School reform efforts in the United States have increasingly come to focus on the identification, recruitment, motivation, and retention of highly effective teachers. This renewed emphasis on teaching and the teaching profession came to national awareness when, in 2009, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced it was phasing out its large investment in small high schools, and instead turning its attention toward teacher quality. 1 President Obama has also indicated a strong desire to improve teacher quality in the public schools, mostly through reforming teacher compensation. In a March 10, 2009 speech, for example, he stated: "It's time to start rewarding good teachers, [and] stop making excuses for bad ones" ( New York Daily News 2009). On July 24, 2009 he went further, adding that rewards should be based on test scores: "Success should be measured by results,,,That's why any state that makes it unlawful to link student progress to teacher evaluations will have to change its ways." 2 School districts have long paid teachers according to the "single salary" schedule, a fixed pay schedule based primarily on education and years of experience. A new conventional wisdom among education reformers has emerged suggesting that this system is outmoded (Hassel 2002; Solmon 2005; Vigdor 2008). The traditional system, reformers argue, fails to attract our best college graduates into teaching and provides practicing teachers no incentives to produce results. In response, a number of states and school districts have begun experimenting with "pay-for-performance" plans, where teachers are compensated at least in