全球智库信息集成服务系统

Research has revealed that effective teachers are critical to improving student achievement. Little evidence exists, however, about the best ways to help teachers be more effective, or about how schools that serve the students in most need can attract and retain the most effective teachers. Traditional salary schedules may not reward effective teaching—or give the most effective teachers incentives to work in high-need schools. In 2006, Congress established the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF), which provides grants to support performance-based compensation systems for teachers and principals in high-need schools. Under a contract with the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, Mathematica recently completed a study featuring an in-depth analysis of TIF’s implementation and the impacts of performance bonuses on educator effectiveness and student achievement. This final report on the study highlights lessons these findings can offer for policies on performance-based compensation. The study also considered possible explanations for why performance bonuses in the TIF program had positive impacts on student achievement—and why those impacts were not larger.