| The Thomas B. Fordham Institute

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Curriculum & Instruction

Miah Daughtery

9.25.2026

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For decades, teacher professional learning in middle and high school has prioritized one thing above all else: pedagogy.

To be certain, pedagogy matters. Teachers must attune to the practices that allow learning to flourish. But as the field has over-indexed on pedagogy, it has under-indexed on content, or the knowledge those practices are meant to open a gateway to. We’ve doubled down on how to drive instead of where the car is going.

I remember spending hours learning instructional strategies: how to run small groups, facilitate Socratic seminars, and use graphic organizers. During one particularly misguided era, I sat through training on the now-debunked “learning styles,” puzzling over how to teach Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye to “musical” and “visual” learners. My districts focused on how to deliver material, not on deepening my understanding of the material itself.

A quick scan of old observations confirms my memory. “Class discussion” and “questioning strategies appeared random and designed to maximize student involvement” are consistently ticked off, identifying me as an effective teacher. Concerningly, there was almost nothing to evaluate my content knowledge or accuracy. The message was clear: pedagogy matters more than content.

Sometimes, my district did deliver small doses of content professional learning. However, this kind of PL existed mostly as a launchpad back into pedagogy: how to teach the complex text, not deepen teachers’ understanding of the text itself. Administrators, too, were told they didn’t need subject-matter expertise to evaluate instruction; “you know good teaching when you see it,” was (and may still be) the reigning mantra. Leaders became adept at recognizing good teaching performance, but too often were unequipped to recognize good content delivery and, in kind, good content learning.

Over the past several years, I’ve found myself in conversations with educators about what I now think of as the quiet content crisis in American schools: whispered exchanges in conference hallways, frustrated debriefs after professional learning sessions. Across math, science, reading, and language arts, the concern is remarkably consistent: deep content knowledge is lacking. We are not Chicken Littles running under blue skies; we are canaries in the coal mine, warning of an impending disaster.

But education already is rife with disasters and handwringing. We cannot unring the bell, but we can get it to ring a different tune. We can turn crisis to opportunity, resulting in better teaching and learning.

Teaching literacy requires deep content knowledge

In literacy education, the problem is particularly acute. It has become harder to find teachers who can confidently explain the difference between a phrase and a clause and articulate the relationship between syntax and meaning. Many teachers facilitate collaborative discussions with ease. But they struggle to unpack the grammatical complexity of the texts their students are reading, though sentence-level comprehension requires grammatical acuity.

I was that teacher.

Early in my career, I taught high school English language arts (ELA). I was assigned Grammar for College, a class that got deep into the weeds of grammar. I didn’t think much about it because I already had strong applied grammatical knowledge.

By week two, I was way beyond my skis. I knew how to write a grammatically correct sentence, but the terms “predicate nominative” and “predicate adjective” eluded me. I couldn’t follow the textbook, let alone teach it. One day as I was muddling my way through, a more experienced English teacher walked into my class. She watched me teach for a few minutes and left. That afternoon, she came to me and gently said, “All of that was wrong. Do you understand this?”

The jig was up.

Her next comment was most important. She said, “Oh, none of us understood this. You’ve got to go, right now, and tell Ms. Hayes. She’ll help you.”

I went to Ms. Hayes. Every day after school she taught me the mechanics of grammar the day before I had to teach it. I learned the content of grammar, a core component of ELA, from a master teacher who mentored me.

I knew how to put my students into cooperative groups. I did not know how to teach them what a comma splice was. That required a deep and flexible understanding of the content.

I know I’m not alone and that the problem extends to elementary schools and other disciplines, too. The science of reading movement was built, in part, on others saying the quiet part out loud: Some teachers weren’t taught how reading develops in the brain. Some teachers don’t know the content of reading, so it’s not being taught. As a result, states have spent millions of dollars and adopted dozens of policies trying to course-correct a content knowledge problem.

Ask many teachers how to organize a small group, and they know immediately. Ask them to distinguish theme from tone or topic and expect multiple competing answers. Ask a math teacher how to divide fractions, and they can. Ask what division means and expect a lot of confused looks back.

This is the predictable outcome of a pre- and in-service system that has deprioritized content expertise for decades, assuming degrees, certification, and licensure to be proxies for content knowledge. That assumption has proven dangerously flawed.

Undeniably, pedagogy is critical to learning. But pedagogy is not a substitute for content knowledge. A teacher cannot effectively teach what they do not deeply understand.

