Session Information
23 SES 11 A, Global Perspectives on Market-Based Teacher Accountability Policies
Symposium
Contribution
Education policy frameworks worldwide are full of proposals to link teacher salaries to performance. Pressed to reform the governance and management of the public sector, education policy-makers increasingly evoke performance pay policies to improve teachers’ motivation and effort, effectiveness, and to enhance accountability and results-based management. Proponents of performance pay are preoccupied with the efficiency of educational processes. They believe that conventional teacher compensation schemes are loosely coupled with the education goals of improving student outcomes. They tell us to imagine an education system where teacher salaries are “competitive, market-sensitive, and performance-based;” where teachers are paid their “marginal product,” and where teacher competition allows schools to draw and hold superior teachers in the profession. Output based compensation innovations had seemingly worked in businesses and industry, and could be a solution to poor achieving public education systems. They have the potential to induce major organizational changes in public education. Research on performance pay can be categorized in four groups. First, there are studies that examine the effects on student outcomes, most generally on student test scores and value added. One can also find experimental, inferential, and even qualitative accounts examining the effects of performance pay on teacher behavior. Third, some research focuses on how performance pay plans are adopted, the policy environment, or the politics of performance pay plans. Finally, another group of studies describe in telling detail the characteristics of the reforms, with discussions on how teacher performance is conceptualized, evaluated, and measured. Overall, the specific features of the “reformed” payment schemes are the least understood component of the reforms. This paper examines how teacher performance pay is understood in Latin American countries. It takes a widely discussed global policy and looks at how it is designed and implemented in practice. I dig deeper into the innovations on the pay component rather than on the performance evaluation. The approach draws from the literature on performance pay in education, personnel practices, and public administration. Using a comparative case-study method, I analyze the purposes of new teacher pay schemes, their rationale, and how their structure compares with conventional pay schemes. Data come from policy documents, regulations, and norms available electronically. Preliminary findings show that teacher pay schemes within pay for performance policies do not radically vary from conventional pay schemes. They introduce some innovations, yet they do not structurally change teachers’ career and pay schemes, as theory on teacher incentives would presuppose.
References
Chamberlin, R., Wragg, T., Haynes, G., & Wragg, C. (2002). Performance-related pay and the teaching profession: A review of the literature. Research Papers in Education, 17(1), 31-49. Vegas, E. (2007). Teacher labor markets in developing countries. The future of children, 17(1), 219-232.
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