Title: Team Pay for Performance: Experimental Evidence from Round Rock’s Project on Incentives in Teaching

Description of prior research and its intellectual context. What is the impact of performance pay on teacher practice and student achievement? Are individual or group-based awards the most effective means of rewarding teachers? Does performance-related pay influence teacher retention and recruitment, and if so, do effective teachers in one setting remain so in another to which they are recruited? These are timely and highly important questions for policymakers and practitioners who must consider how to best use limited resources in tight economic times with ever-increasing expectations for student achievement gains. As is well documented, teachers are one of the most important contributors to student learning. Yet school systems spend over half their budgets paying teachers based on factors (i.e., years of experience, level of education) that are minimally related to their ability to raise students’ academic performance. Nonetheless, numerous questions remain about the best alternative to the traditional single salary schedule. The research and policy communities continue debates about the promising practices and pitfalls for design and implementation of educator compensation reform, such as pay for performance, but these lessons have not always been grounded i