The announcement by the Brumby Government that it will hire the best school principals, pay them up to $200,000 a year and send them to improve the state's worst government schools is an important reform. The next step is to expand it to include teachers.
Our best teachers should be working in our lowest performing schools, and they should be paid according to the outcomes they achieve.
To implement such a plan requires the recognition of three things; that some teachers are better than others, that there are low-performing schools, and that part of teachers' pay should be linked to their performance.
Thankfully, after decades of debate it is now accepted that some government schools achieve better outcomes than others. And it's also accepted that something should be done about this. What hasn't been accepted is that one way to fix the problem is to pay our best teachers more if they go to work in low-performing schools.
Unfortunately, this week's deal between the Government and the teachers' union will not help improve the academic results of students in low-performing schools. And it does nothing to overcome the shortage of teachers in key subjects.
The $2 billion extra spending on teachers' salaries could have been used to transform the teachers in government schools from a workforce into a profession. This week was a missed opportunity for Victorian education. The deal doesn't recognise good teachers, doesn't fix teacher shortages in key subjects, and doesn't ensure that students most in need of a quality education are taught by our best teachers.
The Government had a once-in-a-decade chance to begin a real education revolution. We could have had a revolution based on the notion that the best teachers deserve the biggest pay rises. Instead, the Government took the easy option and decided that every teacher should get a pay rise, regardless of their merit or performance.
The Government did win some minor concessions. Pupil-free days have been cut to one a year. This is an improvement, but pupil-free days should have been eliminated entirely. Pupil-free days are an anachronism of the 19th century. Given the number of weeks during school holidays when teachers are at work and there are no students at school, there is more than enough time for teachers to fulfil their administrative and reporting responsibilities.
The deal allowed the Government to proclaim that Victoria's teachers will now be the best paid in the country. This is a hollow boast given that within months it is likely that teacher salaries in some other state will overtake those in Victoria. The state's teachers should be the best paid in the country only if they are, in fact, the best teachers in the country -- but there's no evidence that they are.
Victoria's teachers may well be the best in the country -- we simply don't know. And the reason we don't know is that no education minister has been willing to confront the teachers' union and actually measure the quality of our teachers. The test scores in literacy and numeracy for Victorian students are among the lowest in the country.
Not surprisingly the teachers' union described the deal as the best outcome for the union in 25 years. The union got everything it wanted. For years the union has campaigned against any attempt to measure teacher performance. According to the union, all teachers are of equal ability, all teachers do the same job, and therefore all teachers should be paid the same.
The union's approach protects poor teachers but penalises good teachers. This week's deal perpetuates the notion that teachers' pay should be determined according to their qualifications and years of service instead of their performance.
The top salary for a classroom teacher will now be $75,500 per year. On most measures this is a good salary. However, there's nothing magic about this figure. The top salary for a teacher could have been $85,500 or even $95,500.
All teachers in Victorian government schools will also get a one-off bonus of $1000 and every principal will receive $2000. Spending of this sort has very little justification. Paying every teacher a bonus, regardless of the quality of their contribution to their students' learning is an insult to the professionalism of teachers. In any school, there would be some teachers who deserve bonuses of $5000, some who deserve bonuses of $2000, and some who deserve no bonuses at all.
It's no wonder that few ambitious, eager and smart young people yearn for a career in an industry in which regardless of how hard they work and how good they are at their job, they will get exactly the same bonus as everyone else. Young people entering teaching know that they are joining a workforce, not a profession.
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