Latest news, weather and high school sports for Albany and Southwest Georgia

ALBANY, GA -- It makes sense, paying teachers more money when their students do well. But according to a new study it doesn't work.

The study, conducted in the metropolitan Nashville school system by Vanderbilt University's National Center on Performance Incentives, was described by the researchers as the nation's first scientifically rigorous look at merit pay for teachers.

It found that students whose teachers were offered bonuses of up to $15,000 a year for improved test scores registered the same gains on standardized exams as those whose teachers were given no such incentives.

Dougherty County School System officials say the study proves what many educators have already known.

“The study indicates that tests are meant to measure student performance and not teacher performance,” said school system public information officer R.D. Harter.

They say not only do merit pay increases not work, they're not fair either.

“It’s got to be more than test performance. It's got to be classroom management and all the many things that a teacher has got to do,” said Harter “In the Dougherty County School System our salaries are based on the state teacher salary scale and our teachers are paid based on the their educational level and experience.”

If you talk to administrators and teachers, they will say it's nice to have some extra cash. But the reason it doesn't work for improving scores is because that is not why they teach.

“Most teachers don't teach per se for the money. If we did a lot of us probably wouldn't be doing it. But we teach for the love of the children,” said 5th grade math teacher Stephen Davis.

Davis knows a little bit about high performing teachers. For the Dougherty County School System he is one of their best and their current teacher of the year.

“For a teacher to do better they would have to know how to do better and that doesn't always come with increases in pay,” said Davis.

Because when it is all said and done it's the students who have to take the tests.

“I don't think additional money in someone's pocket is going to help students learn material better,” said Davis.