I suspect probably not unless you were to implement punitive pay cuts for teachers whose students perform poorly in tests. We don’t know enough about the long term relevance of test scores and the extent the teacher is an influence to make that an even slightly viable option.

The big problem of poor teacher performance is not that principals don’t know who the better and worse teachers are, but that they can’t replace the poor performers. The trick here is that to replace a poor teacher you need the opportunity to replace, that;s easy enough, just have the ability to hire on renewable 1-5 year contracts by school year. The second part is who to replace with – if a school gets 7 applicants for 7 jobs then the opportunities for improvement are limited. If they get 50 applicants for 7 jobs they can pick the wheat and loose the chaff.

So that comes back to the issue of raising the prestige and public perception of the job and lifting pay at all levels so that the best people want to become teachers.

It seems to me that there are two ways to improve performance:
– Improve Overperformance (Excellence)
– Eliminate Underperformance

The latter seems to be a better return on investment. Generally speaking it’s easier to lift a D to a C student than it is to lift a B to an A.

Lifting underperformance involves a different prescription. Too often the underperforming kids we hear about in the media are turning up to school hungry and cold, sick or with a lack of sleep from poor housing. They often have family problems and may suffer from a lack of educational resources and little focus on the value of education. In short the problems of educational underperformance are mostly problems of poverty not teaching.

The example of Finland is instructive – they didn’t set out to achieve excellence, they wanted to achieve equality of opportunity but by ensuring there were no barriers to every kid achieving to their potential excellence resulted:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

Look, none of us are experts on what everyone should be paid. So why not just allow unconstrained pricing of teachers, and leave it up to the parties involved to create their own, efficient method of determining teacher quality? Emergent order ftw.

This works for the following professions; lawyers, programmers, actors, prostitutes, sportsmen, sales executives, shearers…

Oops, I accidentally listed one profession twice.

Best is to watch the Youtube at that page of the man himself explaining it. He really is an extremely good presenter, although I don’t know how it will come across on grainy video.

Have you seen Chetty’s paper that I linked to above, which explicitly deals with Rothstein’s concerns about measurement problems and shows a clear link between test scores and VA?

This all relies on the observability of performance – which is really the key of what I am after here.

Also, if its the principals choice, we have possible incentive issues with him.  In fact, it is pretty important that the principals incentives are aligned with what is in the “social need” – and so their is probably a strong case for them to face some type of incentive based pay.  That or there needs to be a clearer separation between them and teaching staff methinks.

Interesting.  When it comes to implementation I have two questions though:

1)  How do test scores relate to value add from education?

2)  How do we ensure that teachers cannot manipulate results in ways that work against any said value add.

If those are answered well, then the justification for performance based pay exists, and I’d say it should go forward.

Given I know nothing about the field all I can do is frame, and I’m happy to be educated 😀