What a performance about paying teachers!

By Ian Keese

Posted Monday, 23 April 2007

  

The issue of “performance pay” for teachers has produced a lot of heat and very little light. While in general terms the debate exemplifies the dreadful waste of resources when a federal government tries to influence state-run schooling, at least one important issue has surfaced – the position of the mid-career teacher.

 

If you measured the performance of the Federal education ministry over the past few years under Brendan Nelson and Julie Bishop, there would have to be concern about the millions of dollars spent on bureaucrats, consultants and reports, as the Government has tried to impose its own political correctness on schools with pseudo-issues like flagpoles, A to E rankings on reports and chaplains in schools – and now on performance pay.

 

The Federal Ministry does not run one school or employ one teacher. Its only major functions in relation to schooling should be ensuring that equitable funding goes to public and private schools and supporting teacher training through its power over universities.

 

It is heartbreaking to think of the many ways these millions of dollars could have been spent on actually improving the educational experiences of students: improving the physical environment of public schools, providing more on-site experience to trainee teachers or more support in their first years of teaching, or providing post-graduate scholarships to experienced teachers.

 

The actual term “performance pay” belies the market place ideology. You can reward the performance of a car salesman who goes beyond his monthly quota (and whether he does this by honest or devious methods is irrelevant) but the “results” of a good teacher are individualistic and complex, and often it is the change they bring about in the “difficult” student that is most significant. And this is a change that is hidden by a focus on “top scores”.

 

The ideological bent was clear in Julie Bishop’s initial presentation of the proposal for performance pay where she managed to simultaneously attack public schools and promote work place agreements.

 

The Age on September 20, 2006 reported that “Ms Bishop warned of an exodus of young high-quality teachers to private schools which have already started to embrace performance-based pay”. From my experience teachers are in particular schools, whether public or private, more from their own convictions than from the pay they receive.

 

In the same article Ms Bishop said: “There are a range of options, from a bonus paid to salary packages, to teachers being employed under AWAs,” and when asked whether performance-based pay would be a condition of federal funding, she said, “Clearly that is an option”.

 

However, concealed in this debate is an issue that should be addressed. The salary of a classroom teacher in Australia reaches a plateau after nine years, with another 25 years ahead of teaching ahead of them. While there are a limited number of executive positions many of the best teachers choose to stay in the classroom and continue to develop their skills, knowledge and general classroom expertise.

 

Their daily face to face contact with children provides the heart and soul of teaching, and there should be a series of steps through which by the end of the second half of their teaching career they could acquire the status of a senior teacher, with a salary of the same order as the head of a subject faculty.

 

The Victorian Government has already introduced such a scheme with categories of accomplished and expert classroom teacher and leading teacher. In New South Wales the Quality Teaching Awards program run jointly since 2001 by the Australian College of Educators and the NSW Education Department and with the participation of the Teacher’s Union, provides an excellent basis for such a scheme.

 

The real stumbling block for governments of all persuasions, and for the governing bodies of private schools is that such a program would require real money – and this was a key feature lacking in Julie Bishop’s proposal.

 

This money could come from increasing our spending on public education from 3.6 per cent of GDP (2000 figures) to closer to 4 per cent (which would still be less than countries like New Zealand and Sweden) or transferring money from the bureaucracy in Canberra. The encouragement and support of the best teachers in a way that doesn’t devalue others would be worth every cent.

 

 

School’s out all summer

By Ian Keese

Posted Thursday, 17 May 2007

  

The immediate reaction by the media to the Coalition’s education budget statements was that the Coalition had seized the initiative on education from Labor. However closer inspection of its policies on schools, such as a Summer School for “leading teachers”, indicates it is an initiative that one can only hope does not come to fruition as it reveals the Government’s ignorance and arrogance as well as being a great misuse of taxpayer’s resources.

 

Working as an assessor in the Quality Teachers Awards Program in New South Wales, I have observed some of the best classroom teachers in Australia. Some of the dominant qualities are their love and deep knowledge of the subjects they teach, their genuine concern for and understanding of each of their student’s immediate and long term needs, and an outstanding personal integrity.

 

Their students say they want to achieve because they do not want to disappoint their teacher’s expectations of them.

 

These teachers have undertaken further studies in their own time and at their own expense. They have not needed bribes – like all good teachers (as well as nurses and welfare workers) they are driven by the intrinsic rewards of doing their job well and extrinsic motivation is far less relevant. A summer school would mean nothing to them. As Kevin Donnelly said in an article in The Australian on May 10, 2007:

 

Short-term professional development programs have little effect and common sense suggests that a better option would be to subsidise those willing to undertake postgraduate qualifications during an extended period.

 

The teachers the Government are considering for the course are already at the point where they are more than ready to assist in professional development of other teachers. What is needed now is the financial support in terms of time and space for these teachers to share their skills with others in the workplace itself, because they are the ideal people to do so, and the workplace is the situation where the immediate and direct benefits can be seen.

 

The Coalition’s combination of ignorance and arrogance comes from its re-interpreting of the role of the federal government. Federal intervention in schools began with the Liberal Menzies Government in the late 1960s providing financial support to Catholic schools and science education and developed further under the Whitlam Labor Government, where money was focused on professional development of teachers and disadvantaged schools.

 

The procedure of both of these governments involved identifying genuine needs in schools and then providing the resources directly to the State Education Departments to meet these needs.

 

For over 100 years, women and men with good will and tremendous energy have created state education systems which, while like all human institutions are far from perfect, are nevertheless among the best in the world.

