Pay for Percentile

By Gadi Barlevy, Derek A. Neal. Social Science Research Network, 2012

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose an incentive pay scheme for educators that links educator compensation to the ranks of their students within appropriately defined comparison sets, and we show that under certain conditions our scheme induces teachers to allocate socially optimal levels of effort to all students. Because this scheme employs only ordinal information, our scheme allows education authorities to employ completely new assessments at each testing date without ever having to equate various assessment forms. This approach removes incentives for teachers to teach to a particular assessment form and eliminates opportunities to influence reward pay by corrupting the equating process or the scales used to report assessment results. Our system links compensation to the outcomes of properly seeded contests rather than cardinal measures of achievement growth. Thus, education authorities can employ our incentive scheme for educators while employing a separate system for measuring growth in student achievement that involves no stakes for educators. This approach does not create direct incentives for educators to take actions that contaminate the measurement of student progress.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9b51973f859e06c3e665ae8213f3273a6bf7945d

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Citations in the corpus

The Production of Human Capital in Developed Countries: Evidence from 196 Randomized Field Experiments (2016, unknown): “[21] Barlevy, Gadi, and Derek Neal.”
Value-added modeling: A review (2015, background): “…a fundamentally different way, and the application of VAMs to inform teacher evaluations could alter sorting and other behavior (e.g., see Barlevy & Neal, 2012; Campbell, 1976).21 Although the quasi-experimental method developed by Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2014a) is subject to ongoing…”
Knowledge, Tests, and Fadeout in Educational Interventions (2012, unknown): “Our estimates of w in the NLSY79 are consistent with Neal and Johnson’s (1996) findings that performance on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test as an adolescent explains roughly 15 percent of variation in earnings.”
Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates (2014, methodology): “2 in three steps: (1) construct student test score residuals, (2) estimate the autocovariance of scores across classes taught by a given teacher, and (3) predict VA for each teacher in each year using test score data from other years.”