Teachers ought to be paid for performance, rather than seniority. But how to do that?

Policy analyst Eric Wong writes that "the main concerns about performance-based pay schedules relate to evaluating teachers based on criteria that were too subjective."

But, he says, the field of teacher evaluation has advanced since the 1980s, which provided the studies that some critics of performance pay use to support their position.

One key? Measuring student improvement over time: "States and districts have developed data systems that estimate teachers’ effectiveness based on their students’ test-score gains over time. Such use of value-added measures does have its shortcomings, but combining these measures with qualitative measures such as improvement in student behavior and student satisfaction can possibly provide a more holistic assessment of teacher performance."