Very well said! We really appreciated your questions at the panel, agree they’re really important and, yet, largely unanswerable at this point. As I said on the panel, the argument for some investment here is the potential of pay reform to change how 70+% of school dollars are spent, dollars which now do little to advance teaching effectiveness.

That said, redirecting those dollars is only worth doing if it yields better teaching. There’s little direct evidence that it will, but there’s indirect evidence of a couple of sorts. One, there’s strong evidence that pay compression in the teaching profession has led to a decline in the number of high-aptitude people becoming teachers. Coupled with evidence that college aptitude is strongly correlated with teaching effectiveness, this info suggests there would be payoff from changing the shape of compensation. Two, there’s good research outside of education that says well-designed performance pay plans do boost performance. Well-designed meaning things like basing performance pay on measures that are legit and valid.

So, I’m not quite willing to say “we know nothing,” though I agree we don’t know as much as we need to. Which gets to your follow-up question at the panel re: how will we know, which is another tough one. It’s easy for us to say “do evaluations,” but getting useful conclusive data on this stuff is tough, as you know.