Trusting School Leaders
To The Australian Thursday, July 13, 2006
Keeping and rewarding the better teachers is a great prospect for our children. But teacher unions will always oppose comparison and will subvert any teacher evaluation scheme as they have in the past. Likewise bureaucracy can’t handle the responsibility: they will automatically seek out a formula – which will quickly come to be seen as a joke. They’ll miss the best and they’ll include too many duds, including those who will quickly learn to rort the formula.
Assessing a teacher’s real contribution involves too many local factors. Only a school principal can make this judgement. Evaluation will never be perfect, but trusting school leaders will get us much closer than any other scheme. Bureaucracy hates handing power over to schools, but if there’s anyone up there who wants to do Australian kids a favour, offer individual principals the authority to reward and retain their best teachers.
Philip O'Carroll