealthiest, performance-based pay has the potential to increase equity in public schools.
An often-overlooked but critical element of any performance-based pay system is data acquisition and analysis: charting students’ growth measures over a year and comparing actual and expected performance to determine a teacher’s success. This information, after it’s been applied to performance-based raises, can be used to refine strategies to help students learn. Districts can look at which teachers and schools are showing the most growth to determine which strategies and programs are actually working and then apply those methods to schools and classrooms that need more help. Performance-based raises don’t just help teachers who are doing well; they help to make all teachers better.
There are a few notes on successful implementation that should be made. Performance-based pay scales should never decrease a teacher’s pay for not replicating previous high performance. These scales should take demographic factors and students’ earlier growth into account when determining expected growth for a year, meaning teachers at wealthy schools aren’t advantaged over teachers at the lowest-performing schools. Additionally, teachers should be educated on the fairness of evaluation systems and how exactly they’re being judged.
Performance-based pay systems have faced stiff opposition from teachers’ unions, but merit-based raises don’t have to be mutually exclusive with tenure-based raises. Districts can and should continue to reward their veteran teachers. Loyal educators often become integral members of a school community and bring invaluable experience. Over the past 18 months, school boards across the country have figured out how to join online and in-person learning through hybrid schooling. They should apply those same lessons to their compensation systems and offer pay scales that jointly benefit tenure and performance, so that teachers are encouraged to improve and to continue investing in their current schools. Experts emphasize that any successful performance-based pay system will always be a work in progress and that districts should actively recalibrate their incentives based on student achievement and teacher satisfaction.
As we come out of the pandemic, children—especially disadvantaged students —are falling behind. If we’re going to design major changes to public U.S. education, there’s no time like the present to bring performance-based compensation to more teachers, working on a district-by-district basis to improve public schools and better serve all students.
Avery Lambert (BC‘25) is a staff writer at CPR. She plans on majoring in Medieval and Renaissance Studies & Political Science.