I think that for understanding the recent political history of teacher compensation in the United States, the most important paper is “Taking Teacher Evaluation to Scale: The Effect of State Reforms on Achievement and Attainment” by Joshua Bleiberg, Eric Brunner, Erica Harbatkin, Matthew Kraft, and Matthew Springer. It studies how the Obama administration took advantage of the state/local budget crisis inflicted by the Great Recession to get money for a program they called Race to the Top, where the feds would give states grants for K-12 schools, but those grants do things like create performance-pay systems.