The NSW Minister for Education, Virginia Chadwick, launched some controversial guidelines on teacher performance this week and ACT educators will be looking across the border with some interest. The aim of the guidelines is sound: ensuring teachers perform and that those who do not should be given the chance to improve and failing that be out.
Parents have a right to expect their children are not taught by unsatisfactory teachers. Precisely how to test the performance of teachers, however, is a more difficult issue. In other fields of human endeavour, measurement of performance is far easy: profit figures, production figures, client assessments and assessments by managers are usually good indicators. Such measurements in the classroom, especially primary and lower secondary classes, are meaningless in the present public education environment. In public schools, profit is not a motive and in any event is not a sound base for educational standards. In the absence of external exams or other objective outcomes testing throughout the education system, the production approach is impossible. As a general rule, children are not in a position to measure the performance of teachers. And assessments by managers _ in this case school principals _ has its difficulties.
The imparting of education to young minds is hard to measure objectively. The upshot has been that it is easy for teachers adjudged to be under-performing to cry bias, discrimination and unfairness. It is easy for the teachers union to support such allegations. This is borne out by the figures. Out of 50,000 teacher employees the department has dismissed only 23 in four years. Not that the department should be aiming to increase dismissals, but in an environment where the department has identified 100 under-performing teachers and average of six dismissals a year seems low.
The aim should be to have virtually no under-performing teachers. But this cannot be achieved unless there is some ultimate sanction and that sanction cannot be fairly imposed without objective criteria, which does not seem possible in the current environment. It has to be borne in mind that a sacked teacher is sacked from the Department of Education and has not chance of returning to the profession. With that sort of grave sanction; fairness is imperative. It seems, therefore, that any proposal directed at making teachers shape up must encompass wider issues, the most significant of which is more school autonomy and more parent choice of schools. Under-performing teachers and under-performing schools will be better dealt with in an environment where schools have to compete for students, where principals and parents and citizens groups have a greater in school governance (including the hiring, firing and promotion of teachers) and where the performance of schools is measured in publicly available comparative exam results and other tests The present centralised system may be convenient and empowering for teacher unions and education bureaucrats, but it does not inspire parents and in the long run is not inspiring high performance among teachers. Indeed, there is a solid argument that the centralised, highly unionised nature of the profession has resulted in teachers doing very poorly in the pay and status stakes over the past two decades, simply because it is a more inefficient profession in which the best have to carry the under-performers.