DATE as a human capital strategy

Performance incentives in education has frequently been presented in purely rational choice economic terms, looking to see if the input of an incentive produced the desired output of student achievement. Such research has continually failed to produce significant effects. This dissertation attempts to recast incentives in terms of human capital theory and human behavioral economics, looking at the impact of social capital and support structures on teacher response to incentives. This study examines a major performance pay program in Texas using a concurrent-nested, mixed methods design. It finds that an external motivator like incentives is only effective in the presence of factors of internal motivation and that social capital positively affects the impact of a performance incentive.