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District Awards for Teacher Excellence (D.A.T.E.) is a state-funded program in Texas that provides grants to districts for the implementation of locally-designed incentive pay plans. All districts in the state are eligible to receive grants, but participation is voluntary. D.A.T.E. incentive pay plans were first implemented in Texas districts during the 2008-09 school year, and the program is currently in its third year of operation during 2010-11 with approximately $197 million in annual state funding. 

This fall, the District of Columbia Public Schools gave sizable bonuses to 476 of its 3,600 educators, with 235 of them getting unusually large pay raises. "We want to make great teachers rich," said Jason Kamras, the district's chief of human capital. The profession is notorious for losing thousands of its brightest young teachers within a few years, which many experts attribute to low starting salaries and a traditional step-raise structure that rewards years of service and academic degrees rather than success in the classroom.

"Teachers, parents, and the public who are genuinely concerned about public school quality must enter directly the teacher evaluation/pay debate, but do so informed with the following foundational facts, messages, and questions:"

Teacher pay is an entirely artificial concept unrelated to anything but union contracts and reference tables on the number of years spent teaching. Other than, say, relating it to the hourly scale for babysitting, teaching has no inherent market value. Sure, studies show the hours teachers put in, the value of good educators on student lives, and the horror show of failed school systems. But no one has figured out--or wants to figure out--a good way to measure teacher pay.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a plan Monday to award merit pay to Chicago Public Schools principals who perform well on a new set of evaluative metrics as critics questioned whether the program will lead to gains in student achievement. The performance rewards-which may be based on student test scores, school climate and leadership skills, among other factors - are part of an overhaul of principal preparation and evaluation at CPS. They will be paid for over the next four years by a new $5 million fund created through charitable donations, Emanuel said. The district plans to implement a similar incentive program for teachers, he said.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is making a new run at revamping how the district hires, evaluates, trains and pays teachers. Last year, performance pay and a surge of new student tests used to rate teachers brought protests from teachers and parents.

The wish we all have. To find a crystal ball. To see if what we're doing now will pay off tomorrow. Where we go to college. Whom we marry. Where we buy a house. How we raise our kids. We think about it in the big picture, too. In our economy. Our politics. So it is with our public schools. They always seem like a playground for experimentation. Some proved to be bad ideas, like open-classroom school buildings. Most have been replaced. Or the brilliant idea when I was in high school. English and history taught as electives. Let the students choose what interests them. I'm still paying the price for that scattershot experience. And the "new math" roller coaster. We all paid the price for that one. But, they were bumps in the road compared to what is playing out now. The experimentation is on such a grand scale and so many are convinced it is the "right and only" way to go, there may be no path to recovery if it all turns out to be misguided. I've been glimpsing a crystal ball. And what I see in it frightens me.

Louisiana is poised to establish the nation's most expansive system of school choice by adopting a package of vouchers and other tools that would give many parents control over the use of tax dollars to educate their children. The initiative would effectively redefine vouchers, which have typically helped lower-income public-school students pay for private schools. Vouchers could now also be used by students to pay for state-approved apprenticeships at local businesses, as well as college courses and private online classes, while they are still in public schools.

As you may have heard, the big news in Wisconsin is that a new Walker rule allowing school districts to cut teacher pay by approximately 30% is at the tipping point of becoming big news in Wisconsin.

I was part of a National Academies of Science committee that was asked to carefully review the nature and implications of America's test-based accountability systems, including school improvement programs under the No Child Left Behind Act, high school exit exams, test-based teacher incentive-pay systems, pay-for-scores initiatives and other uses of test scores to evaluate student and school performance and determine policy based on them. We spent nearly a decade reviewing the evidence as it accumulated, focusing on the most rigorous and credible studies of incentives in educational testing and sifting through the results to uncover the key lessons for education policymakers and the public. Our conclusion in our report to Congress and the public was sobering: There are little to no positive effects of these systems overall on student learning and educational progress, and there is widespread teaching to the test and gaming of the systems that reflects a wasteful use of resources and leads to inaccurate or inflated measures of performance.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a speech Tuesday pushed higher education officials to "think more creatively - and with much greater urgency - about how to contain the spiraling costs of college and reduce the burden of student debt on our nation's students." At a time when the Occupy movement has helped push college costs into the national spotlight, the Education Department characterized the speech, delivered in Las Vegas, as the start of a "national conversation about the rising cost of college." The department took the opportunity to call attention to steps the Obama administration has taken to reduce the net price that students and families pay for higher education and make it easier to pay back student loans.

