^{The Bottom Line} Incentives Are Wrong in Education

Teachers are incentivized in education to stay in the profession longer through the step-and-lane salary schedule, which gives a raise each year for experience, regardless of professional performance. This creates a system in which individuals are not accountable for proving they are providing student learning. Teacher pay is not linked to student test scores or student growth; rather, it is based on time in the profession.

High-achieving individuals enter the profession and find that their hard work and professional results are not rewarded. They often leave the system to pursue a career opportunity in which their job performance is recognized with financial compensation.

It’s time the system was flipped so that high performance by educators is incentivized and rewarded. The status quo cannot continue. According to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress Exam scores released in January 2025, seven out of ten students cannot read at grade level, and seven out of ten students cannot perform math at grade level. It’s no secret that “teacher quality is the No. 1 school-related factor affecting student progress,” as Vikek Ramaswamy correctly pointed out in an article in The Wall Street Journal.

The education system must move past the ineffective teacher certification barrier, keeping some of the best and brightest professionals with real-world experience and expertise out of the profession and encouraging mediocre and poor performers to remain. Students need teachers with subject-matter knowledge and content-area experience. 

Furthermore, it’s virtually impossible to fire a bad teacher because of the power of the teachers unions. As exposed in a 2009 article in The New Yorker, teachers who should be fired are instead sent to a “Temporary Reassignment Center,” also known as “Rubber Room.” At the time, there were roughly six hundred teachers in Rubber Rooms within New York City who had “been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.”

The article continues, explaining: “The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day—which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school—typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved—the process is often endless—they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.”

The Rubber Rooms have persisted for years despite being exposed as an enormous waste of taxpayer money. According to the New York Post in 2020, “The eight city warehouses called ‘rubber rooms’ were spaces of various sizes where up to 1,500 Department of Education employees at a time got paid their full salaries to sit around — free to read the newspaper, surf the internet, knit, chat or just doze off.” Millions of dollars are spent to pay these so-called teachers who are not teaching. The article said that “one notorious rubber-room fixture managed his real-estate and rental properties. Another teacher in a Bronx rubber room studied for the LSAT and is now a practicing attorney.” 

The system protects adults while failing students and taxpayers. If teacher quality truly drives student success, then pay, hiring, and retention must reward excellence and enforce accountability. Incentivizing longevity over results is indefensible when most students can’t read or do math at grade level. Real reform means aligning incentives with outcomes and putting students first.

Click HERE to watch Keri D. Ingraham’s interview on the Futures Edge Podcast discussing the need to change the incentives in education: