In "Holding Accountability to Account: How Scholarship and Experience in Other Fields Inform Exploration of Performance Incentives in Education"--a paper presented at the National Center on Performance Incentives research to policy conference in February--Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, argues educational policy makers are not sufficiently aware of the costs and benefits of performance incentive systems. As a result, they are ill equipped to evaluate the potential value of such systems. Rothstein contends that many of today's public education challenges have been encountered in other fields. Performance incentives in particular have been analyzed by economists, business management theorists, sociologists, and historians. As a result, valuable lessons and insights can be gleaned from these fields. In particular, Rothstein finds that while the use of performance incentives is on the rise in the private sector, there is a corresponding decrease in the use of solely quantitative measures of performance as a determinant of incentive pay. Goal distortion and gaming are inevitable results when rewards are based too heavily on quantitative measures. Rothstein concludes that this reality has eluded education policy makers. Indeed, as a result of relying on quantitative measures for determining performance incentives, educators engage in what Rothstein characterizes as three common distortions: "mismeasurement" of outputs, "mismeasurement" of inputs, and reliance upon untrustworthy statistics. [This research brief describes work published by the National Center on Performance Incentives in "Holding Accountability to Account: How Scholarship and Experience Inform Exploration of Performance Incentives in Education," by Richard Rothstein, Working Paper 2008-04.]