An honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work is a deceptively simple sentiment when applied to the teaching profession. The idea of offering incentive pay to teachers for raising student achievement is increasingly popular (Harvey-Beavis, 2003) but involves many challenges; beginning with the fact that teacher compensation worldwide is still largely determined by rigid salary schedules that do not factor in student achievement. According to Jay P. Greene, Chair and Head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, most programs claiming to offer teacher incentive pay are “phony” because “the game is often rigged so that virtually all employees are deemed meritorious and get at least some of the bonus” (2012). Gary Mason, Globe and Mail national affairs columnist, echoed this sentiment in a recent column documenting the furor at the mere suggestion by an Alberta task force that provincial systems of performance-based teacher evaluations be adopted and bad teachers be “weeded out” (2014, May 9). Mason rightly questions the fundamental fairness of treating talented teachers the same as mediocre teachers. He also notes that at most only a handful of teachers would be shown the door under a performance-based system, a position backed up by research evidence (Fuller et al., 2007; Imazeki, 2012). Most important, Mason underscores the fact that failing to make commonsense performance distinctions among teachers ultimately hurts students the most.

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