Yes – performance pay is coming

John Hartevelt at Stuff reports:

Performance pay for teachers will be developed by the Government, with secondary principals told by Education Minister Hekia Parata to start “sorting the wheat from the chaff”.

Figures obtained by The Dominion Post show millions of dollars are already being paid to scores of secondary principals partly on a performance basis, but Ms Parata has revealed she is “very keen” to develop performance measures for teachers and start rewarding them accordingly.

The choice of rewards for quality teachers were “pretty obvious,” she said.

“Whether it’s promotion, pay, opportunities to attend conferences or representative roles, or whatever – there are a mix of rewards that I think would be reasonably easy to settle on.”

The Government was in the early stages of devising an evaluation system that would have “integrity and regard” and capture all of the different dimensions of quality teaching.

“Typically, you get a response that it’s not possible to design something like that, because this is so difficult. Well, I don’t agree,” Ms Parata said.

“The precursor to being able to reward monetarily or in leadership opportunities is to have a really reliable evaluation system and one that has real integrity and regard for it.

It is good to see the Government finally embracing performance pay so hopefully the best teachers will get paid more than the worst teachers. However I have some doubts about a centralised system of performance pay.

My preferred model is to delegate school budgets to boards (that wish to have them delegated) and allow the board and principal to pay staff as they see best. So they could pay (for example) a brilliant science teacher with five years experience $90,000 and pay a mediocre science teacher with twenty years experience say $60,000.