Editorial | Performance pay for teachers

Paying Jamaica’s teachers better may, indeed, help to keep them in the island’s classrooms, as their leaders say.

However, what has been missing so far from their argument are the deliverables teachers are willing to provide for this greater investment by taxpayers and how these outcomes are to be measured. This newspaper believes that these must be part of the discussion.

The issue of teachers leaving classrooms for better-paying jobs in other sectors and abroad is, of course, not new. But the concerns have deepened over the past decade and a half, or so, with the more aggressive recruitment of the island’s most talented educators by school districts in the United States, Britain, and Canada. Recently, Middle Eastern states, China, and some Caribbean countries are reported to have joined the act.

There is no readily available figure of exactly how many teachers have decamped for higher salaries and better working conditions overseas. However, the situation is, apparently, so acute in some areas that Jamaica is itself now attempting to recruit foreign teachers to fill gaps, especially in subjects like mathematics, the sciences, and technology.

Last week, for example, 29 Cubans arrived on the island, joining 75 who are already in the system. The Government is looking to places such as India, Nigeria, and Ghana for more.

However, in the face of pushbacks by teachers against the strategy, the education minister, Fayval Williams, has said that her approach was “a surgical insertion for the gaps I know we need to fill” rather than “inundating the sector”.

LASTING SOLUTION

The solution that is more likely to be lasting and deliver more long-term benefits, teaching profession’s leadership, however, argue, would be to make attending teachers’ training colleges more affordable then making the graduates less susceptible to the blandishments of foreign recruiters by paying them well.

“The majority of our teachers will stay if they are better paid,” said Mark Smith, who was installed last month as president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA), the teachers’ union.

Like one of his predecessors, Garth Anderson, Dr Smith said that while Jamaica had the institutional capacity to train the teachers it needed, “dwindling numbers” were enrolling in teachers’ colleges.

One way to attack this problem, according to Dr Anderson, the principal of the Anglican-owned Church Teachers’ College, is for the Government to return to the days when it covered the bulk of the cost of training teachers. It should pay up to 90 per cent, he proposed.

While it pays the salaries of their lecturers, Government support for teachers, as is the case with other tertiary institutions, and subsidies have declined sharply, forcing students to pick up the bulk of the cost of their education. It can cost a student upwards of J$500,000 annually for a four-year teaching course.

Yet, even after recent significant hikes in their pay, Dr Anderson noted, a classroom teacher would earn around US$19,000 a year, or over 30 per cent less than some regional counterparts.

In the United States, where the bulk of Jamaican teachers have headed recently, the average annual salary for teachers is about US$69,500, with a median of about US$61,700.

There may, indeed, be a compelling case for paying teachers significantly more – an argument that other government-paid workers would probably make.

MORE EMOTIVE

But the issue, its merits notwithstanding, is perhaps more emotive, given Jamaica’s well-known poor educational outcomes: a third of students complete their primary education either illiterate or reading below their grade levels, and over 40 per cent do not meet the acceptable standards in mathematics.

In the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams, more than 30 per cent fail at English and nearly two-thirds in maths. Less than 20 per cent pass five subjects, that include maths and English, in a single sitting.

Against the backdrop of such data, notwithstanding the raft of policy fixes required in the education system, demands for improved and measurable deliverables by teachers is not, on its face, unreasonable.

The JTA has, in the past, resisted proposals for performance-based pay, arguing that inequities in the system would place the vast majority of teachers at poorly resourced schools, which receive underperforming children, at a significant disadvantage. That is an understandable argument. But the issue cannot be without solution if creatively engaged.

For instance, the Orlando Patterson Commission on the reform of the education system proposed metrics to determine value-added, based on, among other things, the standard and socio-economic circumstances of the students a school receives compared to their performance at the end period.

Unfortunately, like the rest of the Patterson Report, there has been too little public discussion of that idea.

As the report noted: “Though suggestions about performance-based salary have continued to meet resistance among stakeholders the potential acceptance for performance-based incentives premised on value-added metrics does not seem to have been widely tested. Incentives would be in addition to regular salary. The mechanism would consider teacher performance based on relative improvements in student/classroom performance rather than performance in absolute terms. This would avoid disincentivising teaching disadvantaged students. The metrics would have to be carefully worked out and agreed upon by all stakeholders. This, however, has the potential to retain the best teachers in the classroom and motivate excellence in teaching.”

This is a concept that should be easy to agree on.