Should teachersÊ pay depend on their pupilsÊ examination results?
Dillon Harindiran
ÂThe direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.Ê Plato, The Republic
In many ways this line summarizes the importance of education in every personÊs life, regardless of analysis; education is fundamental to our way and quality of life. It is essential for our self-fulfilment and development on an individual and social level. Thus teachers must be utilized in such a way that society can maximize the benefits derived from education. Basic economic theory suggests that the optimal level of pay for an individual should be the result of societal valuation of their labour having accounted for its net external effects upon society 1 . Thus the labour of a superior teacher should be valued higher than that of one deemed inferior by market forces or other proxies. In order to fully judge the actual benefits and costs of such changes to their system of pay, based on exam results, we must follow through the effects and implications that such alterations may have in order to pass judgment on whether there should be a change, and if so, to what extent. Doing so will require the scrutiny of: the value of exam results themselves, whether exams are a good evaluator of success in fulfilling the true purpose of education, what society demands and expects of its teachers and the education system, the complexity of evaluating teacherÊs performance, and finally the effect that performance based pay could have on pupils and teaching. No examination is annually consistent in difficulty or impossible to cheat in, standardization is nowhere near perfect or existent across all subjects and no exam tests the full breadth of a subjectÊs syllabus. Thus in order to compare a teacherÊs impact on exam results we must assume, or at least find a way of ensuring, that during comparison
exam results are: comparable year on year, examinations are robust in nature, provide a near perfect comparison of one pupil relative to another regardless of subject choice and test the full breadth of a subjectÊs syllabus rather than portions of it. In a practical sense this is impossible to do, or would be so impractical and expensive that it would not be worthwhile. Furthermore, exam boards are susceptible to pressure applied by an authority, so overbearing, as their largest customer – government 2 . The pressure, often applied as a result of re-election ambitions 3 and the need for cost effective ÂimprovementsÊ- or anything that will pass as such, has often led them to take the easiest path to fulfilling the ÂsatisfactionÊ of wants presented by the electorate. Diluting the difficulty of examinations or lowering grade boundaries and claiming consequential national increases in exam scores as evidence of higher quality educations. Additionally, the availability of several exam boards for any one subject 4 and the ability of schools to enter their candidates for any exam board they wish have brought about competition between exam boards to lower the difficulty of their exams in a race to the bottom(without destroying the legitimacy of the qualification). This, added to a performance based pay, would give teachers higher salaries without improving education. Examinations are also notorious for the fact that their mark schemes, more often than not, promote a certain way of answering a question, thus giving rise to the importance of Âexam techniqueÊ. Such an emphasis on conformity in the way in which pupils answer questions not only places pressure on time constrained teachers but also brings about a problem that fundamentally undermines the purpose of education; by
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