A Theoretical Framework for Teacher Incentives: Monetary, Social and Vision-Based

Teachers are at the heart of the education process; in attempts to improve teacher quality there has been a trend in the US and elsewhere to incentivize teachers to put in more effort. This paper presents a theoretical framework for analyzing and designing different incentive schemes informed by the structure and quality of tasks constituting the k-12 teaching profession. It focuses on the question of how policy makers and education leaders can improve teacher effort towards the outcome of interest, specifically improving student achievement. It draws on literature on incentives, goal setting theory, norms and work significance to identify three main types of incentives: (1) monetary incentives, (2) social incentives and (3) vision-based incentive. Each of the types of incentives in this paper are analyzed in light of Vroom’s (1964) expectancy theory—its expectancy, valence and instrumentality—to build a theoretical framework for analyzing the potential mediating factors of each of the incentive schemes and their impact.