 

Now the federal government is maintaining that, with its close to zero experience in school education, it knows far better how to run state education systems than the states do.

 

These are not the policies of a “conservative” government but a “revolutionary” government like that of Robespierre or Pol Pot, which wants to wipe out all the achievements of the past and restart the calendar from year zero.

 

To quote from Kevin Donnelly in the article mentioned above, linking acceptance of Coalition policies to funding “represents an overly bureaucratic, intrusive and centralised model of developing public policy”. By threatening government funding (and in a way that discriminates against public schools) the Prime Minister is acting as if all the money that flows into the Federal Treasury from the states is his own personal fiefdom.

 

With only six months before nominations for participants to the Summer School are to be called there are many unanswered questions. It is, for example, going to be interesting to see who are given the lucrative contracts to run these summer schools.

 

Perhaps a reasonable option would be a coalition of university Education Faculties, but if only one university is chosen, how far will that particular institution have to swallow Coalition ideology to get their pieces of silver? What role, if any, are teacher’s professional associations to play in this? How far will the course recognise that teachers are adult learners par excellence and that they will want to play a dominant role in what happens? What will teachers know about the course before they apply?

 

 

And finally the expense of the project is mind boggling. The $5,000 offered to individual teachers is nothing compared with the expense of bringing people from all over Australia, ten days of food and accommodation and the cost of contracting out the course.

 

On the government figures, over four years, $20 million will go to the individual teachers and $81 million will be eaten up in expenses. Is this an economically responsible government? However, the travel industry is sure to be very pleased with it.

Chaplains, would you believe? 

Just when one thought that the Federal Government’s Education policies could not be any more absurd, along comes a policy to spend $30 million a year for three years to pay for School Chaplains.

When historians of the future look back at the schools’ policies of the Federal Coalition Government over the past ten years, they will find few examples of any significant intellectual or practical contributions that the Government has made to education, with the biggest deficiency being in not doing anything significant about the educational needs of the socially disadvantaged. Instead there has been smoke and mirrors: flag poles, value statements, phoney ‘literacy debates’ and the crudest form of grading possible. There have been veiled and unveiled attacks on public schools (with Julie Bishops ‘Chairman Mao” comment being only the latest) and an unwillingness to act on what even the Government considered the unfair funding of the wealthiest private schools. None of these policies have been based on recognised research, but on picking ideas out of the air that suit the Government’s own form of political correctness.

In discussing the issue of Chaplains I recognise that for the majority of people, there is a meaning in the spiritual realm in whatever form it takes. I believe that those in the public sector who want secular education to be one free of any religious concerns are in effect doing public education a great disservice. One of the wonderful things about Public Schools is that students and teachers whose backgrounds might be Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist or Atheist are encouraged to share their views of the world.

Before looking at some of the specific problems of the Chaplains policy, it is worth pointing out that a commitment has been made to policy costing $90 million in total on the basis of a one page statement. To commit so much money without any evidence of clear thinking or empirical research shows extreme arrogance and carelessness in the use of what is essentially public money.

The most obvious criticism of the policy – and this could be the basis of Constitutional Challenge in the High Court –  is that it blatantly favours Private Schools (although some religious leaders have already expressed their concern about Governments vetting their religious appointment). It will favour “Single Faith” schools in particular, as well as those that claim a looser Christian ethos. I suspect that the more Fundamentalist schools might have some hesitation on the grounds of Government involvement, but $20,000 a year would be hard for them to turn down.

Why it favours Private over Public 

There are three reasons why this policy would favour Private schools and make it difficult for Public schools to acquire funding. Firstly many Private schools are likely to already have structures set up for a similar position, and with this now being funded, they are free to use the $20,000 for the position they already have and use the money they have saved in other areas of the school. One could argue that the policy specifies that the money would have to be used “to further enhance services already being provided” but any educator could use creative accounting to justify this.

Secondly Private religious schools (and this would include Islamic schools) will obviously find it far easier to find a person to meet the Government’s view of a “Chaplain” (and note how the word itself comes from the Christian tradition.) I cannot imagine many of these chaplains would be able to “offer general religious or personal advice … irrespective of their religious beliefs.” How likely is it that a Chaplain attached to the Sydney Anglican Community could offer impartial advice about ‘salvation’ to an Islamic student?

Finally, how would your local Multicultural, multi-religious Public School find a person to meet the Government’s criteria of a “Chaplain”? I can imagine there would be a person who could minister to Buddhist, Christian and Islamic students but I don’t imagine they would be easy to find, or they would be the type of person who meets the Government criteria.

 Why Public Schools should apply 

However I still belief that once the full criteria come out in December, every Public school should apply, for who better than the School Counsellor can carry out the aims of the program which is:

To assist school communities to support the spiritual wellbeing of their students, include strengthening values, provide greater pastoral care and enhance engagement with the broader community

This is exactly what every School Counsellor I have known does, and when the students’ problems have a component related to that student’s particular religious creed, the counsellor would know who to contact. This could mean that every school could have a counsellor four or five days a week, instead of two or three as in many situations. I hope every Public school does apply, and if the Government rejects their application makes public the stated reasons.

A cynical policy?

I feel such an ill-thought out (or cynically divisive?) policy could only come from people with little deep spiritual belief but a keen eye for its political value. However it is possible that it will not only alienate those who believe in the separation of Church and State, but its non-committal position would alienate people of various religious persuasions. It may be that the Prime Minister is really losing his touch on reality.

This article was originally published in Education, the Journal of the NSW Teachers Federation, Vol 87 No 12, , November 27 2006