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Teacher bonuses not linked to better student performance, study finds
09/21/10 | The Washington Post

Behind the Headline
Dollars and Sense
Winter 2005 | Education Next

A study by researchers at the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt finds that teachers who were offered rewards of up to $15,000 if their students met goals for test-score gains did not outperform teachers who were not offered the bonuses. In the Summer 2005 issue of Ed Next, Tom Dee and Benjamin Keys reviewed earlier research on merit pay, and looked at what data from the STAR experiment in Tennessee revealed about the impact of a different kind of merit pay, one based on a career ladder.

Ed Next executive editor Rick Hess writes that the new study obscures the issue of teacher pay reform rather than shedding light on it.