The National Center on Performance Incentives hosted a research to policy conference in February 2008 entitled Performance Incentives: Their Growing Impact on American K-12 Education. The conference brought together more than twenty scholars from multiple disciplines to debate the merits and weaknesses of performance-related pay policy. The conference was attended by a standing room only crowd of more than 320 education researchers, policymakers, students, teachers and journalists.

We invite you to learn more about the 2008 conference proceedings using the resources below.

• Click hereto review a program of panel discussions presented at the conference.
• Click here to learn more about the speakers featured at the conference.
• Click here to access the papers presented at the conference.
• Click here to access coverage of select panel presentations.

Attendance at this conference is an indicator of the interest in pay for performance policies to shape teacher performance. We know that policy doesn’t wait for research, policy is made,” Russ Whitehurst, then-director of the Institute of Education Sciences, said. “The transformation in education that we will see over the next 25 to 50 years will be tremendous if, whenever possible, policy initiatives take place in a context where data can be collected to determine if they are working and for whom. We believe Vanderbilt’s Peabody College is the preeminent college of education for many of the research questions in which we are interested.”