It’s time for performance pay for police dogs
ASWE prepare for another year of a zero Budget, some brave journalists and politicians are again raising the issue of performance pay for teachers. Predictably, shrill teacher unions such as the PPTA bang on about the holistic value of teachers, how they can instil confidence, passion and other difficult-to-assess qualities into the students of our world-class education system. Rubbish. As every parent who spends vast amounts of money buying properties ‘‘in zone’’ knows, the most important thing about school is academic results.
At present teachers are paid on responsibility and length of service. Yet to rate exactly how a teacher has performed, all a principal has to do is to take the raw academic results of each student, factor in the 80 per cent of a student’s academic performance that experts say is determined by their home and socioeconomic environment, and subtract from it the academic level of the student when they entered the school. This would require massive testing to be even partly accurate, but the kids would have already had eight years of national standards so they’ll be used to it.
My simple teacher performance formula (0.2P X Y13 – sinpy9 X [10 - D], where P equals the academic performance and D the decile level of school) may seem complicated, but that’s what they said about NCEA and look how successful that has been.
Alternatively, the Government could take the non-scientific way out and leave it up to school principals to decide who is a good teacher. If this happens, I would advise teachers to stock up on a good supply of rosy apples, whisky and other bribes.
Performance pay is such a brilliant concept I think it should be extended to all Government workers. Our nurses receive many generous allowances, especially when they move to Saudi Arabia for better pay, yet how is their performance actually judged? A simple device such as a weight scale in a bedpan, or a volume meter in a syringe, would tell us exactly just how much work that nurse is doing, and how well.
The simple placement of a highly paid treasury official in hospital wards would see good nurses with high syringe volumes and good results in a time-inmotion bedpan study rewarded, and lazy ones turfed out. It’s the same with police. Like teachers, they are paid on seniority and experience, but what about their actual performance? A small electronic device at the end of a baton would tell us exactly how many pesky protesters were disciplined by a constable.
But it’s police dogs who really need performance pay. They all receive exactly the same recompense yet perform very differently. I look forward to Police Minister Anne Tolley ensuring that high-performing alsatians who disarm burglars get paid in fillet steak while lazy labradors who can’t sniff out a kilogram of marijuana at Customs get dog-roll.
Our military is also highly deincentivised. We need bounties on bad guys and fines for friendly fire. And thank goodness our military bands are finally coming under scrutiny. I calculate that if we fine each military band member just 10c per wrong note, we would save enough money to fund another expensive inquiry into ridiculous ways that our Defence Force could save money.
But let’s not go too far. Not all work performance can be easily assessed. The job of a Treasury official looks simple – pay them more if they get predictions right; less if they get them wrong. But that is a cruel way of looking at things. Treasury officials spend hours calculating their inaccurate predictions and are incredibly busy sticking their noses into areas they know nothing about, such as the effect of class sizes on education, so can easily err.
It’s the same with council chief executives. The simple solution would be to link their pay to ‘‘tangible’’ things like hours worked and how they control ballooning debt. But council debt is a highly complex, holistic, human issue. Unlike the education of our children or the care of the sick and elderly, there are some things that are just too important to judge in a simplistic way.