A classroom can look engaging while students learn very little. Excellence requires both pedagogical skill and intellectual authority. Strong pedagogy paired with weak content knowledge may create an engaging classroom, but one where misconceptions go unnoticed. Strong content knowledge paired with weaker pedagogy may create a technically accurate classroom, but one where students are disengaged so much they don’t learn.^{^[1]} However, strength in both will produce meaningful learning, because expertise lets teachers respond flexibly to the students in front of them.

The crisis

The consequences are visible in student literacy outcomes. Reading scores continue to stagnate or regress, as evidenced by both 2024 NAEP and 2026 PISA. Writing remains alarmingly unassessed at the federal level. If we want stronger literacy outcomes, we need stronger literacy inputs, beginning with educator knowledge of reading and writing development, comprehension, syntax, vocabulary, and rhetoric. If we want stronger math outcomes, we need teachers to have stronger mathematical knowledge and deeper mathematical conceptual understanding.

The opportunity

Middle and high school teachers deserve and need sustained opportunities to study their disciplines deeply, not just rehearse instructional routines. In language arts, this includes reading texts closely as adult readers, analyzing syntax and structure, and building real understanding of grammar and syntax.

We must reconsider how we evaluate teaching. Observations must move beyond engagement or participation. Leaders must also ask: Was the content accurate? Did the explanation deepen understanding? Were misunderstandings corrected? Organizations like EdBetter, which evaluate content and pedagogy, can serve as models and research hubs for how we may revise evaluation and coaching systems.

We can use this moment to re-envision an academic experience that places a premium on content knowledge. Leaders and teachers can build sustainable systems that:

Redesign professional learning around disciplinary study, not just instructional strategy. Partner with universities and subject-matter experts to make expertise an ongoing endeavor. Teachers need opportunities to study language, math, science, and history deeply.
Incorporate content accuracy into observations. Rubrics should evaluate whether explanations are precise and concepts are taught accurately.
Prioritize content expertise in hiring and leadership development. Leaders and coaches should possess strong disciplinary knowledge themselves; schools cannot support teacher expertise if leadership lacks it.

^{^[1]} One of the worst teaching experiences I ever observed was a brand-new teacher, straight from a university setting, who was teaching middle school science. The man, undeniably, knew chemistry. He did not know seventh graders. He taught facing the board, almost the entire hour, as chaos reigned behind him. He had strong content knowledge, but his lack of pedagogical practice impeded learning. A few years later, I saw the same teacher. He was masterful. He’d learned how to engage middle schoolers.

Policy Priority:

Topics:

Evidence-Based Learning

Curriculum & Instruction

Dale Chu

9.24.2026

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Few organizations have shaped education reform as profoundly as Teach For America. This year, TFA marks its 35th anniversary, an improbable milestone for a program conceived in Wendy Kopp’s senior thesis at Princeton. It produced not only achievement gains among students taught by TFA corps members, but also an elite talent pipeline, as alumni went on to leadership roles across business, medicine, law, and other fields, while many remained in education. For K–12 in particular, TFA developed a deep bench of superintendents, policymakers, elected officials, and other influential figures.

Yet Doug Lemov, the author of Teach Like a Champion and hardly a TFA hater, recently offered a stinging assessment of its trajectory:

Almost no other important organization lost its way as completely as TFA in the last 8–10 years… For years TFA brought smart motivated people into schools and focused them on student achievement in areas of high need. [T]hey traded that noble work for a set of political objectives that made corps members feel virtuous at the expense of the very students they claimed to serve… It’s been a long time since they cared more about student achievement than say trying to “teach young people to interrogate systems of power.”

That’s quite an indictment of an organization that was once a bipartisan darling, earning plaudits from Democrats and Republicans alike. In its heyday, TFA was a movement with remarkable reach and influence. So what happened?

Modeled loosely on the Peace Corps, TFA’s founding coincided with heightened public attention to the glaring disparities in American education. Jonathan Kozol’s best-selling Savage Inequalities, published the following year, became a cultural touchstone for that concern even as it drew ire on the right. But the original idea behind TFA was fundamentally about human capital. Compete directly with Wall Street investment firms and management consultancies for high-achieving undergraduates, then place them in inner-city schools that struggled to attract teachers. It also dovetailed with an emerging push for alternative certification, challenging the assumption that prospective teachers needed to pass through traditional routes before entering the classroom. As TFA matured—and faced questions about whether inexperienced college graduates were actually helping children—student achievement moved to the center of the organization’s identity.

