Performance Pay: Arkansas

Retaining Effective Teachers Policy

Goal

The state should support performance pay, but in a manner that recognizes its appropriate uses and limitations.

Meets goal
Suggested Citation:
National Council on Teacher Quality. (2013). Performance Pay: Arkansas results. State Teacher Policy Database. [Data set].
Retrieved from: https://www.nctq.org/yearbook/state/AR-Performance-Pay-23

Analysis of Arkansas's policies

Arkansas supports performance pay initiatives. The state's Alternative Pay Program requires the use of "a variety of objective criteria that are credible, clear, specific, measurable indicators of student achievement, and generally accepted best practices to determine pay." The program requires that not more than 50 percent of its eligibility requirements or alternative pay be related to annual increases in test scores. Also, the alternative pay must be at least 10 percent of the teacher's salary.

Arkansas also supports the Rewarding Excellence in Achievement Program (REAP). The state's REAP requires a comprehensive school improvement plan, including the use of assessment tools, to measure student performance, performance goals and benchmark improvement and a data reporting system about students and their academic progress.


Citation

Recommendations for Arkansas

Arkansas recognized the factual accuracy of this analysis.

State response to our analysis

Research rationale

Performance pay is an important recruitment and retention strategy.

Performance pay provides an opportunity to reward those teachers who consistently achieve positive results from their students. The traditional salary schedule used by most districts pays all teachers with the same inputs (i.e., experience and degree status) the same amount regardless of outcomes. Not only is following a mandated schedule inconsistent with most other professions, it may also deter talented individuals from considering a teaching career, as well as high-achieving teachers from staying in the field, because it offers no opportunity for financial reward for success.

States should set guidelines for districts to ensure that plans are fair and sound.

Performance pay plans are not easy to implement well. There are numerous examples of both state and district initiatives that have been undone by poor planning and administration. The methodology that allows for the measurement of teachers' contributions to student achievement is still developing, and evaluation systems based on teacher performance are new in many states. Performance pay programs must recognize these limitations. There are also inherent issues of fairness that should be considered when different types of data must be used to assess the performance of different kinds of teachers.

States can play an important role in supporting performance pay by setting guidelines (whether for a state-level program or for districts' own initiatives) that recognize the challenges in implementing a program well.  A few states now require that districts build performance into salary schedules, moving away from bonus structures that teachers know may be subject to budget constraints and competing priorities. 

Performance Pay: Supporting Research

Research on merit pay in 28 industrialized countries from Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance found that students in countries with merit pay policies in place were performing at a level approximately one year's worth of schooling higher on international math and science tests than students in countries without such policies (2011).

Erik Hanushek found that a teacher one standard deviation above the mean effectiveness annually generates $400,000 in student future earnings for a class size of 20. See E. Hanushek, "The Economic Value of Higher Teacher Quality," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 16606, December 2010.

In addition, numerous conference papers published by the National Center on Performance Incentives reinforce the need to recognize the limitations and appropriate uses of performance pay. See: http://www.performanceincentives.org/.