Point/counterpoint: the View from the Trenches of Education Policy Research

The Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) was a three-year study testing the hypothesis that rewarding teachers for improved student scores on standardized tests would cause scores to rise. Results, as described in Springer et al. (2010b), did not confirm this hypothesis. In this article we provide additional information on the POINT study that may be of particular interest to researchers contemplating their own studies of similar policies. Our discussion focuses on the policy environment in which POINT was launched, considerations that affected the design of POINT, and a variety of lessons learned from the implementation of the experiment. Dale Ballou (corresponding author) Peabody College Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN 37203-5271 [email protected] Matthew G. Springer Peabody College Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN 37203-5271 matthew.g.springer@ vanderbilt.edu Daniel F. McCaffrey RAND Corporation Pittsburgh, PA 15213 [email protected] J. R. Lockwood RAND Corporation Pittsburgh, PA 15213 [email protected] Brian M. Stecher RAND Corporation Pittsburgh, PA 15213 [email protected] Laura Hamilton RAND Corporation Pittsburgh, PA 15213 [email protected] Matthew Pepper Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools Nashville, TN 37204 [email protected] 170 c © 2012 Association for Education Finance and Policy Ballou, Springer, McCaffrey, Lockwood, Stecher, Hamilton, and Pepper