If 2010 was the year of the bombshell in research in the three "major areas" of market-based education reform - charter schools, performance pay, and value-added in evaluations - then 2011 was the year of the slow, sustained march. Last year, the landmark Race to the Top program was accompanied by a set of extremely consequential research reports, ranging from the policy-related importance of the first experimental study of teacher-level performance pay (the POINT program in Nashville) and the preliminary report of the $45 million Measures of Effective Teaching project, to the political controversy of the Los Angeles Times' release of teachers' scores from their commissioned analysis of Los Angeles testing data. In 2011, on the other hand, as new schools opened and states and districts went about the hard work of designing and implementing new evaluations compensation systems, the research almost seemed to adapt to the situation. There were few (if any) "milestones," but rather a steady flow of papers and reports focused on the finer-grained details of actual policy.

On a Tuesday afternoon in mid-October, between 40 and 50 Cedarburg School District educators sat in a small auditorium to hear about plans that could change the way they earn an income. Instead of pay raises awarded on the basis of education credits and years of experience-long a hallmark of teachers union salary structures-Superintendent Daryl Herrick said the district wanted to distribute annual bonuses to teachers based on the quality of their work. Educators' ranking on Cedarburg's 6-year-old, multipronged performance evaluation system would determine the size of their bonuses.

Given the widespread, non-ideological worries about the reliability of standardized test scores when they are used in high-stakes ways, it makes good sense for reform-minded teachers' unions to embrace value-added as one measure of teacher effectiveness, while simultaneously pushing for teachers' rights to a fair-minded appeals process. What's more, just because we know that teachers with high value-added ratings are better for children, it doesn't necessarily follow that we should pay such teachers more for good evaluation scores alone. Why not use value-added to help identify the most effective teachers, but then require these professionals to mentor their peers in order to earn higher pay?

There is huge pressure from all sides - the federal government, Governor Cuomo, and Mayor Bloomberg - on the UFT, the NYC teachers union, to agree to a test-based teacher evaluation and compensation system in NYC. Similar pressures are being exerted on teachers throughout the US, as a result of "Race to the Top" and the corporate reform agenda being promoted by the Gates Foundation and the other members of the Billionaire Boys Club.  In his State of the City address, Bloomberg also proposed that teachers rated highly through such a system should  get a salary increase of $20,000 a year.  Merit pay has been tried in many cities, including NYC, and has never worked to improve student outcomes.  When challenged about the evidence for such a policy, Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson tweeted a link to a recent NY Times puff piece about DC's Impact system, in which a couple of teachers who had received bonuses after being rated "highly effective" were interviewed as saying that this extra pay might persuade them to stay teaching longer.    Stephanie Black is a former teacher in Washington DC.  In both 2010 and 2011 she was rated "effective" by the DCPS evaluation system.  She is now living in Chicago where she tutors math and coaches in an after school program.  Here is her story.

...what makes us a society is a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most clearly in public institutions - public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on.  Public institutions are supported by all of us as taxpayers, and they are available to all. If the tax system is progressive, those of us who better off (and who, presumably, have benefitted from many of these same public institutions) help pay for everyone else.  "Privatiize" means pay-for-it-yourself. In an economy whose wealth and income are more concentrated than any time in 90 years, the practical consequences is availability to fewer and fewer. The story of our time is a decline of the public good. 

Much like the brief torrential rain which drenched New Yorkers on Thursday morning, Mayor Bloomberg's Thursday afternoon State of the City Address received a deluge of media attention. Today, the print and electronic media feature talk of his jeremiad against the UFT, of his attempted resurrection of 'market reforms' such as merit pay which have been discredited even in 'reform' circles, as study after study has shown them ineffective, and of his claims that he will introduce a new evaluation system by fiat. Tellingly, nowhere will you read an account of what the Mayor's proposed imposition of closure under the Turn-Around model would mean for the PLA schools, were he to be successful in implementing it. Consider what is happening to just a few of the PLA schools. Note that we use here the performance data that, the DoE insists, informs their decisions on the future of schools.

In the private sector, people with SAT and GRE scores comparable to those of education majors earn less than teachers do. Does that mean teachers are overpaid? Or that public schools should pay more to attract top applicants who tend to go into higher-paying professions?

Teachers are neither mercenaries nor missionaries. They do the best they can in spite of - not because of - the salaries they receive. Reformers who have never taught do not understand what motivates teachers. I don't think they ever will. All the more reason to be skeptical about "innovative" merit pay plans.

American public school teachers are paid far more than their smarts are worth. That's the provocative conclusion of a new study from two high-profile conservative think tanks. Researchers from the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute found that public school teachers take home total compensation that's 52% higher than "fair market levels" for professionals with similar cognitive abilities. Unsurprisingly, their findings have riled the education world. "No, we do not agree that teachers are overpaid," public school reform advocate Michelle Rhee told Politico. "Under the status quo in most school districts, good classroom teachers are not only undervalued in pay, but as professionals generally." Of course, this isn't the final word on teacher pay. It's just the latest word. Big sweeping statements about teachers being overpaid or underpaid are perennial in the think tank world. Here are four of the biggest.