When I joined the corps in 1997, Teach For America was hardly a conservative outfit. Most of my fellow corps members leaned left. But importantly, TFA seemed determined not to make politics a condition of belonging. We were there because children growing up in poverty weren’t getting the education they deserved. We could disagree about why that was happening, or what policies might fix it, without disagreeing about the mission itself. The focus on kids and equity, properly understood (more on that below), was paramount, and politics largely stayed in the background. TFA’s instinct calls to mind Michael Jordan’s famous quip that “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” Teacher recruitment was an appealing form of civic service that carried little ideological baggage, allowing people with different politics to rally around the same goal. Its message was essentially, “Come teach poor kids who deserve a great education.” That proved to be a potent formula.

In the late nineties and through the early aughts, many ed reformers understood “equity” largely in terms of outcomes. Hold all students to high expectations, especially those living in marginalized communities. That conviction was central to what attracted people like me to TFA. Since then, however, the term has accumulated more ideological and political freight.

The culture evolved, too. I joined Teach For America before smartphones and social media, before Amazon became an everything store. The generations that followed came of age in a radically different technological and information environment, one that reshaped and continues to reorder everything from social interaction and political engagement to the culture on college campuses. The labor market changed as well. An organization that had once beaten Goldman Sachs and McKinsey at their own recruiting game found itself competing for talent in a very different marketplace. The numbers tell the story. At its peak in 2013, TFA drew 57,000 applicants and nearly 6,000 new corps members. By 2022, the incoming corps had dwindled to roughly 1,600.

At the same time, TFA’s politics moved from the background to the brand. Its public messaging began weighing in more directly on policing, structural racism, gender, and identity. As mission creep set in, its pitch morphed into something like, “Come join a broader struggle against systemic injustice.” That newer framing asked for agreement on more contested questions about why injustice existed and what kind of social change was required to remedy it.

To be fair, the metamorphosis that Lemov describes occurred in the face of real political and cultural headwinds. But those forces alone don’t explain every choice Teach For America made. Some wounds were self-inflicted. The more TFA asked people to agree on issues beyond student achievement, the harder it became to sustain the big tent that had once made it so powerful.

Teach For America’s great advantage at the outset was that politics wasn’t especially relevant to joining the enterprise in the first place. I never thought much about it when I applied, while I served, or even after my two-year commitment was over. TFA recruited ambitious young people, put them through an intense, shared experience (Moody Towers, anyone?), connected them to one another, and seeded them throughout the education ecosystem. That was it. The clarity of the proposition gave TFA an unusually large constituency, and that network became movement infrastructure for transformational change in cities and states across the country.

TFA still has that network, which has grown to more than 70,000 alumni/ae. The question is whether it can regain the focus that once made it a tour de force. That challenge now falls to Aneesh Sohoni, who took the reins last year and whom I’ve previously had the chance to work with. Under his leadership, recruitment seems to be on the rebound. More importantly, Sohoni is publicly emphasizing areas of agreement like reading, math, and college and career readiness.

The timing might even be right. The cultural currents that pulled institutions like Teach For America toward more ideological terrain appear to be receding, while disappointing student achievement results have returned much-needed attention to the basic work of schools and teachers. That creates an opening for TFA to rediscover what once made it so effective. Doing so will require resisting the pull of new battles that aren’t essential to its educational mission. The test will be whether Teach For America can once again make its core proposition broad and compelling enough that people with different politics and worldviews can be a part of it.

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Brandon L. Wright

9.24.2026

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The latest PISA results were mostly grim. The Program for International Student Assessment—the leading international test of fifteen-year-olds’ academic performance, given in dozens of countries around the world—showed average scores falling to their lowest levels ever in reading, math, and science. The U.S. results were better, but not by much: Reading fell again and math and science were basically flat.

But one of our focuses here at Fordham is advanced education, so what about results at the high end of the achievement spectrum? The best way to determine this on PISA is to look at students scoring at Levels 5 and 6. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—a group of 38 mostly-affluent countries that designs and administers PISA—views such test-takers as advanced performers able to go beyond routine, age-level tasks and apply what they know to complex and unfamiliar problems. It’s somewhat analogous to NAEP’s Advanced level.

Viewed through that lens, the current American picture is brighter than most.[1] About 13 percent of U.S. students reach those levels in reading and science, compared with roughly 6 and 7 percent across the OECD, respectively. In math, the U.S. is right around the OECD average at 8 percent. See Figure 1.

