Teacher’s pay and educational outcomes

Below is a guest post by Justin

In the past weeks education has become a political platform for our pollies. Kevin Rudd has proclaimed possibilities of a ‘revolution’ in educational reform should his ascendancy land him in the Prime Ministership at the end of the year. But this is nothing new. Over recent years, and particularly the past 12 months there has been heavy focus on educational reform and specifically, the creation of a national syllabus. It’s probably hard to argue against this. Indeed, logic almost demands that Australian students should be taught the same things to the same level across the nation. And in some subjects, such as chemistry and physics, states share around a 90% overlap in course content; a commendable consistency. Yet subjects such as history, English and other humanity-oriented subjects often share less than 40% in common. Clearly Julie Bishop is intent on remedying this. However, she is meeting stiff opposition from the states. 

I was particularly interested to read her comments in the Australian on Friday Feb. 2, 2007. The first comment that struck me was this:

“The quality of our teachers is critical. After parents, teachers are the most important determinant in educational outcomes for school students. Our teachers are a precious national resource. They should be respected and rewarded for their significant role in educating our children.”

To that comment I add my applause. However, Ms Bishop then went on to suggest,

 “But like other professionals they deserve career incentives. That is why I am developing options for greater consistency in professional development for teachers as well as calling on the states to provide higher salaries, with an element of performance or merit-based pay and greater workplace flexibility. For example, we should be rewarding teachers who work in our most disadvantaged schools and achieve outstanding results, or specialist teachers such as in science or maths.”

And how, Ms Bishop, do we measure the performance of teachers in order to best incentivise them? One would imagine it would be based on the outcomes of the students. And student outcomes are measured in one way only. Grades.  You see, grades are a tangible outcome, whereas learning is not. We can’t measure learning except insofar as test performance indicates it has occurred. 

This slippery slope leads to some severe possibilities. Firstly, if my pay were based on a student performing well from a grade point of view, you can be assured I would set a test I know that they can complete. They’ll all get A’s, I’ll get my pay, and the students’ education is dumbed down further. Their actual learning is undermined. Or try this. We introduce standardised testing so all students must be able to perform to an agreed upon standard. Indeed, purely because they’re standardised, these tests are widely regarded as objective instruments for assessing children’s academic performance.  But there is considerable reason to believe that standardised tests are a poor measure of intellectual proficiency. They are, however, excellent indicators of two things. The first is affluence. Up to 90 percent of the difference in scores among schools, communities, or even states can be accounted for, statistically, without knowing anything about what happened in the classroom. All you need are some fact about the average income and education levels of the students’ parents. The second phenomenon that standardised tests measure is how skillful a group of students is at taking such tests – and, increasingly, how much class time has been given over to preparing them to do just that. 

There is specific research that finds a statistically significant positive relationship between a shallow or superficial approach to learning, on the one hand, and high scores on various standardised tests, on the other. I could go on and provide more reasons for my opposition to standardised testing, but ultimately that’s not the point of this post.  

I simply posit the following:  Firstly, a national curriculum is very much in the interests of our children, particularly with the claims that education is the driver of our nations’ economic prosperity.  

Secondly, providing merit pay, or incentive systems, to teachers (or for that matter any profession) is simply the worst way to obtain quality results. It’s a great quick-fix, but for genuine positive outcomes and intrinsically motivated staff, it is a powerful disincentive to do things the right way. Your thoughts?