Teacher bonus pay won't help students, educators warn

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This was published 12 years ago

Teacher bonus pay won't help students, educators warn

By Anna Patty

EDUCATION leaders fear federal government plans to deliver high-performing teachers a one-off bonus of up to $8100 after the next election will divide the profession and do nothing to raise student performance.

Professor Brian Caldwell, a former dean of education and now professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne, said the government's scheme - which aims to reward one in 10 teachers - was impossible to deliver by 2014.

The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, at Turner Primary School in Canberra.

The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, at Turner Primary School in Canberra.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, yesterday committed that next week's federal budget would contain $425 million for the plan, announced before the federal election.

Professor Caldwell said the government had no clear plan for how it would evaluate teachers and the national teacher training authority had set out more than 100 standards.

''Getting valid reliable evidence on more than 100 standards on 250,000 teachers by 2013 will be no more than a tick-a-box exercise which could lead to a class action lawsuit against the allocation of those funds,'' Professor Caldwell said. ''I am not aware of any national system of education that has successfully implemented such a bonus pay scheme for teachers. There is no evidence they have any impact on improving [student] learning.''

Professor Caldwell said it was inappropriate to use NAPLAN test scores for literacy and numeracy to evaluate music, history and art teachers.

Simon Marginson, Professor of Higher Education and Australian Professorial Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne, said the bonus-pay system would encourage a ''two-speed school system''.

He said Australia would do better to follow the example of Finland which has invested in raising the status of the entire teaching profession. In Finland, teachers are educated to masters level after achieving higher university cut-off scores than are required to study medicine.

Dr John De Courcey, the former NSW president of the Australian College of Educators, said the use of tests like NAPLAN for high-stakes outcomes such as salary increases ''detracts from the usefulness of the tests for helping students to learn''.

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''Teachers should be paid more because of the complexity task that they undertake. Dumbing down the task to just a test score is where the damage is done,'' he said.

Ben Jensen from the Grattan Institute said the government had taken a well-rounded approach by including lesson observations, parental feedback and teacher qualifications in the mix of what it would evaluate in awarding teacher pay bonuses.

''The crux of whether this will be successful or not is whether … it will promote or negate constructive feedback for teachers … based on a comprehensive appraisal of their work,'' he said.

The NSW Minister for Education, Adrian Piccoli, said using NAPLAN results as part of a system of rewarding teachers would skew the results.

''It's disappointing the NSW government hasn't been consulted about this, considering the Commonwealth doesn't employ any school teachers,'' he said.

''There is no strategic approach to this. Surely we can do a much better job than what looks like a very one-dimensional approach to teachers.''

Linda Darling-Hammond, Professor of Education at Stanford University in the US, said a growing body of research had shown bonus pay was unsuccessful in raising student achievement and undermined teacher collegiality.

The Minister for Education, Peter Garrett, said he was confident a system of evaluating teachers could be developed by the end of next year.

''Clearly NAPLAN can be taken into account. Any school-based measure of school based assessment must be considered a meaningful measure and that's what NAPLAN is,'' he said.

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