Wednesday, August 11, 2010 at 2:52PM The education revolution is finally here
This week Prime Minister Gillard announced a suite of radical policies that will do far more to improve student learning than any school hall or national curriculum ever could. Performance bonuses for teachers and schools; Teach Next, which moves passionate professionals into teaching careers; and an Australian Baccalaureate to complement state high school certificates. Combined with earlier initiatives such as the MySchool website which compares school performance and profiles across the country; and last week’s promise to hand more power back to principals and parents, we have a real revolution. Not just of schooling policy, but Labor policy.
These policies – quite rightly – overturn traditional Labor and teacher union platforms and demonstrate that the Gillard is willing move beyond traditional alliances and ideas to do what the evidence says is necessary (not that we were in doubt!)
Take performance pay, which rewards the best – not longest serving – teachers with a 10% salary bonus. Under Labor’s new performance framework, excellent teachers will be rewarded not only for student achievement, but also their contribution to the school community, support for colleagues, and involvement in extra curricular activities.
The policy responds to shocking findings by Melbourne’s own Grattan Institute that 91 per cent of teachers felt the best teachers in their schools did not receive the greatest recognition, and that only 8 percent said they’d receive any recognition if they improved their teaching. Indeed, OECD data shows that Australia was the fourth worst of 23 developed nations when it came to recognizing and rewarding effective teachers.
It’s a dysfunctional system. Our teachers – and students – deserve better.
For this reason, performance pay has many supporters, including the Australian Council of Educational Research, the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Primary Principals Association, which represents all school sectors.
Yet, the policy is opposed by teacher unions and old Labor ideologues because – shock horror – it recognizes that not all teachers are equal in their talent and dedication.
For instance, Angelo Gavrielatos, federal president of the Australian Education Union, condemned the scheme as ‘wrong’, ‘misguided’ and ‘bad’ without providing any evidence. He claims it will do nothing to address teacher shortages, willfully ignoring the complementary Teach Next policy and the fact many teachers leave when their enormous efforts receive little more than a pat on the back.
The policies are not new. Teacher bonuses are already being implemented in Victoria, and around the globe. ‘Teach Next’ type schemes have had great success in the UK and US, attracting excellent teachers, and raising the profile and esteem of this important vocation. And school-based-management, working well in Victoria nearly 20 years, has been repeatedly recognized by the OECD as a key attribute of the world’s top performing school systems.
But most are from the ‘too hard’ basket, fought against by the states (for some legitimate reasons) and by the teacher unions and ideologues (for generally illegitimate reasons.)
This is the very definition of revolutionary policy – progressing beyond old party lines and old rhetoric. Doing what works, rather than what is politically convenient. It’s certainly time.
Bronwyn Hinz
School of Social and Political Sciences and Melbourne Graduate School of Education
University of Melbourne
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Reader Comments (2)
It is important to acknowledge and reward good performance.
However research suggests that dollars is not the right approach.
See this video for more information: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Evidence of 'what works' is precisely the point at which Bronwyn's enthusiasm for the new order starts to encounter difficulties that cannot be fixed by labelling opponents as 'ideologues' or even worse, 'teacher unionists.'
In fact, there is considerable evidence that performance pay does not deliver what it claims to but can often have destructive effects. This evidence, some of which was cited by Leigh Sales on the ABC's Lateline last night when interviewing Chris Bowen, is in governance and management literature all too often ignored by education experts.
Advocates of performance pay tend to draw uncritically on the considerable Human Resource literature propounding its benefits, but this is based on problematic assessments combined with a priori assertions about how (monetary) 'incentives' generate better performance. Human motivations at work and around professionalism are considerably complex and generally better mobilised around intrinsics, rather than the crudest of extrinsic motivators - money - even assuming that generally flawed management systems manage to allocate it fairly.
Indeed, it is not just teacher unionists who act in perceived professional and industrial self interest. The pro performance pay literature is all too often linked to the HR profession's own interests in expanding the use of HR professionals to construct and service ever more complex pay and performance systems. Despite these problems, the literature advocating performance pay has been drawn on in a range of fields, education being one, as those grappling with complex problems of control, responsiveness and accountability search for simple clear management solutions.
In my experience, working as a representative of public sector scientists in the 1990s, the enthusiasm for performance pay proposals at that time (which fortunately came to nought) came almost exclusively from managers either concerned they were out of step with private sector practices, or genuinely feeling it was unfair that they could not 'reward' their best performers with serious money, with a small number of individuals who constructed their roles in a competitive frame also feeling frustrated at the inequity of being treated the same as marginal, lazy or poorly performing colleagues. Against that, most scientists feared the consequences of structuring the workplace even more around competition for money, but this time individualising it, rather than doing it around projects. In profit making organisations, performance pay can function to some degree as a merit-based form of profit sharing. Given limited funds available for salaries, performance pay in the public sector almost inevitably becomes a zero sum game, based on a redistribution of salary dollars upwards. Management culture, power and structures tend to valorise the work of those in management roles in ways that create increasing divergence between pay at the bottom and the top of organisations.
It is no coincidence that the expansion of performance pay systems across the UK and US over the last 30 years has happened at the same time as the development of tproblems with excessive CEO pay. Performance pay is closely linked to the change in norms which has allowed these disparities to develop to every increasing degrees, along with associated social and economic costs.
Within organisations, the heightened stakes around performance review are as likely to diminish as to improve performance for many - for example by increasing risk averse behaviours. For those organisations or governments who successfully institute (impose) performance pay, of course, the revolution only ever succeeds. In complex organisations where there are constantly changing work processes, technology, organisational structures, markets, and so forth, it is impossible to construct a credible counter-factual situation with which to compare the results and actually demonstrate whether performance pay in and of itself has improved performance. To my way of thinking, the things performance pay says about human behaviour, and the norms it promotes have proven destructive at many levels, and there needs to be a much more nuanced debate about the merits of such systems than the 'magic bullet' representation that we so often receive.