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Incentivising teachers? Evaluating the incentive effect of China’s teacher performance‐based compensation reform in rural China
Author(s) -
Zhang Jian,
Jin Songqing,
Si Wei
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
australian journal of agricultural and resource economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.683
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-8489
pISSN - 1364-985X
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8489.12335
Subject(s) - incentive , compensation (psychology) , china , value (mathematics) , mathematics education , merit pay , education reform , academic achievement , psychology , panel data , political science , economics , primary education , econometrics , social psychology , mathematics , microeconomics , statistics , law
In this paper, we evaluate the incentive role of a teacher performance‐based compensation reform in rural China. Using the value‐added model widely adopted in the education literature, we first estimated the teacher effects on student academic scores with panel data of a large number of students and teachers from rural and urban schools in one county in a south‐western province of China. The estimated teachers’ value‐add was then allowed us to examine the effectiveness of the 2009 teachers’ compensation reform. We find that despite the strong intent of the performance‐based compensation reform to improve student’s academic performance, teachers’ compensations are not closely tied to teachers’ value‐add to student academic achievement. This suggests that the performance‐based compensation reform is not able to provide strong incentives for teachers to raise students’ test scores and points towards the possible problems with the design and/or implementation of the reform.