Figure 1. Percent of students at PISA Levels 5 or 6 in reading, math, and science, U.S. and OECD average, 2025

Source: OECD, PISA 2025 U.S. country note.

If that snapshot is encouraging, the trends are even better, as shown in Figure 2 below. Recent NAEP results have given us some hints of this pattern. Start with reading. A decade ago, the U.S. advantage over the OECD average at the high end was just 2 percentage points. Since then, the American share of top performers has risen by more than 3 percentage points, while the OECD average has fallen by about 2. There was a small U.S. decline from 2022 to 2025, but it wasn’t statistically significant. In fact, among 89 participating countries and jurisdictions, the United States ranked 4th in students reaching those levels in the subject.

Science is relatively bright, too. In 2015, 9 percent of American test-takers reached Levels 5 or 6, statistically indistinguishable from the OECD average of 8 percent. Today, the U.S. is at 12.9 percent, compared with roughly 7 percent—and ranks 8th out of the 90 countries that took the assessment.

Then there’s math, which has long been America’s biggest weakness compared with other countries. Yet the trend here is also encouraging. In 2015, just 6 percent of U.S. students were top performers in math, versus about 10 percent across the OECD. In 2025, America’s share was 2 percentage points higher (even if, surprisingly, this jump isn’t statistically significant), while the OECD average was 2 points lower (which, conversely, is significant).

Figure 2. Percent of students at Pisa Levels 5 or 6 in reading, math, and science, U.S. and OECD average, 2015 and 2025

Note: The OECD data in this figure are based on 35 OECD countries with comparable data in both 2015 and 2025. Source: OECD, PISA 2015 and 2025 results.

This is all good news, full stop. But it shouldn’t be oversold, and nobody should over-indulge in champagne. In each of the three subjects, countries perform better than the United States, especially in math. In 2025, for example, 37 percent of students in Singapore reached Levels 5 or 6 in math, compared to America’s 8 percent; in Korea, it was 23 percent; and in Japan, 22 percent. In other words, the U.S. still produces advanced math students at nowhere near the rate of the world leaders, even if our comparatively large population still produces a substantial absolute number of top performers.

Nor should any of this distract from the country’s shortcomings at other achievement levels. In 2025, more than one in three American test takers scored below PISA’s Level 2, its baseline proficiency bar, in math, as did about one in four in reading and more than one in five in science. Those numbers are especially sobering considering the strong U.S. performance at the high end. In fact, the United States has the largest gap between its 90th- and 10th-percentile students in reading and the second largest in science.

Still, the good news at the top suggests that the country is capable of producing a lot of very advanced students. It also suggests that America, again with its large population, has a substantial reservoir of academic talent, periodic cries of disastrous brain drain notwithstanding. In reading and science, the shares of top performers have risen and are now among the highest in the world. And although the U.S. still lags far behind the strongest nations in our rate of advanced math achievement, we did improve over the last decade while the OECD average dropped.

That leaves us with a more complicated—and more positive—picture than many PISA headlines painted. Yes, America has serious achievement problems. But there’s also a lot of good news at the high end. That surprised me, and I’m guessing it will surprise readers, too.

[1] Readers should note an important caveat about U.S. results: The United States fell short of several PISA sampling standards for school and student participation. As a result, the OECD can’t rule out bias due to nonresponses or determine whether such a bias raised or lowered results and, therefore, rankings. To compensate for this, the OECD used preselected replacement schools and reweighted the sample. After doing this, the participating and nonparticipating groups looked demographically similar. Still, readers should interpret U.S. results and rankings with some caution.

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Accountability & Testing

Curriculum & Instruction

Advanced Education

Jeff Murray

9.24.2026

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A defining feature of charter schools is the oversight structure provided by the authorizer. It is an authorizer’s job to determine whether schools are fulfilling the terms of their charters across numerous areas, not least of which is student outcomes. Contract renewal time is when those determinations matter most. Has a school earned the right to continue operating and for how long? While the typical charter renewal term is five years, most states give authorizers the discretion to offer longer or shorter terms if circumstances warrant. A new report looks at renewal term length decisions in four of those states, aiming to see how authorizers use that discretion and what impacts they associate with different term lengths.

