(NewsNation) — In South Carolina, a program to pay teachers based on their students’ performance has shown evidence of student improvement where similar pay models have failed.
The question has been debated for years, and some past evaluations of programs that paid teachers for performance found there was no impact on student outcomes.
But a new study published last month suggests that performance pay, when structured in a certain way, may improve both academic and social outcomes for students.
University of South Carolina economist Orgul Ozturk and her colleagues studied the implementation of the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) in South Carolina schools.
The TAP program offers additional compensation to teachers for improving their students’ performance and for taking on roles such as serving as coaches for other teachers. Teachers are also given feedback on their performance, which allows them to adjust their teaching.
Established in 1999, TAP is funded by grants offered by the federal government. Hundreds of school districts nationwide have now modeled programs after TAP.
Ozturk’s team studied the dozens of South Carolina schools that implemented the program starting around 2007, looking specifically at eighth graders over several school years through the 2012-2013 school year.
“A lot of the time these policies are done without much thought about the indirect effects or long-term effects,” Ozturk said, explaining that they wanted to study the impact of performance pay more comprehensively.
They followed several groups of eighth graders and found that the TAP program benefited the students in myriad ways — ranging from increasing a 5% improvement in 12th-grade enrollment rates to reaching a 6% increase in on-time graduation rates.
A student at a TAP school was slightly less likely to be arrested for a felony by the time they turned 18. The researchers also found that this group of students were less likely to use welfare benefits like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Temporary Aid for Needy Families during early adulthood.
Ozturk speculated that TAP may be more successful than other performance pay programs because of an emphasis on feedback.
“There was feedback, there was not only observation, testing and evaluation, but also teachers were given feedback on their performance and their professional development was complemented with that,” she said.
Her team did administer surveys and analyzed employment data that could point to a downside of implementing a program like this.
“We looked at the surveys — parents were happy. But teachers and students weren’t necessarily happy,” she said, noting that there did appear to be some increase in teacher turnover.
That’s an effect some South Carolina school administrators acknowledged. But Eric Mathison, who led two different TAP-utilizing schools in the state, was not as bothered by attrition.
“In this model, good teachers get better, and bad teachers can’t hide. That is always going to ruffle some feathers, but it’s what’s best for kids,” he told EdWeek.
Evaluations of TAP elsewhere in the country, such as in Chicago, have also shown less impressive results, finding no increase in student performance — although that research looked at short-term effects rather than long-term ones.