Charter schools are held up as examples of the benefits of a freer approach to hiring teachers. Most studies of charter school personnel policies, however, overlook important variation in personnel practice within the charter school sector. Examining how charter schools use recruitment timelines and teacher compensation to complete for teachers in…

Performance pay can be implemented in ways that are helpful to students and teachers, or it can repeat the mistakes of the past. To avoid these mistakes, initiatives must address the district factors that affect schools. There are six cornerstones for compensation reform: 1) Performance-based compensation is a systemic reform; 2) Compensation…

Pay for performance is not a new idea, and reformers should not ignore the dismal record of merit pay over the past century. Initially adopted with a flourish of expectations during several waves of popularity in the past, every plan eventually fell into disuse. These plans proved to be unexpectedly costly and cumbersome to run. They often…

A growing number of states and school districts are experimenting with new approaches to paying teachers. These efforts to reform teacher pay can involve a range of state and local actors, including governors, state education officials, superintendents, local school boards, teacher unions, private foundations, community organizations, and local…

A mantra in recent years has been to blame the teachers' unions for many of the problems that beset public education. Americans only need look at Wisconsin, where the governor and lawmakers pushed through legislation curtailing the collective bargaining rights of teachers and other public employees. This special report examines the attempts by a…

Current proponents of education reform are at present seeking to fundamentally change the system of teacher compensation by eliminating the traditional single salary schedule and instituting a merit pay system that directly links teacher pay to student achievement. To date, the scholarly literature in music education has been silent on the subject…

The author reports on an experimental study of performance-based teacher compensation conducted in the U.S. which shows that a nationally watched bonus-pay system had no overall impact on student achievement. Nearly 300 middle school mathematics teachers in Nashville, Tennessee, voluntarily took part in the Project on Incentives in Teaching, a…

The study examined whether offering financial incentives to teachers of fifth- through eighth-grade math students improved their students' achievement on the math section of the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program. The study took place in the Metropolitan Nashville Public School District during the 2006-07 through 2008-09 school years. It…

Policymakers are increasingly adopting "pay-for-performance" policies in which teachers are compensated based on their performance as measured by classroom evaluations and/or student achievement test results. Prior research has produced largely inconclusive findings concerning support among teachers for these policies and their effects…

Over 99 percent of business schools use student evaluation of instruction to measure teaching and classroom performance. The resultant measures are utilized in judgments of merit pay, tenure, and promotion. In such an environment, an inspection of exceptions to their assumed validity is justified. This paper investigates one such issue that is…

Democrats and Republicans in Washington, D.C., are more polarized today than they have been in nearly a century. Among the general public, party identification remains the single most powerful predictor of people's opinions about a wide range of policy issues. Given this environment, reaching consensus on almost any issue of consequence would…

President Obama's Educate to Innovate initiative has provided billions in additional federal funding for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education programs across the country. The Administration's recognition of the importance of STEM education-- for global competitiveness as well as for national security--is good and…

The state's Race to the Top (RTT) application requires changes to the state's evaluation/accountability system. It requires a teacher effectiveness measure, district effectiveness measure, leader effectiveness measure. Regarding the teacher effectiveness measure, RTT requires linking the data of individual students to individual teachers as part…

Diane Ravitch's book, "The death and life of the great American school system," is an exploration and critique of educational change in the United States since the report "A Nation at Risk" in 1983 and more specifically since the passing of the No Child Left Behind legislation in January, 2002. Arguably, there are several…

In 2006, the Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ) and its Teacher Leaders Network (TLN) successfully launched the TeacherSolutions initiative--a unique approach to elevating the voices of accomplished teachers on policy issues affecting their profession and the students they serve. In the inaugural TeacherSolutions project, 18 of the nation's best…