The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) surveyed 39 authorizers across Colorado, Florida, Indiana, and Michigan, all of whom had at least five charter schools in their portfolios. The survey asked respondents about all the renewal term lengths they grant and the reasons for granting different lengths. Twenty-six of those authorizers also agreed to participate in focus groups which delved into more depth on their survey responses and added an additional dimension: What effects—intended and unobserved—do authorizers associate with different term lengths.

Across all four states, five years was the most common renewal length. Respondents said that a five-year term provides them with enough data to make sound decisions and provides schools sufficient time to achieve any needed operational stability required by authorizers.

Longer-term renewals (anything more than five years) were rare, respondents said—typically reserved for schools with sustained strong performance across academics, finances, and governance. But they do have their upsides when granted, including reduced administrative burden for both authorizers and school staff, as well as incentivizing more favorable facility financing opportunities for schools with longer-term charters. On the downside, however, respondents reported that some schools declined in performance after receiving long-term renewals, with fewer intervention tools then available to authorizers.

Shorter-term renewals (anything less than five years) were most commonly reported in response to academic underperformance, financial distress, or governance problems. Authorizers intend them as leverage—a way to force change with new contract/accountability requirements or to signal that a school’s continued operation is conditional upon specific improvements. However, respondents provided little evidence that short-term renewals actually improved school performance. Repeated short-term renewals, respondents said, could also accelerate staff turnover, hasten enrollment declines, and do reputational harm to schools.

Interestingly, while five-year terms continue to function as the sector default and are deemed appropriate for most schools that are meeting expectations, they still generated concerns from some respondents. Having all or even most schools in a portfolio on similar terms creates clusters of renewals every year, resulting in a significant and ongoing administrative burden for authorizers that staggered/non-standard terms could alleviate. Additionally, any states that don’t allow shorter renewal terms lump both adequate and problematic charter schools into the same category; and any states that don’t allow longer renewal terms lump both adequate and exceptional schools together. Both situations, authorizers say, remove the quality signals that varying term lengths are meant to convey.

While these findings come from a limited, nonrepresentative sample of authorizers—those willing to speak on the subject—NACSA’s recommendations on renewal term length nonetheless reflect much of the insight they provide. To wit: The length of charter renewal terms should be determined through a deliberate, performance-based process, and not by default or tradition.

Long-term renewals should be reserved for schools demonstrating sustained excellence across all performance areas, and their contracts should include robust monitoring systems to detect declines in performance as well as actionable accountability structures if a decline occurs mid-cycle. Short-term renewals should be used sparingly—with “clear conditions and consequences”—and never as cover to kick painful closure decisions down the road a year or two. Finally, the report encourages charter supporters to band together to support state policies (or support implementation of new policies if they don’t already exist) that minimize “authorizer shopping,” the process whereby schools can easily switch authorizers if they don’t like, for example, the term length being offered.

SOURCE: National Association of Charter School Authorizers, “Charter Renewal Term Length Project” (August 2026).

Policy Priority:

Quality Choices

Topics:

Accountability & Testing

Evidence-Based Learning

Charter Schools

[1] These ratings are noncompliant with a provision in state law prohibiting more than half of districts or schools from receiving the same rating. This should be addressed in advance of next year’s report card.

[2] Just 16 and 9 percent of Akron and Youngstown graduates, respectively, earn an associate degree or above by their mid-twenties. The median incomes of Akron and Youngstown graduates are $26,130 and $18,486, respectively, five years after high school.

Public school funding is at record levels, but not enough money is making its way to teacher paychecks.

Between 2002 and 2023, the average inflation-adjusted teacher salary fell despite a 36 percent real increase in per-student funding. Public schools are increasingly spending more outside the classroom, with non-teaching staff—such as instructional aides, counselors, and social workers—increasing by 23 percent.

Many factors have contributed to this staffing surge, including special education, technology, wraparound services, and administration. But it’s a real problem, given that research shows teachers are the most important in-school factor affecting student outcomes, underscoring the significant opportunity costs of this spending. There are no quick fixes, and state lawmakers face real constraints on what they can do. But they still have an important role to play in stemming the staffing surge and encouraging more strategic use of scarce resources for teacher pay. The following analysis offers ideas for how they can tackle these challenges.

Decentralize spending decisions

Requiring school districts to spend a minimum portion of their funding on teacher compensation, as Indiana does, might be tempting. But money is fungible, and no single way to allocate resources is optimal for every school district. Instead, state lawmakers should slow the staffing surge by decentralizing spending authority, giving districts—and ultimately schools—flexibility to align resources with local needs.

