Want to boost pupil outcomes in poor areas? Then give teachers bonuses based on pupil outcomes.

That’s the conclusion of a new working paper in the US that has restarted a long-fought debate about whether teacher rewards can get the best teachers to work with the children who need the most support.

So, will this new study on a specific performance-related approach change the conversation?

Performance-related pay: the background

The story began in 2012 when Mike Miles took on the role of superintendent of Texas’ second-largest school district, Dallas Independent School District (ISD). 

He made clear he wanted to use his tenure to turn around struggling schools in the district by, in part, enticing more high-quality educators to work in the area and drive improvements in student attainment as a result. It was, he said then, “the most important work of our time”. 

One idea he introduced was simply to pay teachers more. This he did with the introduction of performance-related pay for teachers working in the toughest schools in the district, with an offer of as much as $10,000 on a base salary of $50,000 based on student outcomes.

“No organisation can maximise its effectiveness if what it values is disconnected from how they compensate people,” Miles told Tes.

As such, instead of rewarding years of experience or having a degree, a new Teacher Excellence Initiative was based on three metrics: performance, based on 19 classroom indicators; student achievement, based on both test results and improvements; and a student experience survey.

Miles adds: “You have to incentivise teachers to stay in the profession, to really want to do their best work and also to go to the struggling campuses. A pay-for-performance evaluation and compensation system made sense.”

This idea was hugely controversial and led to heated disagreements at the time, as well as - Miles believes - perhaps even permanent career damage for some of its advocates.

Indeed, three years after taking the job, he himself resigned and, by 2019, the programme was mostly eliminated. Recent reports of teaching in Texas suggest life is as tough as ever for educators.

However, a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), published in March, suggests the programme worked and that paying teachers bonuses to work in tough schools can have a major impact on pupil outcomes.

“The programme brought the average achievement in the previously lowest-performing schools close to the district average,” the paper notes in its conclusion.

The findings: boost pay to increase attainment

So, what happened?

The paper compared primary schools in the scheme - dubbed “accelerating campus excellence” (ACE) - with other low-performing Dallas schools, tracking pupil scores in reading and maths from 2012 to 2019 as they reached the start of secondary school.

“We focused on elementary schools because we wanted to observe the longer-term outcomes and see how well the kids did when they transitioned to the next school,” Steven Rivkin, one of the co-authors, told Tes.

Rivkin says from this it is clear that the schools in the ACE programme that gave sizeable bonuses to effective teachers saw pupils’ immediate and long-term achievements improve. 

“Within this small set of the most disadvantaged schools, you see this increase in achievement to the point at which the school started off well below the district average, and after one or two years of the programme they were approaching or even exceeding the average achievement in the district,” says Rivkin. 

In standard tests, even after a short amount of time, children’s achievement scores went up - by an average of half a standard deviation in maths and around a quarter of a standard deviation in reading.

“These are huge effects relative to what you observe in other kinds of interventions, such as a 10-student reduction in class size,” says Rivkin.

Even more importantly, the students’ longer-term results also went up when the researchers tracked them over time: by 6th grade, their achievement was also up by about 0.3 of a standard deviation compared with their peers in non-ACE schools.

“This is a lot: the system appears to succeed in defining a good teacher as someone who’s able to really foster meaningful learning, and these kids benefit,” he says.

‘It doesn’t work just to get a new textbook and a curriculum’

A big reason for this impact was found to be simply that the scheme ensured a high calibre of teachers rewarded with performance-related bonuses, rather than having to rely on new or inexperienced teachers.

“Effectiveness-adjusted payments…provided the compensating differentials to attract and retain effective teachers in the lowest-achievement schools,” the paper summarises.

The same was true for the leaders, for which the ACE scheme also awarded pay rewards linked to school performance, something Rivkin says also underlines shortcomings with current systems.

“If you have a principal with great job security, it doesn’t really matter…how well the school is going to do, it gives them great latitude to engage in arbitrary behaviour, favouritism or discrimination,” he notes.

“Whereas, once you link the principal’s career success closely with how effective the school is, you really impose a much higher cost on that kind of behaviour.” 

As such, the Principal Excellence Initiative, which still exists and is based on achievement, uses performance from supervisor observations and a survey of students and families to put 68 principals on boosted pay in 2012-13, making them eligible for a $15,000 salary increase.

For Miles, both elements are proof that if policymakers want to turn around struggling schools in poorer areas then major, structural ideas have to be considered: “It doesn’t work just to get a new textbook and a curriculum,” he notes.

The fatal flaw

However, for all this positivity, there was an inherent issue with the programme’s success: schools whose scores rose then had their special status and teacher funding removed. As a result, the excellent teachers left and results declined - and fast.

“What you observe happening is: once the extra payments to almost all of the teachers are removed for the 2018-19 school year, achievement plummets in these schools,” said Rivkin.

