A new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests a growing number of statewide school districts are moving away from compensation systems that at least partly pay teachers for performance, the Wisconsin State Journal reports.
Twenty-four districts in the study have largely reverted to “step-and-lane” compensation systems, which only consider educators’ degrees and years of experience, fourteen years after a controversial state law gave districts the flexibility to pay teachers based on other factors.
Researchers from the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, in their July working paper, highlighted four main reasons district administrators are abandoning performance pay:
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The practice led to “discontent” among staff.
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Principals were unwilling or unable to make performance distinctions among teachers.
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Performance systems were too complex or difficult to administer.
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School staff perceived that more flexibility in pay led to inequities among educators.
Act 10, the 2011 law that largely gutted union rights for most public-sector employees, allowed school districts to experiment with more flexible salary systems. The recent WCER study sought to determine if any of the 25 districts that had made pay system changes as of 2014 still maintained them by 2024.
Information obtained from 24 of the 25 districts found that most had largely reverted to the step-and-lane system, despite some evidence in the education research literature that “flexible pay has potential benefits in terms of both teacher retention and student performance.”
