Labor's bonus pay scheme for teachers : deeply flawed

Stakeholders, researchers and consultants in the enterprise of schooling are yet to show any endorsement of the Prime Minister's $425 million bonus pay scheme, Reward Payments for Great Teachers, to be introduced in 2013 and 2014. It has been heavily criticised, by teachers' associations such as the Australian Primary Principals Association, and the author, a principal research fellow at ACER. APPA's president argues that no education system in the world has been able to show that one-off payments to teachers raise the quality of teaching or the status of teachers. The author believes that the worst reason to incentivise teachers is to focus exclusively on improving scores on national tests such as NAPLAN. Basing quality teaching performance on gain scores from such tests is not a definition of good professional practice. A recent article in the 'American Journal of Teacher Education' reports on and criticises the Labor government's scheme as a very 'inefficient way to link pay to performance', arguing that the scheme 'will prove to be invalid as well as highly cumbersome for schools to administer'. The article's authors argue for a national professional certification scheme which would assess teachers against the standards for highly accomplished teaching.