Paying for results

Linking teachers’ pay to performance is not worth considering. Everywhere this “reign of error” has been practised, a negative, destructive psychological environment has been produced in which professionalism, collaboration and care suffer, and damage is done for the children for whom school is a special and safe sanctuary.

Should teachers be made accountable for the problems of deserving children who, through accident of birth, have learning difficulties, for classroom distress from fractured relationships, for the disenfranchised, or for the results in children of social and cultural exclusions resulting from deeply integrated historical systems of inequality outside their control?

Thinking New Zealanders with heart would reject performance pay for teachers as part of broader cultural and imaginative failure, for we do not want this creeping spiritual paralysis.

Dr Janet E. Mansfield, Mount Eden.