I don’t believe it.

Not performance pay for teachers.  Really, seeing that idea rear its ugly head didn’t surprise me given the lengthy rumblings.  Also given how the federal government acted on “plain English” reporting (i.e. it employs the first five letters of the English alphabet), I’m not surprised to hear the proposal that performance pay would be ”tied to” (or, depending on your point of view, “used as blackmail to make school systems take it in order to get their…”) federal government funding.

What I don’t believe is that I agree with Alan Jones!

Many people either agree or disagree with Mr. Jones’ opinions, and one could suggest that he can encourage national debate on key issues.  But in his final editorial for the Channel Nine program, Today, he addressed the very issue of performance pay for teachers.  What’s more, I do believe what he says makes perfect sense.

At the end of the day, the problem is this:

  1. What do we define as “performance” or “achievement” in the teaching profession, and,
  2. How do we assess, report and reward such individual performance or achievement, especially that teaching is a collegial, cooperative, collaborative and inherently social profession.

Let’s also remember that teaching is just that – a profession, not an industry.  This is not to degrade one type of work against another, but simply to say they are different types of work that operate in different ways for different purposes.  If we must accept performance pay, does this mean that doctors will be paid according to the number of correct diagnoses, or how quickly a diagnosis can be made?  Some lawyers may adopt a “no win – no fee” approach, but remember, they can choose which cases to take.  Should we start paying our accountants according to how much of a tax refund they can get for us?  Is performance pay just another example in a long history of our profession being treated as an industry, thus “selling it short” yet again?  Surely, our classrooms are more than production lines.

As Jones said, we have no problem as teachers in being properly rewarded for doing our job to the best of our ability.  Just how you do that in a fair and just manner is extremely difficult to determine.  I seriously hope, especially in the Catholic sector, that our professional associations and system administrators address this issue with a Christian sense of social justice at the forefront of their minds.

The transcript of Alan Jones’ editorial is on the Radio 2GB website.  You can view video of the editorial on the blog idents.tv.

My thanks to our fantastic teacher-librarian, Judy, who first handed me a copy of the transcript of the editorial and alerted me to it.