Why Performance Pay Grading is Flawed
The rationale behind putting teachers on a pay for students performance salary scale is the application of the principles of piecework to human beings. In this rationale, each student is viewed as raw material that is to be intellectually molded in such a manner that they are able to pass certain standards, i.e. the various tests deemed as illustrative of certain skill sets by state and federal government bodies.
The analogy lends itself to purported emphasis on teacher accountability for what occurs in their classrooms and thus is seen as a means of filtering out poorly performing teachers and encouraging increasing professionalization. As appealing as this appears, there are several major problems with using this industrial analogy.
Unlike standardized materials provided to an industrial worker to be sewn, welded or in some other ways assembled, students enter teachers classroom at varying levels of intelligence. This situation is further compounded by inclusionary guidelines that put low performing students in classrooms once typically considered too advanced for them to attend. In such an environment teachers must simultaneously work to adequately challenge the more advanced students in the classroom as well as to engage the lower level thinkers in the classroom. Further complicating the performance salary issue are classes specifically designated for those students that demonstrate intellectual acumen and the teachers in those classrooms could financially benefit by their ability to ingratiate themselves with whoever is in charge of class assignments.
Unlike the shop floor, where machines and materials stay, students come and go. Some students are forced to work late in order to help support their parents and thus don’t get the recommended amount of sleep, some use drugs which hurt their academic performance, some come from abusive or otherwise dysfunctional households which causes emotional trauma leading to a lack of concentration in class, some have diets which have been shown to lower mental attentiveness and physical health, some come from homes where English isn’t a first language. The performance model seeks to deny these social realities by presupposing all students as equal.
That said, by analyzing how the classroom actually works and the social dynamics at play within the life of the students we can see not only how equating the work that teachers do with that of loom-workers is reductive, but also how a means for performance pay could be achieved that is fitting to the industrial metaphor it seeks to model itself on.
The only manner that performance grading would work is to negate all variables from entering into the formation of the student’s intellect and this could be accomplished by removing children from parent’s care after birth and entrusting them solely to state supervision by professional childrearers and educators. As students entire lives from, say, age 2 to 18 would be wholly supervised the denotation of them as “standardized” people becomes possible and those educators in charge of the students during this period could be paid appropriately. The quest for an ownership society where teachers are held wholly accountable for students leads to this sea change, but as I imagine most parents find such a notion distasteful perhaps we can maintain that annual salaries, imperfect thought they may be, are the best solution for right now.
