Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education 12:4 387±394, 1999 # 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston ± Manufactured in The Netherlands On Rewards, Punishments, and Possibilities: Teacher Compensation as an Instrument for Education Reform BETTY MALEN Department of Education Policy Planning and Administration, College of Education, University of Maryland± College Park Abstract This commentary is organized around three cross-cutting themes contained in the articles: assessing school based rewards, envisioning other promising possibilities, and evaluating policy as well as people. The discussion of these broad themes illustrates both the power and limits of policy initiatives, particularly in the area of monetary incentives or sanctions as vehicles for enhancing school performance. This special issue is a welcome addition to the literature on recurrent efforts to alter teacher compensation in ways that might enhance school performance. The articles assembled for this special issue examine recent efforts to implement school-based awards, identify other compensation options, and underscore the importance of evaluating the policies that impinge on schools as well as the persons who work in schools. The articles provide empirical evidence and conceptual insights that warrant attention, especially in a context characterized by clarion calls for ``results-based'' education reforms and fervent efforts to use various combinations of rewards and sanctions to ``leverage'' school improvement (Ladd, 1996). This commentary is organized around the three cross-cutting themes noted above. The ®rst section on school-based rewards receives the most attention because the majority of the articles in this volume address this topic. The second section on alternative compensation strategies and the third section on the importance of policy evaluation receive less attention, not because they are less important but because these topics are not as frequently or explicitly addressed in the articles that comprise this special issue. Assessing School-Based Rewards School-based rewards for improved performance are a prevalent but understudied policy option (Richards, Fishbein & Melville, 1993; Elmore, Abelman & Fuhrman, 1996). The three articles that address various aspects of school-based awards (this volume: Kelley; Heneman & Milanowski; and Milanowski) bring some data to bear on the topic and thereby make an empirical contribution to our understanding of this reform strategy.