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A version of this essay appeared on Matthew Yglesias鈥� , a site dedicated to offering pragmatic takes on politics and public policy. 

David Broockman and Josh Kalla in which they tested the electoral impact of 鈥渕oving to the center鈥� on a range of issues. In theoretical terms, the main import of this paper is to establish that adopting a more moderate view improves your electoral performance only if the more moderate view is more popular.

In most instances it is, but that鈥檚 not always the case.

They find that Democrats mostly benefit from moving to the center on cultural issues (affirmative action, crime, admission of asylum seekers, girls鈥� sports) but are generally better off maintaining conventional progressive positions in areas like Social Security and health care. (Note that this is different from the populist formula of saying that Democrats will benefit from moving further left on economic issues. It鈥檚 just that a basic defense of the existing safety net is very popular.)

I , but there is one very interesting exception to the culture/economics pattern that鈥檚 worth talking about in detail: performance pay for teachers.

On this issue, they tested three positions:

• Liberal: It should be difficult to fire teachers, and their pay should primarily depend on how long they have worked as a teacher.
• Conservative: Being a teacher should be like any other job, where better teachers get paid more and worse teachers can be easily fired or get paid less.
• Centrist: It should be difficult to fire teachers, but better teachers should get paid more than worse teachers.

In contrast to the cultural issues, where moving to the center helps Democrats, this all sounds a little tedious and technical. But Broockman and Kalla find that attributing the centrist position to a Democratic candidate has a larger impact on that candidate鈥檚 vote share than moving to the center on girls鈥� sports teams, on asylum, on gender transition surgeries for minors, or on prison sentences for property crimes. The impact is bigger than embracing an 鈥渁ll of the above鈥� energy policy rather than one that is renewables-only. In fact, the only issues that had a larger impact on candidate evaluation in their survey were and racial targeting of small business loans.

That means that this wonkish technical question of teacher compensation is actually a bigger deal in the eyes of voters than a lot of inflammatory cultural issues.

Why is this shift so high-impact?

Not only is the liberal position very unpopular (it鈥檚 just as unpopular on these other topics), even the moderate position doesn鈥檛 have much support. Over 60% of voters agree with the stated conservative position.

The authors also find consistently in this experiment that voters with conservative views on a given topic appreciate it when Democrats move to the center on that issue (and vice versa for voters with liberal views when evaluating Republicans). The upshot is that there is a lot of electoral upside to offering the pretty tepid take that teacher compensation should be based on performance rather than pure seniority, even without any compromise on basic job protections.

The voters seem correct on this

It makes sense for politicians to say things that voters agree with, but you want to be careful about committing yourself to policies that will catastrophically fail if implemented.

I think it is reasonably likely that a candidate could win an election by promising price controls on groceries, and that鈥檚 especially true if they did it while maintaining broadly moderate vibes. The problem is that if a state actually imposed price controls on groceries, it would immediately suffer from severe shortages.

And when that happened, the voters would not say 鈥淎h, my bad, I didn鈥檛 think this through.鈥� Voters, sadly, are not very self-aware and they would blame the politicians who caused the shortages.

Conversely, while voters were deeply skeptical of New York City鈥檚 congestion pricing plan, once it was implemented, we saw the same political dynamic that we previously saw in Oslo, Stockholm, and London: Voters liked the reduction in traffic volume. Voter skepticism of congestion pricing seems to be driven by skepticism that it will work, but when they see that it works, they like it.

I don鈥檛 want to downplay the pure politics here, though.

Lots of people in the Democratic Party camp are spinning their wheels furiously in a quest for big exciting new ideas, often embracing proposals that make almost no sense on the merits. It turns out, though, that there is an incredibly large political upside to just saying 鈥淗ey, we should get schools to give raises only to their best teachers so we鈥檙e making sure they don鈥檛 leave the profession.鈥�

Consider all the genuine excitement that DOGE initially aroused in some quarters before crashing and burning as a total failure: Lots of people are very sincerely interested in the question of improving the performance of the public sector, and putting out plausible ideas to do this 鈥� like paying teachers based on demonstrated skill rather than pure seniority 鈥� is (in the eyes of the voters) a genuinely exciting big new idea.

On the merits, to the extent that there鈥檚 a problem here, it鈥檚 that translating the words 鈥渂etter teachers get paid more鈥� into an actual policy is a nontrivial task.

You don鈥檛 want to reward the teachers whose students do the best on year-end tests, because that鈥檚 just encouraging teachers to take on the easiest assignments in classrooms full of smart kids with no problems. You also don鈥檛 want to reward the teachers whose students like them best, because the point of school is to make kids do boring stuff like learn math. So you need an evaluation system and that鈥檚 going to be hard to get right.

The good news is that I surveyed the evidence and, while there is a wide range of program designs and a wide range of findings among researchers, nobody is finding that performance-pay programs backfire and make things worse. The entire research debate is between enthusiasts who claim large benefits and skeptics who say the benefits are small or null.

I think the existence of skeptical findings 鈥� and a general sense that the impact of all education policy changes is pretty small 鈥� has created a permission structure for Democrats to backslide from Obama-era efforts at education reform in order to avoid conflict with unions. That鈥檚 why the polling is relevant, though. The political upside to embracing the commonsense view that pure seniority-based pay doesn鈥檛 make sense is large. And it鈥檚 also just clearly the case that pure seniority-based pay doesn鈥檛 make sense!

