NT: Performance based pay system fatally flawed: Smith

AAP General News (Australia)
04-12-2007
NT: Performance based pay system fatally flawed: Smith

DARWIN, April 12 AAP - The federal government's plan for a performance-based pay system
for teachers is "fatally flawed", says Federal Opposition Education spokesman Stephen
Smith.

In a united Labor front, state and territory education ministers gathered behind Mr
Smith outside parliament house in Darwin, ahead of this afternoon's meeting with their
federal Counterpart, Julie Bishop.

Ms Bishop is expected to call on the ministers to adopt a Commonwealth plan to pay
public school teachers on merit from 2009, starting with a trial performance pay for teachers
over the coming year.

Her plan would see teachers paid based on principals' assessments of their work, student
exam results and parent feedback - and she has threatened to withhold $3 billion in commonwealth
education funding if the states refuse.

But Mr Smith said today the proposal was "narrow and simplistic".

"It's quite clear from the documents that Ms Bishop has distributed that their model
of performance pay is fundamentally and fatally flawed," Mr Smith told reporters.

"The Howard government has been trying to use performance pay to beat up on the states
and territories, beat up on teachers and unlike Labor they are not serious about genuinely
trying to reward quality teaching."

Instead of rewarding teachers under an arbitrary system of excellence, Mr Smith said
Labor would provide financial incentives for teachers who taught in remote or rural areas,
joined up to mentoring programs, and obtained special skills and accreditation in key
areas such as maths and science.

Grading teachers according to the outcomes of standardised tests was an approach adopted
in the US which subsequently failed, Mr Smith said.

"We won't be using the outcomes of standardised tests as the basis for our deliberations
in that area," he said, while also acknowledging that defining quality teaching was "a
difficult public policy question to answer".

"Do I have a concluded view as to how that can be judged? No I don't," he said.

"I openly acknowledge ... it is very hard to make a public policy judgment about determining
the quality of a teacher actually in the classroom.

"Things like peer review, assessment, mentoring, engaging in ongoing development, these
are all things that can improve and increase the quality of the teacher in the classroom."

AAP tr/it/de

KEYWORD: TEACHERS SMITH

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