National Center of Performance Incentives

The National Center on Performance Incentives (NCPI) is charged by the federal government with exercising leadership on performance incentives in education. Established in 2006 through a major research and development grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES), NCPI conducts scientific, comprehensive, and independent studies on the individual and institutional effects of performance incentives in education. The Center is housed in the Learning Sciences Institute on the campus of Peabody College of Vanderbilt University.

A signature activity of the center is the conduct of two randomized field trials offering student achievement-related bonuses to teachers. These multi-year performance pay experiments address a key issue in education: the concept of providing financial rewards to classroom teachers who significantly elevate students’ academic achievement. The multi-year randomized field trials will concentrate on middle school mathematics teachers. In each setting, volunteer teachers will be randomized into control and treatment groups for a three-year period. Treatment group teachers will be eligible for annual bonuses contingent upon student achievement gains. Control group teachers will receive a stipend each year for their participation

Performance-related pay is an issue that is taking on additional importance in conversations regarding teacher compensation. Most professional workers in the United States rely on a compensation structure that is flexible, market driven, and performance based. The higher one progresses in an organization, the more likely that at least part of one’s salary will be linked to an incentive or merit-based pay system. Most public schools teachers are exceptions to this. Teachers and administrators are seldom subjected to systematic evaluations, and when they are, there are seldom significant rewards or penalties for unusually good performance or failure to perform effectively. In the absence of well-tested means for measuring and rewarding teacher and administrator performance, informal systems have emerged. Many of these systems are lacking in fairness to teachers and administrators, have little by way of scientific evidence for their effectiveness in elevating student achievement, and are often counter productive. The Center’s work focuses on these issues and will provide unbiased research and scholarship to inform educators, institutions, civic and government organizations in their policy making.

In addition to the above-mentioned randomized field trials, the Center will undertake studies of teacher behavior and institutional and organizational dynamics that accompany operation of a pay for student performance experiment. The Center will also work with other state governments, schools and districts to research interests that include studies of additional pay for performance projects in other regions of the nation, and a cost-effectiveness analysis of pay for performance relative to other interventions such as class size reductions and professional development.

James W. Guthrie, chair of the department of leadership, policy and organizations at Peabody College, is the Center’s executive director and principal investigator. Matthew G. Springer, research assistant professor of public policy and education at Peabody College, is the Center’s director and co-principal investigator.

Other researchers include Dale Ballou of Peabody College (Co-Principal Investigator), Michael Podgursky of the University of Missouri (Co-Principal Investigator), Daniel McCaffrey, Laura Hamilton, Janet Hansen, and Brian Stecher of the RAND Corporation.