Based on Kevin’s response, I suspect I wasn’t actually being clear enough here. I wasn’t actually advocating against new compensation models on the grounds that pay isn’t intrinsically motivating. There’s a line to be drawn here of course as I really don’t want Gordon Gecko teaching my kids. He’ll just falsify the test scores take his bonus and head to a country where we don’t have an extradition treaty. But that wasn’t where I was going.  My baseline position wasn’t “we’re not in this for the money, give us more money.” Instead it’s “we don’t have the option of being in it for the money, and trying to introduce that option without making the pie bigger isn’t a smart idea.”

What I was trying to argue is that we don’t have in place one of the essential preconditions to having an effective variable pay structure: adequate base compensation (Next time, less KRS-One, more Murnane and Cohen. I'm sure they too can rock the mike).  As a result, you get a system where people are being driven to a large extent by the intrinsic rewards of the work, and by the external rewards that come from a kind of cult of teacherdom.  I don’t know if it’s chicken or egg, but uncompetitive pay is a factor keeping this dynamic in place. Since I don’t want the people I work for to have to be the public employee equivalent of nuns,  it is something I worry over a fair bit. Which is why I think we need to keep thinking about how to change the compensation system fairly.