Last night in Melbourne, where I’m based for the next few weeks, I attended a Grattan Institute event on the economics and politics of teacher merit (i.e. performance) pay, which featured former ANU economics professor, now federal MP Andrew Leigh in conversation with Grattan CEO John Daley. While Andrew is a supporter of performance pay for teachers, he noted there is limited evidence on the effectiveness of such schemes. Partly this is because the existing evaluations tend to focus on the incentive effect of performance pay (i.e. making existing teachers work harder/smarter) rather than the selection effect (i.e. attracting better people into the profession or retaining the better teachers), which is much more important. Andrew’s latest views on teacher performance pay are presented in this paper:
Economics and politics of teacher merit pay
I am a big supporter of performance pay for teachers, as discussed in this previous post:
Queensland Economy Watch 