China Education Daily Highlights REAP's Teacher Performance Pay Project

China Education Daily, a national newspaper published by the Department of Education with daily readership in the millions, published a feature article highlighting REAP research on teacher performance pay structures in rural China.  The article rapidly caught the attention of policymakers and educators across China and was widely circulated on a number of China's largest news media websites. 

What is teacher performance pay, and why does it matter?  Students in rural schools in China are falling behind.  Much of the burden for why students from China’s rural schools perform poorly may fall on teachers, as studies from both developed and developing countries, including China, consistently show that teachers are one of the (if not the) most important factors affecting student achievement.  Despite their importance, teachers in rural schools in China often lack strong incentives to help students--especially lower-achieving students--learn.  Surprisingly, almost nothing is known about how to incentivize teachers in rural China to help their students.  "Performance pay" is designed to address this problem by providing contracts to teachers that tie their pay to students test scores, with the goal of raising teacher quality and ultimately student achievement.

The Chinese government is also highly interested in addressing this problem, and in 2009 launched the Teacher Performance Pay Policy asking schools to implement teacher performance pay.  However, in 2012 REAP researchers found that 46% of rural schools still had not implemented teacher incentive programs, and in most cases teacher incentive programs that were in place did not lead to improved student achievement. 

Therefore, REAP researchers designed an intervention to test three different teacher incentive designs, with the goal of identifying which scheme boosted student achievement the most.  The "Pay-for-Percentile" design, which rewarded teachers for focusing on low-achieving students in addition to high-achievers--and thereby differs sharply from most incentive schemes that have been implemented in China--generated remarkable improvements in overall student test scores (learn more about the project here).  These results have significant implications for how to raise the quality of schooling across China.

Read the full article (in Chinese) here, or see the English translation below.