Lawrence Ingvarson, a research fellow at the Australian Council of Educational Research, was commissioned by the Federal Government to research performance pay for teachers.
The report has not been made public, but the federal Minister for Education, Julie Bishop, has said it supports her push for performance pay in all schools. She maintains that student results should be a key determinant of teacher quality and has suggested asking principals, parents and students to rate teachers.
Dr Ingvarson declined to comment on the report, which he co-authored, but when asked about his general views he told the Sydney Morning Herald that existing test data could not be used as a reliable measure of individual teachers.
He said teacher merit pay had been tried in the US and failed and that giving principals power to hire and fire could lead to a messy cottage industry with no common standards for performance. "If we leave it up to the school it leads to cronyism and favouritism," he said. "We can't do it well until we have developed methods of assessing teachers that stand up to very critical reviews of their validity, reliability and fairness."
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