We should pay more for the best teachers

David Broockman and Josh Kalla recently published a paper in which they tested the electoral impact of “moving to the center” on a range of issues. In theoretical terms, the main import of this paper is to establish that adopting a more moderate view improves your electoral performance only if the more moderate view is more popular. In most instances it is, but that’s not always the case. They find that Democrats mostly benefit from moving to the center on cultural issues (affirmative action, crime, admission of asylum seekers, girls’ sports) but are generally better off maintaining conventional progressive positions in areas like Social Security and health care.1 I wrote about these findings broadly in the New York Times, but there is one very interesting exception to the culture/economics pattern that’s worth talking about in detail: performance pay for teachers. On this issue, they tested three positions: Liberal: It should be difficult to fire teachers, and their pay should primarily depend on how long they have worked as a teacher. Conservative: Being a teacher should be like any other job, where better teachers get paid more and worse teachers can be easily fired or get paid less. Centrist: It should be difficult to fire teachers, but better teachers should get paid more than worse teachers. In contrast to the cultural issues, where moving to the center helps Democrats, this all sounds a little tedious and technical. But Broockman and Kalla find that attributing the centrist position to a Democratic candidate has a larger impact on that candidate’s vote share than moving to the center on girls’ sports teams, on asylum, on gender transition surgeries for minors, or on prison sentences for property crimes. The impact is bigger than embracing an “all of the above” energy policy rather than one that is renewables-only. In fact, the only issues that had a larger impact on candidate evaluation in their survey were affirmative action in college admissions and racial targeting of small business loans. That means that this wonkish technical question of teacher compensation is actually a bigger deal in the eyes of voters than a lot of inflammatory cultural issues. Why is this shift so high-impact?