A good place to start is to eliminate state categorical grants that direct funding toward non-teaching staff. For example, Arizona’s $82 million school safety program funds social workers, school counselors, and school resource officers; Michigan allocates $428 million for mental health and school safety; and Minnesota spends $45 million on student support personnel to improve students’ “academic, physical, social, and emotional outcomes.” These dollars could be redirected into the state funding formulas instead.

Funding for community schools, which now make up an estimated 6 percent to 8 percent of all public schools, deserves similar scrutiny. Community schools often provide health care, adult education, counseling, and other services that require costly investments in non-teaching staff. Lawmakers in Maryland appropriated $572 million for community schools for FY 27—more than they spend on school construction and about 50 times more than the cost of the state’s program for math and literacy coaches.

Improving mental health, school safety, and other student supports are worthwhile goals. But one-size-fits-all grants prevent local leaders from making tradeoffs between higher compensation, additional staffing, and other uses of scarce resources. And while community schools address real needs, policymakers should ensure that academics, not social services, are public schools’ priority.

Next, lawmakers should audit state laws for provisions that dictate staffing inputs. For instance, Virginia mandates one school counselor for every 325 students, one librarian for every 300 students, and one assistant principal for every 600 students in high school. Arkansas has similar requirements for counselors and librarians, while New Hampshire regulates school counseling loads. Other states go even further: Idaho, West Virginia, and North Carolina have funding systems that allocate resources based largely on staffing positions and programs.

A public school deregulation agenda, while not a cure-all, would push the ball in the right direction.

Finally, states should encourage school districts to give principals more authority over budget decisions. As it stands, most school budgets revolve around staffing positions, incentivizing school leaders to advocate for additional full-time equivalents (FTEs) rather than higher teacher salaries. Expanding principals’ role in financial decision-making, including providing a mechanism to convert staffing positions into flexible compensation dollars, can make these tradeoffs clear (more on this below).

Getting the fiscal incentives right is crucial, but policymakers also need to rethink how teachers are paid.

Modernize teacher compensation

State policymakers should avoid costly, across-the-board pay bumps that do little to attract and retain the best teachers. Instead, they should reform flawed policies and try approaches that reward high performers and differentiate pay for shortage areas such as math, science, and special education.

Most public school teachers are paid on a step-and-lane salary schedule in which pay increases with years of experience and educational attainment. While research indicates that teachers tend to improve with experience (with diminishing returns after the first ten years or so), studies show that teachers with advanced degrees are generally no more effective than teachers with bachelor’s degrees.

Paying more for teachers with advanced degrees is inefficient, but data published by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) suggest that this practice is widespread. NCTQ examined the nation’s 148 largest districts and found that 135 pay teachers with master’s degrees more than those holding just bachelor’s degrees, with novice teachers receiving $3,581 more on average and experienced teachers receiving $9,315 more.

For many states, the first step in modernizing teacher pay is a no-brainer: stop mandating master’s degree premiums. Nearly one-third of states—including Alabama, Indiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia—have such a requirement in state law, according to NCTQ. Or they could go even further and incentivize districts to phase out the practice.

Removing collective bargaining constraints, as Wisconsin did in 2011, can also help encourage innovation in teacher pay. Research suggests that giving districts flexibility in determining their compensation structure, while politically difficult, can help improve teacher quality and student achievement.

But lawmakers might also need to try more direct approaches to rewarding the best teachers. For example, Texas’s Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA), adopted in 2019, provides performance pay that’s awarded based on locally designed designation systems using student growth, classroom observations, and other criteria. Initial research on TIA is encouraging, with researchers finding improvements in teacher retention and student achievement.

States could go even further by piloting a bottom-up model that minimizes red tape and leverages local knowledge: Send dollars directly to principals and empower them to reward their best teachers or those in hard-to-staff positions.

This might sound radical, but principals in private schools and charters routinely have more discretion over teacher pay than their public school counterparts. Great Hearts Academies’ Teacher Excellence Fund, which gives headmasters a pot of dollars to use at their discretion for teacher bonuses, offers a glimpse of what this could look like. In an era defined by school choice policies that fund students directly, Principal Empowerment Accounts might have a fighter’s chance in state capitals.

Conclusion

Public school funding has risen drastically in the last couple of decades, but dollars are increasingly going toward non-teaching staff rather than teacher salaries. If state policymakers want to slow staffing growth—and redirect dollars toward teacher paychecks—they can start by decentralizing spending decisions and reforming how teachers are paid.

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