Ultimately, I don't believe that we should be debating about the policy for the 'wise men' in parliament to implement. I believe that we should give control of teacher funding back to the schools. They will create the most efficient process possible in order to get good quality staff and keep them. After all, it is in their interests to do so. Instead of opting for a one-size-fits-all government policy, we should decentralise the industry and invite innovation in staff management so that kids will have a chance to experience a better education led by better teachers.
That could work. That's my only real comment on this.
yes, it could work, but the problem will be private schools having better funding -> better teachers... is that necessarily a good thing?? why is it better this way when potentially successful students are limited by their family financial background??
That's just the politics of envy. So what if they have good teachers? Rich parents will always be able to afford more for their kids. What are you gonna do? Use government to take it from them? Robin hood style? Secondly, with Asian students, research has found no relationship between socio-economic status and student achievement. None whatsoever, so you don't even have causation. If what you said was actually true, then the research would have had to
at least found a statistically significant positive correlation. Thirdly, i don't see how this point is even related to the OP because what you describe is already happening right now.
A lot of the debate around different pay structures fails to address the main point - that compensation arrangements are determined by a Soviet-style central bureaucracy rather than by the individual school, why that ought to be so, is beyond me. It should be individual schools determining for themselves what compensation arrangements suit them, not some bureaucrat imposing conformity on all schools from a distant office. The problem is only further exacerbated by the fact that the government bureaucracy has decided to impose upon all government schools a uniform and rigid pay scale in which poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid whereby pay is determined far more by seniority than by merit. So, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the average quality of incoming students to the teaching profession has been decreasing over time: "Between 1983 and 2003, the average percentile rank of those entering teacher education fell from 74 to 61, while the average rank of new teachers fell from 70 to 62."
http://econrsss.anu.edu.au/~aleigh/pdf/TQConf_Ryan.pdfSo the bottom line is that whether the pay arrangement is determined by merit, experience or even penis length, it should not be imposed from above by a central government bureaucracy.
On the question of teacher quality in the USA there exists a highly regarded set of standards for measuring highly accomplished teaching developed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Certification by the NBPTS is to teachers what the CFA is to Financial Analysts and what the CPA/CA is to Accountants. However, there is no such equivalent in Australia, in fact, there are only a few examples of teaching standards in Australia currently that are complete and useful for measuring teacher quality. Examples include the standards developed by Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers, Australian Science Teachers Association and the WA Education Department’s Level 3 Classroom teacher standards.
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