[fnordpiglet]

Does standardized test score outcomes measure this behavior or does it favor teachers who teach test taking and have less challenging demographics in their classroom?

Performance based pay in professions whose performance is difficult to measure directly leads to bizarre outcomes. I’m not disagreeing in general but I’ve seen this again and again in my career, and I spent a long time on Wall Street where bonuses -really- matter. That extreme brought out the extremes in how incentive pay distorts behaviors in unexpected and undesirable ways, which gets worse the further you get from a directly measurable outcome like PNL.

As a parallel example, hospitals who specialize in extremely difficult diseases with high fatality rates generally have abysmal patient outcome metrics over hospitals that punt anything complex to a specialty hospital. This plays out in policy spaces punishing the speciality hospitals despite the fact they are well known to be top of the industry in terms of performance and “extra effort.” Nominally though they should be shut down by all metrics.

This absolutely plays out in education. Not every classroom or school or district is equivalent in terms of the challenges they deal with. A teacher with a very challenged class who is a high performer and puts in extra efforts will be punished simply because their baseline was much lower than a teacher who punches the clock in a class of affluent students who have private tutors.