One thing I forgot to mention is teacher’s pay system. In korea, 70% comes from base pay and 30% from performance. We should follow their model!!! Or let the teacher’s keep the same salary but offer them 30% bonus based on their performance. Sorry to say but the most effective way to improve education is by spending more money.
[font=calibri]I can’t tell you how much I agree with that. The government in England has recently tried to bring in performance-related pay for teachers and have been firmly told that it would be a complete and utter disaster.
The biggest problem is how you measure teachers’ performance. Do you do it based on the results their pupils achieve? But there are no externally marked exams in most subjects and in most years, so how can you ensure a fair assessment? Or do you base it on assessment by the school leaders? Because that is going to lead to rampant patronage and unfairness.
But more than that, schools are communities all pulling in the same direction. It isn’t a competition between teachers, it’s about everyone working together to get the kids to achieve as well as they possibly can. By pitting teachers head-to-head (especially if as, in the proposed system here, schools don’t get an extra allowance for bonuses, so it comes out of the same pot and is therefore a zero-sum game), you’re making it less likely that teachers will collaborate and help each other, if you believe the mantra that they are motivated by money.
Teachers will fight like rats in a sack to avoid getting particular classes, because certain kids will spell financial ruin for them while others are a ticket to riches. And teachers could (could? would!) end up being unfairly penalised for circumstances completely outside their control.[/font]
Yes, that’s the sticking point. It’s not just between different classrooms within the one school. The academic performance of schools is hugely influenced by the area they are placed in and the socio-economic circumstances the grow out of. I had to do some teacher training in some really bad-ass areas, and boy, it’s an uphill battle to get to first base in schools like that—where education has status 0 in the eyes of the community. Compare that with a school in some posh, rich area where the kids have highly educated parents and so on. It’s a different ball game.
If you judge teachers on the performance of their charges alone, you get a ridiculously unfair system of pay.
Not that I joined Korean High School but that’s how it is down there. They actually have a ranking of students per grade and they put it on a board to know who’s the smartest kid. The upside of this is that it brings competitiveness for students to study more to rank higher. The downside of this is that… it is common to hear about korean student suicides over… education pressure. Even teachers get upset if their overall rank goes down because they’ll get less pay. It’s so competitive that just about every student goes to after-school private courses after normal school sessions. I believe they literally go to school 12 hours a day. It is so bad that getting to top college is nearly impossible so many parents like mine decide to go oversea. For some reason, american university is highly regarded over Korean college… I’m not sure why. Still, I’m glad I moved here since I can’t handle that type of pressure.