Pay teachers on merit: OECD
By Justine Ferrari
Teachers’ skills should be linked to career structure and pay, so that advancement is based on competency rather than years spent in the job.
An international report on Australia’s school system, to be released today, endorses the direction of the Labor government’s education revolution, including national tests, reporting of school performance on the My School website, national curriculum and “commitment to transparency”.
The OECD report also praises the introduction of national teaching standards, performance goals and the system’s strong focus on students’ results.
But it urges the government to go further and identifies “a number of missing links”, including that career structures for teachers are not tied to teaching standards.
“This translates into a detrimental separation between the definition of skills and competencies at different stages of the career, as reflected in teaching standards, and the roles and responsibilities of teachers in schools, as reflected in career structures,” it says.
The report highlights the need to broaden the use of student assessment, including the National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy, and warns against using the results to identify problems in individual students. It says government has focused on using assessments to hold schools accountable but is yet to look at how the data can be used to make improvements in the classroom.
“The national education agenda has placed considerable investment in establishing national standards, national testing and reporting requirements, while it provides considerably less direction and strategy on how to achieve the improvement function of evaluation and assessment,” it says. The report recommends the performance of non-government schools be scrutinised more closely, saying the reporting of outcomes in private schools is “still limited to a simple set of compliance statements and does not focus on performance”.
It also calls for independent reports evaluating schools to be published on My School to provide more comprehensive information about the quality of teaching and warns teachers against using the national literacy and numeracy tests to identify problems in individual students.
The report into student assessment in Australia is part of a broader review by the OECD of the different systems around the world for assessing and evaluating students and schools, and the way they can improve outcomes.
School Education Minister Peter Garrett said the report was “a big tick of approval” and many of the recommendations for student assessment, teacher appraisal and school evaluation were already being implemented by the government as part of its education reforms.
“The OECD backs our approach in today’s report. It found that a coherent framework for student assessment is in place, that accountability and transparency are well embedded in the system, and that reforms such as these are vital in improving student results,” he said. “I was also pleased to see that the OECD believes our decision to introduce teacher standards is a `major development’ and that teachers in Australia are treated as `trusted professionals’ with a high degree of autonomy.”
The OECD says teacher appraisal in schools is of “variable quality”, ranging from a “light touch” to demanding and elaborate processes.
“The review team saw examples of principals setting up thorough performance management processes but also examples of principals who perceived performance management as a simple `signing off’ of the teacher’s salary increment,” it says.
“Therefore there are no guarantees in Australian schools that performance management processes are addressing the real issues and complexities of teaching and learning, except in those schools where appraisal is well consolidated.”
The review recommends linking the teaching standards, which set out the skills and knowledge required of teachers at four levels, with a career structure, and the tasks and responsibilities required of teachers in schools.
“This approach would convey the message that reaching high standards of performance is the main road to career advancement,” it says.
The report highlights a lack of knowledge among teachers about how to interpret information on student performance, saying they are not adequately prepared in analysing student test results and using the data to improve their teaching.
A priority is to develop teachers’ capacity to use student assessment data, including that generated by NAPLAN (National Assessment Program – Literacy And Numeracy).The review was concerned about the narrow focus of the NAPLAN tests on basic skills in literacy and numeracy and said any tests intended to improve student education had to be aligned with the national curriculum, noting this work is under way.
It warned that NAPLAN was becoming dominant in discussions of student assessment, which risked diminishing the importance of more individual evaluations by teachers.
This dominance appeared to be occurring as a result of a focus by the teaching profession rather than government.
The report warned against teachers basing classes on the questions students answered incorrectly in the NAPLAN tests, saying the results were only reliable at the national level.
“Tools enable teachers to use students’ responses to an individual item to diagnose student needs. In the absence of other sources of information, such inferences are not reliable and may well yield inaccurate diagnoses. This is reflected in NAPLAN documentation which states that it should be used to supplement other assessment information gathered by the teacher.”
Mr Garrett said the NAPLAN tests were important in providing “a set of comparable, reliable data to track school and student performance and improvement” but it was only one indicator of school performance.
“Teacher-based assessment is a central part of the Australian school system. NAPLAN doesn’t replace ongoing school- and class-based assessment of students. It provides a snapshot that allows broader comparisons and indicators,” he said.
Article from The Australian, August 18, 2011.
