There is undoubtedly a problem of bad teachers, and I think something should be done about it. I don’t think that “thing” should be performance-based pay, because I believe that would undermine the collegiality of the job. Competition is generally a good motivator in life, but one must allow that there are exceptions to this rule, and there are times when collaboration is important. Collaboration is very important in teaching.

What should be done? Principals of all schools should have the power to hire and fire. It’s disgusting how difficult it is to get rid of a bad teacher. And the motivation to do so is limited, because they could be just replaced with another lemon.

Bad teachers are a detriment not only to their students; they damage staff morale as well, which becomes a detriment to all teachers and students at the school.

Now, there aren’t enough teachers out there that a lot of sackings would occur. It’s just important, I believe, that teachers have that level of accountability.

In short, merit pay might be the best thing ever invented, but I don’t think so. Try some other reforms first: they’re easier to implement and in my opinion are more likely to have a beneficial effect.

As students we are forced to look at a massive amount of readings like this in the curriculum units I am doing and to be honest as a primary teacher I can’t see the relevance of it. If we want better performing teachers coming into the profession then honestly we need our universities to train them better! Next year I will be teaching and I am already feeling pretty angry about the poor training my course has given me so far.

Just my 2 cents.

Sport’s not part of education?

That’s an interesting question, Rob.

I used to have an office next to the guy who headed up Health and Physical Education for the state. School sport was one of the bains of his life. It tended to be run by enthusiastic sporty teachers who put in heaps of time and enthusiasm. But often their efforts worked against the aims of the PE curriculum.

In brief, too much specialisation and too much competition too early.

Also the School Sports Council, which was run by a guy I went to school with and a VG sprinter, had better access to the minister’s office than my colleague who although much more senior was buried under three layers of bureaucracy.

Roy Morgan has just done a poll on the image of the professions.

78% of people over 14 rate teachers as “high” or “very high” on ethics and honesty. They are just below nurses, pharmacists and doctors. Also they have improved from 54% in 1979.

State and federal pollies are on 16 and 17%, just ahead of union leaders, journalists, insurance brokers, advertising people, and estate agents with car salesmen bringing up the rear. They’ve pretty much marked time since 1979.

So we have scummy pollies and media types taking down well-regarded teachers.

Aulich said parents were pretty happy overall with what teachers are doing. They’d want to see schools better resourced and teachers better supported, yes, and paid better too.

He said that new teachers are isolated in an environment where others are ostensibly coping. He’d like to see them on a half teaching load while they sorted themselves out with lots of mentoring and an opportunity to compare notes.

Lomax-Smith said they already had a merit pay system in their Advanced Skills Teacher scheme. She’d listen to the feds, she said, if they had improvements to offer, but not a scheme that was based on unworkable and untried principles, or where they had been tried they’d failed.

Both were very articulate and disinclined to cop any old rubbish that’s handed out.

people on this thread who’ve seen the inside of a secondary classroom from a teacher’s perspective are PC and me

Nope, not me either, SL — just 20 years of tertiary (a different set of intractables and imponderables) plus several close friends and a sister in and out of primary and secondary teaching over many years. Enough for me to have an idea how hard they work and what they’re up against.

But I’m not sure why people are suddenly being challenged to prove their cred anyway. However depressing the fact may be, I don’t think it can be denied that many more people are taking (or wanting to take) the private school option than used to be the case, but I’d also argue that that’s a direct result of the Howard government talking state education down and being shamelessly partisan about directing federal education funding towards private schools. It’s very hard to keep up standards when the federal government is openly making it impossible.

I’ve seen people on this very blog seriously arguing that if you send your kids to a state school you’re ’sending a message’ that you don’t really care about them. Ten years ago such a remark would have been unthinkable. That climate of opinion didn’t just grow by itself.

wpd, my question was whether you support giving principals the power to hire and fire staff.

What does this mean, exactly, though? In Queensland now interviews for teachers are conducted at school level and teachers are graded initially for their suitability for working for Ed Qld by the principal and supervising teacher of their final prac school. And principals would have a role in recommending termination. I don’t see why there’s this fetish for schools to be some sort of mini-enterprise. Any large organisation (and education departments are very large) wants some consistency in recruitment (remember - what we’re talking about is standards!) and also follows good HR practice which recognises that decisions on personnel matters are not just for the immediate supervisor, because that person might have biases, personal issues, etc. It’s just a matter of being fair to people and having consistent HR policies - again, as I say, no different from 99% of large private sector employers. The latter point is also why subjective perceptions shouldn’t be the determinant of performance pay.

One possibility would be to pay higher wages at disadvantaged schools.

Labor Party policy. But unlike the government, the ALP is promising the commonwealth will come through with the dosh.

PC, when I say my performance can’t be quantified, it means there are no numbers at the end of the year which directly measure performance. There is, however, a pretty clear impression of how well I performed my duties, and senior management uses these impressions when deciding on bonuses and pay rises.

It’s not perfect a perfect system and certainly open to abuse. I think think there’s a general understanding in schools as to who the good teachers are. It would be nice if the principal could reward these people, even if some people are treated unfairly.
Obviously a system which quantified performance would be better but as I’ve conceded several times there are issues here to.