Designing and implementing a great teacher-evaluation system is hard, but 鈥渂e at least as good as strict seniority鈥� is easy because the strict seniority system is clearly bad.

Performance-pay systems mostly work

There are a lot of studies of merit-pay systems. If you want a summary, that concludes that 鈥渢he effect of teacher merit pay on student test scores is positive and statistically significant (0.043 standard deviation).鈥� It also features the boring but important caveat that the effect 鈥渧aries by program design and study context鈥� 鈥� the details matter.

You can also look at the most negative studies. Here鈥檚 a , a program, and another in part because half of eligible teachers didn鈥檛 know it existed.

I think that for understanding the recent political history of teacher compensation in the United States, the most important paper is 鈥溾�� by Joshua Bleiberg, Eric Brunner, Erica Harbatkin, Matthew Kraft, and Matthew Springer. It studies how the Obama administration took advantage of the state/local budget crisis inflicted by the Great Recession to get money for a program they called Race to the Top, where the feds would give states grants for K-12 schools, but those grants do things like create performance-pay systems.

This did not really work.

My qualitative understanding of why is that the incentive program was almost too effective. States really wanted the money. Teachers unions wanted states to get the money. So everybody duly submitted their grant applications and said the magic words, but then in most cases they did not actually create rigorous and well-implemented evaluation systems that meaningfully changed anything.

From a narrow politics viewpoint, I would say the Obama-era effort worked great. It allowed the president to do popular position-taking in favor of performance pay. And it didn鈥檛 make schools worse, even though the implementation was pretty fuzzy. So really, if you鈥檙e running for office, you should say you鈥檙e for this whether or not you鈥檙e serious about implementation.

But to get good results, you need good implementation.

Eric Hanushek, Minh Nguyen, Ben Ost, and Steven Rivkin have , which has been in place since 2013. This system features rich evaluations that include test scores but also observations and student ratings. Notably, in addition to paying the better-performing teachers more, the system offers additional bonuses to skilled teachers who volunteer to teach in high-needs schools.

A 2013 study of D.C.P.S.鈥檚 performance-pay system 鈥� which includes provisions to make it easier to fire low-performing teachers 鈥� , with low-scoring teachers either getting better or else quitting. A 2019 followup found that , meaning that the floor for teacher quality is rising in the city.

The in India also worked really well, for an international example.

I鈥檓 a little torn here because I don鈥檛 want to overpromise.

As a D.C.P.S. parent, I can tell you that the system does not work miracles. The main thing that parents in the real world care about is peer effects and the demographic composition of their kid鈥檚 school, not sophisticated value-added measures of student performance.

What great teachers in a diverse public elementary school do is have an unusually high success rate at taking really low-performing kids up to a baseline of basic competence. From both an objective statistical viewpoint and also my eyeball experience of seeing a group of kids with mostly very high-scoring teachers, it鈥檚 clear that the actual impact of teacher quality is modest compared to innate ability and out-of-classroom stuff.

All that being said, we do have all these schools and we should try to run them well rather than poorly. The schools all have teachers, the teachers need to be paid, and we need some kind of system to determine how much teachers get paid.

The pure seniority system does not make sense. All public-sector-pay systems are rigid compared to the private sector, but teacher compensation is unusually undifferentiated 鈥� cop pay has a large seniority element but they also take exams for promotion to sergeant or earn bonus pay by qualifying as detectives.

Voters do not agree with the status quo. There are some examples of compensation systems that perform a lot better than the baseline, and at worst they make no difference. Politicians should give the voters what they want and try to do it well.

The union factor (of course)

A little while back, I was moderating a panel that included Representative Jake Auchincloss and he was doing his bit about how harmful prolonged school closures were and Democrats need to own that to regain the public鈥檚 trust. Because I like to make trouble, I tried to follow up by pressing him to say something negative about teachers鈥� unions for pushing to keep schools closed. He mostly demurred.

That annoyed me a little at the time, but in retrospect I think he was right.

Of course people in my line of business like to try to do meta-takes about root causes and push politicians to say things that will deliberately get them in trouble with their base. But what the voters want to hear are not ideas about the thing but the thing itself. One of the reasons that there鈥檚 such a strong public response to the concept of paying the best teachers more is that I bet it would never occur to 90 percent of the population that anyone would ever construe that as an anti-worker, anti-teacher, or anti-union take.

One of the is that among Democratic Party primary voters, there is extremely little support for strict seniority-based teacher pay (this is what they label as 鈥淜-12 Teacher Accountability鈥�).

That鈥檚 a huge contrast with asylum or energy or affirmative action, where there are big electoral gains to be made from moving to the center but also a price to be paid with primary voters. A Democrat who just says that teachers should be paid according to ability is appealing to swing voters and primary voters simultaneously. You know and I know that it will make teachers鈥� unions mad, but I think going out of your way to have a fight about unions distracts from the more important point that this is just an overwhelmingly popular position that is well-supported on the merits.

Just say and do the thing. Don鈥檛 be scared off by the unions. If they come at you, punch back by just restating the compelling core thesis: Teachers鈥� work is important and should be well-compensated, but that means paying to retain the people who are good at it, not just arbitrarily paying more for whoever happens to have been in the job longest.

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