John MacDonald: Why is performance pay such a no-no for teachers?

Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

You won’t get me tooting for the striking high school teachers.

Because I don’t think they’re reading the room at all. On the picket lines, unhappy that they've been offered a 3% increase over three years.

And this is nothing to do with the kids not being able to go to school today, because high school kids don’t need babysitting. They can just stay at home and work on their assignments, or go to the mall, or go into town.

The reason I think the teachers are going to find it difficult to get a lot of love today is because I think most people are like me and don’t think that every single teacher signed up to the union deserves a pay rise.

And think that a teacher’s pay should be based on their individual performance in the job.

I reckon plenty of teachers feel that way privately, as well. Yes, they might want to earn a bit more themselves, but I bet you there is no shortage of teachers who think some of their colleagues aren’t up to it.

Who think some of their colleagues don’t deserve to be recognised with a pay rise.

But that’s the system as it is at the moment in the state school sector – pay rises for everyone.

Once up on a time, I probably would have been happy with that one-size-fits-all approach, but what good is a mind if you can’t change it? And I have.

I think, like pretty much every other worker in society, teachers’ pay should be based on how well they do their job. Whenever performance pay for teachers is discussed, questions about measuring performance are raised.

But, at a time where everything can be analysed to the nth degree, I’m pretty confident that we could come up with a robust system to evaluate and measure an individual teacher’s performance.

Hard-liners would probably say that it could or should be down to test results and exam results and nothing else. But I think that would be too simplistic.

Yes, results would have to part of it, but not the only things measured.

For example, how would you measure the performance of a teacher who might have several kids in their class who need specific support? They might be neuro-diverse, or they might have learning difficulties because of things like foetal alcohol syndrome.

That’s where parent feedback would come into it.

Because while a student with learning difficulties might not score highly in all these tests and things the Government is bringing-in, their parents would notice whether they were engaged in school or not.

You imagine a parent saying to a principal that their child has never been so enthusiastic about learning and how much they love their teacher – there’s a performance measurement right there.

But it is ironic, isn’t it, that teachers are busy evaluating and marking the kids on their performances, but no one measures or evaluates theirs.

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