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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