Minister Bishop offends teachers

By Angelo Gavrielatos

Following in the footsteps of her discredited predecessor, the Federal Minister for Education has continued the denigration of teachers.

In The Australian newspaper on July 10, Julie Bishop is reported saying that "teachers were one of the few professions not accountable for their performance and it was 'high time' they were...held responsible for their students' achievements".

Demonstrating an absolute lack of knowledge and respect, the Minister's comments fail to recognise that teachers are amongst the most accountable of all professionals. Indeed, the level of public, media and political scrutiny that teachers are subjected to daily is greater than it has ever been.

Continuing her ill-informed and baseless comments, the Minister resurrected the notion of performance pay for teachers. The Minister asserted that teachers should be rewarded on the basis of their students' results and indicated that performance pay would form part of the next round of funding negotiations with the states and territories.

Advocates of performance pay fail to recognise the social and human dynamic of education. They also fail to recognise that the educational well-being of each child involves much more than any single teacher.

There is no evidence that performance pay improves performance. Indeed, there is research which indicates that performance pay damages productivity, morale and dedication.

The rejection of performance pay for teachers is best summed up in the words of former Premier Bob Carr, who is quoted as saying: "I'm not sure if there's ever been a satisfactory way of measuring the performance of teachers. It strikes me as a very subjective area. I've been to schools for kids with disabilities, special education schools. I've been in a classroom where the teacher is working with these Down Syndrome youngsters to get them to the stage where they can read a rail timetable so they can get to work on their own. How do you measure the performance of a teacher in a comprehensive high school who has a class of youngsters all drawn from a public housing estate? Most from single parent families, few with a desk to study at, many of them with unstable homes? How do we measure the performance of that teacher compared to a teacher in a selective high, recruiting at the start of year 7 the most motivated youngsters in our society? I've never seen a system to do it."

Angelo Gavrielatos is the Deputy President.

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Last Modified: 03 Aug 2006