Such schemes aim to create a direct link between teacher pay and student achievement. Education reformists argue they incentivise teachers to try harder and perform better and therefore improve educational outcomes.
NSW Premier Dominic Perrotett’s recent comments around the “need to modernise the [teaching] profession” calls for the introduction of a performance pay scheme to reward “those teachers who excel and drive better results for our kids”.
Performance pay schemes for teachers is not a new idea. Such schemes have been popularly used in the US in recent decades, for example. While the forms of administration may differ across schooling systems – such as rewarding all teachers in a school based on aggregate academic achievement or individual teachers for their students’ tests scores – the logic is the same.
The concept of performance pay is based on a business model which links increased worker productivity to higher rewards. While a single-salary schedule is usually based on objective measures like qualifications and experience, a performance pay scheme is based on more subjective measures and gives attention to the quality of teachers’ work. Higher-performing teachers theoretically receive higher rewards.
Proponents of performance pay schemes argue they work to motivate teachers and improve teacher quality. They are also perceived as fairer because they reward those considered high-performing.
But despite the rhetoric of the purported benefits of performance pay schemes, the assumption that incentives will make teachers work harder and more effectively isn’t supported by the evidence.
Of the evaluations undertaken of performance pay for teachers, the picture painted of the effectiveness of such schemes isn’t positive. In fact, most performance schemes have shown not to improve teacher performance nor student outcomes.
There are concerns that performance pay schemes will also create unintended consequences. It may lead to teachers focusing only on tested outcomes, ‘teaching to the test’, focusing on a group of students near a particular assessment threshold, or, in serious cases, cheating.
For example, in Atlanta’s (US) recent ‘school cheating scandal’, a court found that teachers and school administrators artificially inflated students’ standardised test scores under pressure to meet certain targets.
Teaching, at its heart, is a collegiate profession. A competitive environment may negatively impact teacher morale, trust and collegiality, and contribute to stress.
It is also not clear how to measure teachers’ productivity. The learning environments that teachers work in are also highly complex with students’ having different learning needs and abilities and different levels of privilege. A level playing field to measure and compare performance just isn’t possible.
The idea of performance pay proposed by the NSW Premier is a distraction from the real crisis at hand.
Outside of the ‘business world’, the idea of paying teachers more for higher productivity doesn’t necessarily hold. But such market-driven ideas remain popular in education.
Accountability for students’ test scores has become a cornerstone of education policy in recent decades. Proponents argue that if we manage schools like private businesses and reward only those teachers that improve student outcomes that teacher quality will improve and students will learn more.
But such policies are overly simplistic and in fact detrimental.
We currently have a crisis in the teaching profession in New South Wales. Teacher workloads are unsustainable with research showing teachers work on average 55 hours per week. Most teachers feel that administrative demands are negatively impacting their core work of teaching.
There is a decline in the relative position of teacher salaries compared to other professions. The public sector wages cap contributes to these stagnating salaries. There is a worsening teacher shortage in the state that is compounding workload pressures. Meanwhile, poor professional status means fewer students are selecting teaching as a career of choice.
There is clear and compelling evidence on how to address the crisis and make teaching an attractive and valued profession. The idea of performance pay proposed by the Premier is a distraction from the real crisis at hand and appears to be yet another example of misguided education reform that fails to listen to the needs of educators.
Addressing the urgent teaching crisis requires meaningful solutions – reducing face-to-face teaching time to give teachers the time to prepare quality lessons and to collaborate with others, reducing unnecessary administrative burdens, recognising the valuable role of teachers in school communities, increasing teacher salaries to ensure they are competitive, and enhancing the status of teaching to attract graduates into the profession.