“More than half of the achievement growth that was caused by the programme goes away in one year. It’s not surprising, because you observe extensive departures of some of the most highly effective teachers in those schools after stipends are removed.”

Rivkin says it’s understandable funding had to be removed because you “can’t really keep targeting schools [if] they’re no longer below-achieving” but it reveals the shortcomings in the enticing simplicity of what the scheme achieved.

However, and perhaps more importantly, when the funding was moved from the first cohort of schools to the second, Rivkin says the same positive impact was seen on pupil outcomes.

“The programme had very similar effects on the second generation of schools, which is reassuring from the point of view of thinking that you could succeed in taking the programme to scale.”

Despite this positivity, Miles has mixed feelings about the new research because although it validates his team’s efforts in Dallas, it underlines how hard and long-sighted policymakers have to be to make major changes.

“We knew that we would get some gains right away, but the long-term impact obviously can’t be determined until several years down the road,” he says.

“It’s hard for board members, administrators, school leaders to stick with something when there’s a lot of noise and the result is four or five years away.”

Could it work in England?

However, with such compelling impacts on pupils and the fact the results replicated themselves in two cohorts of schools, it could well be the sort of idea that makes other policymakers looking at tackling poor attainment and teacher retention sit up and take notice, as Rivkin outlines.

“If you want to really support kids who are in banlieues outside Paris or difficult circumstances and public housing in London or Newcastle, you make these jobs more desirable, learn about why it is hard to attract and retain effective educators [and] do what you need to do to make sure you have the best educators possible,” he says.

British educational experts also believe a Texas-style programme could make a huge difference in the UK.

“Understanding what can be done to improve recruitment and retention is an urgent priority for our school system and many others,” says Professor Becky Francis, chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation.

“NBER’s findings are supported by the wider evidence base, which shows that financial incentives can be persuasive in encouraging teachers to work in schools with higher levels of need,” she says.

What’s more, Francis’ comments come in the same week the EEF published its own study that examined research from around the world on how boosting pay could help improve teacher recruitment, particularly in schools with high levels of socioeconomic disadvantage.

Although not linked to pupil outcomes like the NBER study, the EEF research also shows that directing targeted payment to entice teachers to hard-to-recruit areas should be examined further, says Francis.

“We know that it’s great teaching that has the biggest impact on the learning of pupils, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds,” she adds.

“[Yesterday’s] report is an important first step in our work to understand more about what can be done to attract teachers to, and keep them in, schools with pupils who need their expertise most.”

It is worth noting, though, that schemes to boost teacher pay in difficult schools like the one in Texas are, in fact, not new. Following the post-war Plowden report in 1967, some British schools were designated Educational Priority Areas with financial incentives to attract and retain good teachers.

In the Netherlands right now - after worrying signals about the unequal effects of homeschooling during the pandemic - there is a bonus of 8 per cent for teachers working in schools that are designated as having fallen behind. In municipalities such as Labour-led Amsterdam, the talk is of “unequal investment for equal chances”.

‘If you really want to help kids in very disadvantaged circumstances, you have to pay for it’

Meanwhile, in England, a scheme to offer extra payments of up to £9,000 over three years in tax-free bonuses to maths, physics, chemistry and computing teachers in their first five years of teaching if they work in disadvantaged schools will begin this September.

The scheme was announced by then education secretary Nadhim Zahawi last year and given backing from the Gatsby Foundation, which argued that boosting payments like this would help with recruitment and retention in hard-to-recruit areas.

“[Our] research showed paying salary premiums can have an effect on the number of teachers choosing to remain in the classroom,” said Jenni French, head of teacher supply programmes at the Gatsby Foundation.

Specifically, the research said eligible teachers are 23 per cent less likely to leave teaching in state-funded schools in years they were eligible for payments, and this could help boost retention as a result.

While French points out that the scheme targets subject specialists rather than the “effective teachers” element of the Dallas programme, all the research stresses cash is key. “Serious consideration must be given to the role of financial incentives in ensuring that there are sufficient teachers in the classroom,” she tells Tes.

Education researcher Sam Sims has also written recently that he believes targeted payments should be a policy priority for the government - especially if it’s not willing to increase teacher wages.

“If the government is committed to providing enough specialist teachers for all pupils, and they are not willing to increase teacher wages generally, then increasing the value and coverage of targeted payments must be their policy priority,” he wrote.

While welcoming the incoming bonus payments, Francis notes the concern is that, as in Texas, once payments stop, teachers may quickly move on.

“Teachers only stay in post as long as they are incentivised. Other concerns - such as working conditions, workload and pupil behaviour - are also important factors,” she adds.

Nevertheless, it seems clear that as a way to raise attainment in struggling regions or even individual schools, Rivkin says he believes the Dallas programme is worth investigating further: “This system demonstrates that if you really want to help kids in very disadvantaged circumstances, you have to pay for it.”

Senay Boztas is a freelance journalist based in Amsterdam