One possibility would be to pay higher wages at disadvantaged schools. At the very least it would give the principal more options when choosing staff.

“My views are therefore anecdotal, but shaped by experience.”

Very limited experience I would suggest, despite her protestations. The sooner she gives up as ‘judge and jury’ and inflammatory comments like, “people are deserting the public sector in drovesâ€?, a reasonable debate might be had.

We have a pretty reasonable secondary education system despite so much money being drawn off to support independent schools.

But my question remains a valid one. If one of the desired consequences of performance pay is to weed out ineffectual teachers, then it behooves us to know a) how you can reliably measure teaching effectiveness, b) to what extent is it a problem, and c) if the solution is commensurate with the problem.

I suspect that what is being offered by Bishop is an over-reaction to a conflation of a number of issues with a silver bullet solution. This is after ten years of neglect by the Howard Government (like so many other policy areas of critical importance). The education solution for the future? A low-budget impact item – a national curriculum, standardised testing and reports and performance pay for teachers, when the sector is crying out for resource to meet the demands that students, parents, tabloid journalists and shock-jock shills and politicians place upon it. If this is all they can manage, then public education may well be more stifled and crippled as a result.

I was a teacher for many years. I was also a parent with children in public and private schools, a union researcher, a private secretary to an education minister, a university lecturer for seven years.

I think I can see it from a number of perspectives.

“Those who are assessed as being more skilled — their performance is better than others — would have a salary increase. Those who would not be so assessed would be paid less.� [My bold]

Yet she denied that this amounted to cutting wages.

“I’m not talking about pay cuts. I’m talking about a differential in salaries,� she said.

I guess what the linked AGE article failed to do was to make clear exactly what Bishop meant by “would be paid less”.
Does that mean a pay cut?
Or does it mean less in comparison with the uber-pedagogues who will now be paid more?

Seems she wanted to imply the latter, but still claiming that the pay budget would remain static. Which is impossible.

Obviously, this ambiguity has arisen from Julie’s poor command of english. Tsk.

From what I can gather, the only people on this thread who’ve seen the inside of a secondary classroom from a teacher’s perspective are PC and me. I was very careful to frame my comments as derived from experience, as has PC in her various education posts over the years, so it is not necessary to repeat a point I have already made and am happy to concede. I do not wish to use the ’s’ word, but that is what you are doing. If you are unwilling to engage with informed views that happen to diverge from your own, that is your look-out.

At first I was aghast, but I have to admit it was a much better teaching (and learning) environment.

A particular and peculiar view of what teaching and learning is all about. At least in the Australian context.

Sums up your arguments perfectly.

Does anyone know of any actual figures for percentage of poor or ineffectual teachers? I would think it prudent to know that first. If, for the sake of argument, 10% of teachers were bad, possible solutions would be different from the situation where 40% were bad.

As far as pay is concerned, if the percentage of bad teachers is small, across the board pay rises may well suffice to attract better competition. But of course, the real problem is that Australia will be 30,000 teachers short within 3 years and will be obliged to accept what we can get. Viable solutions are bound to involve far greater investment in teacher training, teachers, and schools.

I browsed the OzPolitics blogfeed earlier this evening and didn’t pick up anything on Bishop’s admission, so I went ahead and posted my own. And now I discover this great thread here! So it goes.

Only in Italy did I see a system that just shrugged its collective shoulders and abandoned them to the consequences of their choices. At first I was aghast, but I have to admit it was a much better teaching (and learning) environment.

No system can afford to sustain those numbers without serious questions being asked.

But are the questions being asked serious, SL? I don’t know that the ones asked in political debate are at all. Last year the Ministerial confected crisis noise machine was going on about curricula, this year it’s all the fault of teachers…

In fact, one reason for the growth in private school numbers under the Howard government has been the fact that it’s become much easier to open small religious private schools. The shift to them might indicate that people from Protestant sects, Islamic and Jewish backgrounds, Pentecostals, etc., are now being catered for within the private school sector which was formerly dominated (in terms of religious schools) by Catholic schools and posh Anglican and Uniting Church ones. It doesn’t necessarily (for instance) indicate anything at all about the quality of teaching in state schools.

A lot of stuff is conflated in a lot of these debates.

I see it was too much to expect some people to read long comments. I should have known better.

And I wouldn’t go ticking other people off for not having read things; you obviously haven’t read the post of mine that Kim linked to in her original post here, either, but it hasn’t stopped you from ticking me off for being a fool for ideology. Ticking-off seems to be something you’re quite good at, in fact; is that what you do for a living? It would certainly explain the performance pay.

Quantification is not the only way to manage performance pay. It’s pretty much impossible to quantity how well I’m doing my job, but I still get performance pay.

If it’s impossible to quantify, how can there possibly be a sound basis to give it? If it can’t be measured, what is the criterion? Secret ballot? Friends in high places? The Merit Fairy?

Discretion is the key.

What, like ‘Sshh, don’t tell the others’?

And that’s still nearly 4% in (I’m presuming from your comment) roughly 10 years. No system can afford to sustain those numbers without serious questions being asked.