After Trials, Most Wisconsin Schools Opt Out of Performance-Based Pay For Teachers
Rewarding teachers on how well students do is complicated and can have unintended consequences, research finds.
Fifth grade students in math teacher Missy Sperle’s class work independently on classwork Tuesday, April 29, 2025, at Winskill Elementary School in Lancaster, Wis. Angela Major/WPR
Wisconsin’s school districts are largely rejecting policies offering performance-based pay for teachers in favor of traditional salaries.
Act 10 ended collecting bargaining rights for teachers in 2011. By 2014, nearly half of the state’s school districts were experimenting with performance-based pay for teachers. That’s according to a new study by the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative that looked at how pay practices are changing over the years.
Between 2014 and 2024, Wisconsin school districts that offered such incentives to teachers dropped to 12 percent.
Steve Kimball co-directs the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. Kimball recently told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that the idea of performance-based or “merit” pay was to offer financial bonuses and other incentives to teachers whose classrooms were performing well by measures like standardized testing.
Kimball said districts found that measuring high performing teachers was more complicated than anticipated — and that measuring teacher performance created added administrative costs.
Wisconsin schools aren’t alone in giving up performance-based pay. In Denver, teachers went on strike in 2019 largely over a performance-based pay system called ProComp.
Robert Gould, a special education teacher and president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, told “Wisconsin Today” that its performance-based reforms ended up boosting the performance of schools that were already doing well in tests, while schools that were struggling fell further behind.
“Our veteran educators would know that they could get a higher bonus by moving to these higher-performing schools, which left a gap within our more impacted schools, where we were filling with new teachers,” Gould said.
Gould said the district’s turnover rate doubled at the height of the old ProComp system due to low teacher morale and struggles with the merit pay.
Another problem with the performance-based system, Gould said, was that base pay salary increases failed to keep up with inflation. That made it especially difficult for teachers to make a living. Also, teachers were confused about how the performance-based system worked.
“Every single person had a different reasoning behind their pay,” he said. “If you tried to figure out why you were paid what you were being paid, you would have to go back through this long, complex search to try to figure out how your pay was built over time.”
Gould said the current ProComp system that Denver operates is a hybrid system, which includes pay incentives. But the “merit” part of teachers’ pay is a smaller part of teachers’ paychecks.
Kimball said that most Wisconsin schools that experimented with “merit” pay systems for teachers are also now operating in some kind of a hybrid system.
Wisconsin schools largely reject performance-based pay for teachers was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.
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Performance based teacher pay is just another of the range of voodoo “silver bullets” continue to be promoted while test scores have changed significantly to justify the cost and the disruption of good teaching practices. Good teaching is an art and a craft and not the results of drill and test multiple choice exams. Simply, the solution is the problem. l always find it ironic that the Journal/Sentinel regularly reports anything that the right wing Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty says but rarely goes out to find urban schools that are successful and schools that are creating very innovative, educational programs like Oostburg or the Kettle Moraine School District
What about performance-based pay for principals and superintendents?
A principal and superintendent have control of resources . . . They are the educational leaders. Why not base their pay and license on performance?
Using standardized test scores to determine student achievement DOES NOT WORK. Besides the myriad of biases embedded in these tests, they can only measure the ability of students to take a standardized test on the day of testing. There are far better performance measures that actually measure student performance. However, the standardized testing industry is vehemently opposed these measures because they cut profits.
Here are the options K-12 teachers face when their pay is tied to students’ standardized test scores. Option 1: teachers can teach to the test–limiting instruction to those skills needed to take standardized tests; OR option 2: teachers focus on the skills students need to meet tomorrow’s challenges–particularly creative and critical thinking. With option1, teachers have a chance to increase their pay. With option 2, teachers can actually use their instructional skills to guide students’ learning.
There is a problem when students aren’t able to read, write, or do math.
I’m not saying that testing is perfect. But we need to acknowledge that there is a very real problem.
Students could have a hard time being creative when they can’t multiply (don’t “know” the multiplication table), lack a basic understanding of historical facts, have difficulty reading, and can’t write a complete sentence.
I agree that testing isn’t perfect, but testing has shown that there is a problem. (There is also the issue of looking at scores from any Milwaukee Public School High School and then comparing them to other Wisconsin High Schools.) Something isn’t going well. We could blame the test; however, then why are scores higher?
It’s not fair or genuine to say that the test is biased when those who read earlier or learn their multiplication tables through drill or parents teaching them do better. (There are 80 teachers missing from Milwaukee Public Schools – could that be a problem?)
How to fix this problem is another discussion. More reading, Head Start, perhaps trades, . . . and maybe those drills that include “learning” the multiplication table, writing, and spelling. . .? What about requiring college students who receive financial aid to help in schools?
I believe that the first step is to acknowledge that there is a problem.
The Oak Creek Franklin school district implemented a performance pay “system” that was solely based on the principal’s evaluation of a teacher’s performance. Principals rated teachers as either a “4” being exceptional, “3” doing okay, “2” marginal, or “1” needing improvement. Teachers rated a “4” got the largest pay raises, with “3”‘s about half of that, “2”‘s and 1″s got a pay cut.
This “system” drove many high quality teachers out of the district as it was nothing but a measure of how much a principal liked the teacher. The exodus of top quality teachers was most prominent among male teachers at Oak Creek High School as there was only 1 male teacher out of 24 total teachers rated a “4”. Like most school districts, the largest percentage of male teachers are employed at the high school level; in Oak Creek the male/female percentages were 33%/67%, yet there was only 1 male teacher rated a “4. At Oak Creek High School, male teachers were disproportionately rated as “2”‘s and “1”‘s and suffered pay cuts and/or were targeted for non-renewal and termination.
Though eventually abandoned, significant elements of this highly discriminatory pay structure are the foundation of the current Compensation System in the Oak Creek Franklin school district to this day. Many of the most senior male teachers still teaching in the district earn tens of thousands of dollars less than female colleagues with similar experience and years of service to the district.
Sadly there are still many school districts across Wisconsin that still screw teachers with failed “performance” pay systems. We work tirelessly to educate young teachers of the significantly greater career opportunities for teachers who leave Wisconsin to teach in blue states such as Minnesota and Illinois where this crap doesn’t exist.
If there is going to be performance-based pay, the Principal and Superintendent.
The Principal and Superintendent should be held accountable!
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” -Goodhart’s law