> Yet so far, both merit-pay efforts and programs that recruit a more-elite teaching corps, like Teach for America, have thin records of reliably improving student learning.
Yet, I imagine you'd find it odd to suggest that better programmers shouldn't be better compensated in some sense.
I think merit pay (or just higher pay) and high demands are too different things, and the latter often destroys the benefit of the former. I recall reading an article where teachers were measured on many different axes with insane expectations. I imagine that works about as well as micromanaging a programmer's time.
I don't know how the Equity Project was ran, exactly, but it's trivial to mess that kind of thing up. Compensation is absolutely relevant to teacher quality: it has to be. Pay and other factors (respect, benefits) influence how people choose their profession, do they not? So it will influence who becomes a teacher, so if we posit that teachers matter, this will have an effect. A study is not required here.
And as I've noted in my other post, this didn't seem widespread or covered well. Having one small program esoterically targeting some teachers and giving them more money a large shift does not make. I'm not going to become a teacher all of a sudden because one small program shows up that could theoretically offer someone money anymore than I'll become a professional StarCraft player because a small city in Canada is experimenting with basic income.