There is an old adage about a “lie oft repeated..”
Commentary by way of editorial in the press over the last few days praises the federal government’s ‘teacher reward’ announcement and simultaneously denigrates teacher unions and slurs classroom teachers.
One opinion piece talked about “overseas experience….shows that competition between schools….help[s] transform the lives…of students”. Presumably the ‘competition’ for the top 10% of ranked teachers in Australia would do the same.
The only problem is that the international experience does not show this at all.
Fullan (University of Toronto) concluded in a recent review that ”performance-based merit pay is a non-starter”. Hammond-Darling (Stanford University) a recent visitor to Australia and some-time advisor to President Obama, said recent research in the US showed bonus payments for teachers lowered student performance in schools where a one-off bonus was paid.
Of course, the opinion pieces remind us that the persistent problem with education reform in this country are the unions. These unions are made up of several hundred thousand teachers.
Apparently it is only the teacher unions, and principals, that want to block this nonsense agenda. Which of course dismisses entirely the commentary by Australian and international education experts and researchers. It dismisses the decisions of US state authorities to overturn the implementation of these schemes because they didn’t work. It also ignores the concerns openly held by Australian school employer groups and State governments.
As for the apparently very generous sum of money on offer “from $5400 for new teachers to $8100 for the more experienced, is generous enough”: the money falls some $30,000 short of what the Business Council of Australia thought might be an appropriate rate; it is a one-off bonus and not a salary adjustment unlike the BCA model; and it is substantially less than the $13,000 differential for ‘excellence’ in standards-based industrial agreements that the IEUA is party to.
The fact that teachers through their union have actually negotiated agreements that recognize accomplished teaching and move away from the annual progression model also lays bare the falsity of the assertion that “the established system – favoured and entrenched for far too long by an old-fashioned education hierarchy and self-interested trade union chiefs – of having rigid pay scales and an incentive born of longevity”.
The reality is that employers and governments have shied away from doing anything about the incremental pay scale because of the enormous cost implications. But that reality doesn’t fit particularly neatly with a well-worn tirade against teachers’ unions.
Teacher unions have supported the development of teacher standards and recognition for accomplished teachers for over two decades. It was the union movement itself that sought to have recognition for ‘highly accomplished’ or ‘highly skilled’ teachers in the late 1980s and early 1990’s. It was a lack of commitment from governments, including a lack of commitment of funds, that has stalled this progress for twenty years.
Therefore it is a nonsense to say that “teacher unions would favour the initiative degenerating into an across-the-board pay rise for all teachers, not linked to performance”.
Perhaps most outrageous of all the comments were the pieces that inferred that classroom teachers are either not really trying hard enough, or that they are somehow holding back in their efforts to teach Australia’s students.
Comments like “merit bonuses will be a useful incentive to encourage teachers, on a daily basis, to go the extra mile for their students in order to promote greater achievement” or the comment that “best way to get the most out of our primary and secondary school teachers is to have a rigorous system of intelligent appraisal and assessment” are simply insulting.
Teachers already go, on a daily basis, many extra miles for their students. It denigrates the profession to suggest that a one-off bonus reward is what has been lacking in Australian schools.
And for the 90 per cent of teachers who wont be eligible, are they not trying hard enough? The notion of a quota is senseless. If the proposal had any merit at all, there would have been no quota assigned by the federal government and that ‘achievement’ itself would have been rewarded.
Perhaps what should have been asked in the various opinion pieces was ‘what is the problem that needs to be fixed?’ and then, ‘what evidence is there about things that actually work?’ Of course those are dangerous questions because the answers might require a genuine investment in this nation’s teaching profession, paid for by the Australian taxpayer.
Chris Watt
Federal Secretary