Purpose: The study examines why the logic of a performance management system, supported by the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, might be faulty. It does this by exploring the nuances of the interplay between teaching evaluations as formative and summative, the use of procedures, tools, and artifacts obligated by the local Teacher Incentive Fund system, and bonus payments as extrinsic motivators. Research Methods: The study is a qualitative longitudinal study in three public charter schools that were selected as a presumably conducive environment for incentive-driven performance management. Eight rounds of semistructured interviews, 130 interviews, and 65 hours of meeting observations are the data for this study. Findings: In the three charter schools, the adoption period was characterized by consonance, the belief that the performance management system served valued purposes. In midlife, dissonance set in. Performance contingencies attached to both bonus and external evaluations were perceived as disconfirming the values of the schools. Incentives and status competition were largely rebuffed and relegated to the periphery. Once the power of incentives became latent, a period of resonance set in. Administrators and teachers came to interact with the two main artifacts, videos of lessons and the Summative Evaluation of Teaching observation tool, in ways that afforded new learning. Implications for Research and Practice: The study suggests that research insights can be gained when logics of complex performance management systems are disentangled and competing dynamics deliberately studied. Practically speaking, when schools try to maintain a rich collegial culture, incentives may crowd out the use of teaching evaluations for formative learning.

Mindful of the withering of high-stakes accountability and disappointing data from pay for performance evaluations in the US, we ask why management by extrinsic incentives and organizational goal setting may have been far less powerful than designers of accountability and extrinsic incentive systems had expected. We explore how system-generated motives (e.g., attaining specific organizational goals, preventing sanctions, or garnering rewards) stack up against autonomously generated, intrinsic, or service motives.? We found through both quantitative and qualitative data that for teachers in the charter schools a constellation of public service motives pre-dominated: diffuse pro-social commitments, ideologies of fairness and equity, a belief in the moral deservingness of deprived student populations in opposition to societal neglect, and identification with one’s work as a personal calling. By comparison, monetary rewards were embraced as already deserved. Neither rewards, nor accountability, seemed to regulate behavior in a deep way. Prestige was not bestowed by official performance statuses within the accountability system, but flowed from judgments, personally communicated, by students, parents, or colleagues who had direct contact with teachers’ work.

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El artículo aborda los factores que inciden en que distintas escuelas públicas tengan una diferente capacidad de absorción de un proyecto de mejora escolar. Se estudiaron los efectos de un proyecto de asistencia técnica impulsado por un centro universitario que buscó fortalecer la confianza relacional en diez escuelas básicas públicas de dos municipios de Chile durante los años 2020 y 2021.Se utilizó una metodología cualitativa, basada en entrevistas semiestructuradas y revisión documental. Un primer hallazgo consistió en que las escuelas estudiadas presentaban niveles diferenciados de absorción de conocimientos, pudiendo clasificarse en los tres siguientes: cambios en creencias y/o competencias de directivos, desarrollo de nuevas prácticas de gestión y relación, e institucionalización de nuevas prácticas. Un segundo hallazgo fue la utilidad de contar con un dispositivo de análisis que considere las características de la escuela que absorbe, así como las del socio externo y el tipo de relación existente entre ambos durante el proyecto, factores todos que inciden en la capacidad de aprendizaje organizacional. El dispositivo empleado, basado en uno preexistente sobre la capacidad de absorción de instituciones educativas intermedias, mostró su pertinencia, pero también constató la necesidad de integrar ciertos factores complementarios.

This study drew on Chilean teacher survey responses from TALIS 2018 data on teacher motivation in order to examine the extent to which these data reveal different motivational profiles among Chilean teachers. Also, it explores the influence of those profiles on quality teachers’ instruction. As a conceptual scaffold, this article uses Agency Theory and Public Service Motivation theory to conceptualize and explore the data. Using latent classes analysis, multivariate regressions with survey methods, results showed three different motivational profiles: utility-laden, modal, and socially-laden. From these profiles, modal teachers seem to produce better teaching quality compared with the others profiles. These results suggest that the teachers’ profiles are more diverse when it comes to work motivation and teaching quality than what it is described in the literature. These findings give interesting insights for policymakers and school leaders to better understand the teaching workforce and think in diverse governance and teacher management tools. It also opens a set of interesting questions about how to motivate the teacher workforce in Chile.