Incentives for Teachers

29 August 2006, 11:17am

24 August, 2006

Letter to Dr Craig Emerson

Dear Dr Emerson,

I refer to your recent comments in the media in relation to ‘incentives for teachers' (The Australian 21 August and ABC Radio Canberra).

The IEU welcomes your comments in support of the teaching profession and your indication of desire to promote and recognize the value of the profession.

The IEU, nationally and at a state and territory level through its branches, has been attempting to have thoughtful discussions with employers and governments about recognising highly skilled teachers for almost twenty years"

Despite some progress and some initial starts, the hopes of teachers in this regard have been largely unfulfilled.

Importantly however, the IEU rejects the simplistic notion that recognition of highly skilled teachers or ‘high performing teachers' should be part of some discretionary expenditure package available to the school principal. There is no doubt that, in the absence of an objective process, ‘grace and favour' would be the dominant characteristic of such a scheme. Indeed international experience has already shown this to be the case.

For example a report by Murnane and Cohen (1986) found that:

This "evaluation problem" is further complicated by the fact that schools have goals other than cognitive achievement (e.g. promoting citizenship, fostering individual development and reducing drug use and violence) that are difficult to measure and often only achieved jointly through teacher cooperation. In other words, according to this line of reasoning, the diverse nature of educational outputs and the "imprecise" nature of effective teaching imply that it is infeasible to reward the isolated contributions of individual teachers.

These concerns also suggest that the capricious results of most attempts to reward meritorious teachers could have perverse consequences. Merit pay systems may distort the incentives for a variety of relevant teacher behaviors (e.g. cooperation, effort and retention) as well as foster a demoralizing and unproductive work environment.

Commentators such as Marie Gryphon, an education policy analyst with the US Cato Institute describes the idea of a ‘discretionary principal's payment' this way:
On the other hand, capping awards would invite administrators to hand out the bonuses to their favorites. It would be ironic, but not unlikely, if merit pay became another opportunity for political patronage.

Richard Rothstein in an essay in the American School Board Journal, School Spending 2000, provides a reflection on the administrative requirements that need to be considered and genuinely addressed that are particularly pertinent to any notion of a ‘discretionary principal's payment':
The evaluations needed to support a merit pay system in education are inconceivable with schools' currently weak administrative structures. Of course, many politicians and business leaders who advocate merit pay for education also denounce what they regard as schools' excessive administrative spending. Yet the reality is that teachers are the most undersupervised professionals in the nation.

Repeatedly, ‘performance' or ‘merit' pay schemes have failed in the US and invariably resentment over pay differences has been an issue. For example the Oregon School Boards Association in an online publication this year, concluded that experience of performance or merit pay schemes where the focus was on individual teachers, caused competition and "this practice actually undermined - and almost destroyed - the staff teamwork needed in schools."

Equally a teacher recognition scheme should not be about popularity contests. Where industrial agreements in almost all Australian states and territories, already make some provision for a recognition of highly skilled teachers, they most certainly are not centred on student results and ‘favourite teacher' rankings.

It is also worth noting in any consideration of a model for recognizing highly skilled teachers that a Harvard Business School survey of business compensation experts, as reported in the American School Board Journal (2000), found that when "quality of work is important, corporations do not generally evaluate professional employees by quantifiable goals, such as test scores. And private sector pay-for-performance plans more frequently use team incentives, not individual ones".

One of the difficulties that teachers and their unions have faced in advancing consideration of a professional, objective and valid model is the lack of preparedness of government and employers to commit the substantial resources, including financial, to have an authentic system.

What is required at this time is the development of an integrated career structure for teachers that reflects the work currently underway in Australia around highly accomplished teacher standards and that understands the need for a substantial commitment of resources by employers and governments.

The IEU would welcome an opportunity to explore the current debate and opportunities in relation to recognition of highly skilled teachers.

Yours sincerely

Dick Shearman
Federal President

cc Ms Jenny Macklin, Shadow Minister for Education, Training, Science & Research

Contact details

Chris Watt
Assistant Federal Secretary
Ph: 03 92541830
Fax: 03 92541835
cwatt@ieu.org.au