AN incentive scheme to encourage Israeli teachers to improve results has been so successful - at so little cost - that it is being extended to all of the country’s high schools.

Under the scheme, cash awards go to schools that make the greatest progress on measures such as reducing the pupil-drop-out rate. Three-quarters of the money is paid as bonuses to teachers and the rest goes towards a common benefit, such as improving the staffroom.

Reporting on a four-year experiment with the scheme in 62 high schools, Professor Victor Lavy of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said it had cut by 40 per cent the number of pupils dropping out between the ninth and tenth grade (roughly equivalent to staying on in the sixth form). This was true across all the schools, not just in the top third that won awards. It had also improved average test scores and raised pass rates in the matriculation exam, especially for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Winning schools were judged both on how much better they fared than other schools with a similar socio-economic intake and on how much they improved year-on-year. The way the scores were computed encouraged schools to focus on helping weaker students.

Professor Lavy told a recent seminar at the London School of Economics that these improvements had been achieved despite the relatively modest size of the awards. In 1996, the highest bonus per teacher was about $1,000 (pound;660) and the lowest $250 (the average salary of a high school teacher is $30,000), and the highest-scoring school won a total of $105,000.

Publicity given to successful schools and the rise in their reputation was a factor in the scheme’s success, he suggested.

The programme was one of two introduced by the Israeli government in the mid-1990s in an effort to raise pupils’ achievement. A 42 per cent increase in the education budget introduced in 1992 had produced large rises in teachers’ pay but no improvement in results; ministers were anxious to find more effective alternatives.

Under the other scheme, a different group of 22 high schools was given extra teaching resources, mainly teaching time and on-the-job training. Each school was given a voucher equivalent to about 2.5 extra full-time teachers. Schools could use the time as they liked but were asked to focus on potential drop-outs and weak students. This too was effective. It boosted pupils’ test scores and the proportion sitting the matriculation exam was even higher than that for the incentive scheme, although it did not affect the proportion passing matriculation or drop-out rates.

But the resources programme cost more than twice as much per school as the incentives one. The government therefore decided to extend the incentives scheme to all schools with matriculation students, offering awards totalling $5 million to the top 100 schools.

“The power of incentives, observed elsewhere in the economy, is also evident in schools,” Professor Lavy concluded.

However, Professor Lavy warned that, since the schools in the incentives scheme were mostly in small (and relatively poor) communities, it was difficult to predict what the results would be elsewhere. Also, the research covered only cost and outcomes. How the schemes were made to work in schools was unknown. Nor did an analysis of winning schools reveal any characteristics of students or teachers that indicated why they had done better. The “black box” had yet to be discovered.

E-mail: msvictor@mscc.huji.ac.il