Shortchanged, a TNTP report released last week, takes a harsh look at current “lockstep” teacher pay systems, which reward teachers for time in the classroom and advanced degrees rather than actual performance. The report argues that these practices pushes out high performers and incentivize poor performers to stay in the classroom—with costly consequences: TNTP estimates that last year alone, districts spent $250 million on automatic pay increases for ineffective teachers.

TNTP proposes new teacher compensation systems that focus less on years of experience and master’s degrees and instead focus on actual teacher performance. Research on teacher quality peaks offers other reasons to support this argument.

Research shows that teachers develop the most in their first few years of teaching. After three to five years, though, most teachers peak. So to a certain extent, schools can predict early on how effective a teacher is going to be for the rest of his or her career. Yet under current policies schools must continue paying ineffective teachers the same automatic raises as highly effective teachers, year after year. This creates an incentive for poor performers to stay and for high performers to leave – which they do. TNTP’s own research shows that 40 percent of teachers with more than seven years’ experience are not as effective as the average brand new teacher.

Compensation structures in most other professions are designed to reward employees for logarithmic growth – they assume that employees will make large gains in the beginning of their career then taper off later on. Doctors and lawyers, for example, quickly ascend to peak earnings in the first ten years of their career, then plateau at that salary level for the next ten to 25 years. With teaching, it’s the opposite. Teachers’ growth is ignored when they’re actually improving, and they’re rewarded after they’ve plateaued. As TNTP points out, that creates a whole host of problems.

–Ashley Libetti Mitchel