Roland Fryer, the celebrity Harvard economist who has studied the stigma of "acting white" and performance pay for students - says in a new paper on teacher performance pay in New York City that he finds "no evidence that teacher incentives increase student performance, attendance, or graduation" and that "if anything, teacher incentives may decrease student achievement, especially in larger districts."

But ...

But Fryer also suggests the results are more likely the result of bad design rather than bad concept: "All incentive schemes piloted thus far in the U.S., due in part to strong influence by teacher's unions, have been more complex and provided teachers with less agency than incentive experiments in developing countries." More about Fryer's study here.