Opinion & Commentary
Reward key in educator quality equation
In almost every profession, people who are good at their job are paid more. This makes perfect sense as it helps to keep good people in their jobs and it is an incentive to work hard.
In the teaching profession, hard work is not rewarded with higher salaries. Instead, teachers get a small salary increase each year for the first 10 years they are in the classroom.
Only a tiny proportion of teachers are ever denied their pay rise. The upshot is that poor teachers are paid more than they should and good teachers paid less than they deserve.
After 10 years, if a teacher wants to earn more, they have to accept extra responsibilities that take them out of the classroom. It is easy to see how this policy is counterproductive to quality teaching and teacher retention -- both of which are high on the national educational agenda.
Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop last week broached the idea of merit pay, proposing a Federal Government-funded "incentive fund" to reward high-achieving teachers. Predictably, the Australian Education Union was outraged. Even though the minister's idea is more carrot than stick, teacher unions will not consider any policy that would differentiate between teachers. For them it's solidarity or bust.
Of course, arguments by teachers' unions against merit pay are not framed in that way. They claim it is impossible to judge teacher quality because there are too many factors involved, not least those pesky students.
There has been a tendency to view students as beyond the direct influence of teachers and therefore to exclude them from the teacher quality equation.
The US National Board for Professional Teaching Standards provides teacher certification based on teaching methods and evaluations by colleagues. Even though there is no student learning component, NBPTS qualifications are recognised in every US state and are rewarded with salary bonuses and increases of up to $6000.
Lawrence Ingvarson at the Australian Council for Educational Research has written a report for our national teaching institute, Teaching Australia, recommending a similar credential. It would extend the teacher pay scale to reward long-serving teachers who excel in their field. The scheme would recognise professional development and performance in the classroom. Taking results into account would, however, be "problematic".
But is quality teaching what a teacher says and does in the classroom? Or is it how much their students learn?
US researchers Gary Fenstermacher and Virginia Richardson describe these as the "task" and "achievement" aspects of teaching and argue that evaluation of teacher quality should consider both. They write that "at some point we must give up saying that we are involved in teaching if no learning ever follows from our actions". Teaching and learning are interdependent.
This is why any merit pay scheme must include some measure of student performance. The American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence's fledgling Master Teacher program is one such scheme. Developed in response to a small but growing number of school districts in the US that are embracing the idea of merit pay, the ABCTE program certifies teachers that demonstrate high levels of mastery of their subject and can show significant gains in student learning.
The key part of this is student gains or "value-adding". Teachers with high-performing students are not advantaged because the emphasis is on how much students have learnt over time, not one-off test scores.
Meantime, it is not necessary for governments, either state or federal, to devise new pay schedules for all teachers. There is no need for a confrontation with teachers' unions or changes to industrial regulations. Merit pay schemes need not even be system-wide, but can be voluntary. Schools or individual teachers could opt-in to be eligible for the financial and professional rewards of being identified as a quality teacher. Their union "representatives" should get out of the way.
Jennifer Buckingham is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
