Teacher Incentives and Student Achievement: Evidence from an Advancement Program

Abstract

This paper examines the effects of a comprehensive performance pay program implemented in high‐need schools using administrative data from Louisiana. Exploiting the within‐student variation in the timing of implementation, we find a large and significant effect beginning with the second year of the program on math achievement. Similar but generally insignificant point estimates are observed in social studies. As for English Language Arts and science, there are no effects of the program. We provide evidence against changes in the composition of teacher workforce and postadoption student sorting as potential explanations for our results. We then show aggregate findings from a web‐survey that teachers may have altered their teaching practices following performance‐based compensation. Finally, under certain assumptions, we calculate the net present value of earnings impact to be close to a million dollars per school‐year for math.

Teacher Incentives and Student Performance: Evidence from Brazil

“…Lavy (2002Lavy ( , 2009) looks 7 at the impact of two different teacher incentive programs in Israel using natural experiments and finds positive effects on student test scores. Unlike previously cited studies in the U.S., Eren (2019) studies a teacher incentive program in Louisiana and finds positive effects in math starting from the second year of the program.…”

Impacts of the four-day school week on early elementary achievement

“…The K-12 school environment is another critical setting for further closing these achievement gaps once children reach school age and has been viewed as a critical component to child development by providing stability and universal academic instruction, regardless of a child's home environment. A wealth of literature demonstrates that the quality of educational inputs, such as teacher quality (Rockoff, 2004;Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain, 2005;Figlio and Kenny, 2007;Eren, 2019), class size (Angrist and Lavy, 1999;Krueger, 1999), and school infrastructure investments (Neilson and Zimmerman, 2014;Conlin and Thompson, 2017;Lafortune and Schönholzer, 2019), and the quantity of exposure to the K-12 school environment (Taylor, 2014;Cortes, Goodman, and Nomi, 2015;Lavy, 2015;Rivkin and Schiman, 2015;Huebener, Kuger, and Marcus, 2017;Cattaneo, Oggenfuss, and Wolter, 2017) positively impact achievement.…”