Merit-Pay for Australian Teachers
Government Introduces Performance-based Salaries for Educators
The Australian Commonwealth Government seems determined to push the concept of payment for results into the nation’s schools. It claims that this is the key to attracting, developing and retaining excellent teachers. Would the move really improve the education of children?
The Federal Minister for Education, Julie Bishop, has put the concept on a pedestal as the great hope for transforming schools through quality teaching. She is fond of stressing that “teacher quality is the most important single school-based factor in improving student learning.”
Recent reports indicate that she proposes several other criteria for deciding which teachers to reward: ranking of teachers by their peers; ratings by students and parents; the teacher’s contribution to the general life of the school; and attainment of relevant academic and professional standards, including continuing professional development. But in all her statements children’s academic results receive the main emphasis.
The Bishop plan raises many complex issues. To begin with, her own Treasurer, Peter Costello, has announced that he will not allow payment of teachers from federal funds. That means that all the salary increases would have to be covered by the States, and so she must win their support if the idea is to be put into practice.
Another crucial point is that rewarding some “excellent” teachers will not ensure that every child has an excellent teacher. How will that raise the general quality of Australian education? And what percentage of the teaching force will be rewarded? Anecdotes circulating in the public arena suggest that in the USA the various merit-pay schemes have rewarded very few teachers and in some cases the bonus has been as low as an insulting $15.
Objectors to the Bishop plan have disputed her assertion that students’ test-results are good indicators of a teacher’s quality. Even Lawrence Ingvarson – whose research the Federal Government commissioned and claims as support for the plan – has now made it clear that students’ results cannot be used as an independent measure of a teacher’s merit. He says much more work is necessary to develop valid, reliable ways of measuring the quality of teaching.
The notion of assessing a teacher on the basis of ratings by students and their parents has sent shivers down the spines of many educators. Would teachers be tempted to submit to unreasonable expectations of youngsters or to bullying by parents in return for higher ratings? Would more malicious students gang up to give poisonous ratings to any teacher whom they could not twist around their little fingers?
Even if we could be confident of goodwill among all children and parents, how would education authorities impart to them the understanding and expertise necessary to know how to compare the particular teacher with all other teachers in the State? Unless this is done, surely any attempt to use students and parents as accurate assessors of teaching quality must fail.
So far the spotlight of the debate has been on raising teaching quality in the areas of literacy, numeracy and science. (Maybe history could be added, in view of Bishop’s stated enthusiasm for giving it higher curricular status.) The Commonwealth Government apparently is confident that tests are available to measure all the desirable attainment in these domains. That could be debated at length.
The sleeping question is: How does Julie Bishop intend to test students’ attainment in other learning areas? Consider physical education, technical studies, languages other than English, music, dance, drama, and the visual arts in which standardised testing is rare or unknown. Does she intend to somehow develop valid standardised measures for the skills of singing, soccer and soliloquising?
Much more careful research and public discussion is necessary before considering the Bishop plan further.
