Page 26 - ELG1805 May Issue 457

COMMENT .
Performance pay or
the highway
Should language schools pay more money to their best teachers, and
should student feedback be the deciding factor, asks Melanie Butler
P ersonally I have always thought schools. All five of the UK language chains
that submitted their pay results to the UK
relating pay to performance was
government gender pay gap exercise (see page
piffle.
When I was a book publisher, I
was promised a bonus based on the number
of books I published and their sales. also get performance
So when a fellow publisher had a
particularly good year with a raft of new
books hitting the classroom and soaring sense suggests that the
sales, she expected her annual bonus to go
up. answer should be yes. But
It went down. Perplexed, she asked her
accountant husband to explain the complex
calculation on which the bonus was based.
He looked at it and laughed: ‘Using this
algorithm they can give you whatever they
like, and you can’t argue.’ But very few seemed to offer bonuses to
Performance pay has arrived in language
26
?
get performance related pay?
Common sense suggests that the answer
should be yes. But the evidence is less than
According to the UK’s Education
Surely teachers should convincing.
Endowment Foundation, ‘The results of
rigorous evaluations, such as those with
related pay? Common experimental trials or with well-controlled
groups, suggest that the average impact
of performance pay schemes has been just
above zero.’
the evidence is less than How much above zero?
A four-year-long randomised control
convincing trial conducted for the American federal
government suggests that the answer is not
12) had bonus schemes. much.
The difference between the end-of-year
their teachers. Surely teachers should also test results for the 65 schools that were
May 2018
randomly assigned to offer merit pay and the support it. THE HOTTER
Once again, research evidence does not
66 that were not was between one and two
As Russ Mayne, who has looked at the
percentage points, equivalent to three extra
studies in this field, explains on this page
weeks of school a year.
THE BETTER?
schools based the performance scheme on right, we know exactly which teachers get student feedback site, and is
The results were the same whether the
bonuses on this basis: attractive teachers
Russ Mayne looks at one
test results for individual classes, the schools
who give good marks.
The good news here is that gender doesn’t
as a whole or on other measures such as
classroom observation.
matter. Which is not the case for most
unsurprised to discover that
Worse still, an upward bump in test
the most attractive teachers
Take those five language school chains.
get the best ratings
After that, test results did not continue to
Four of them paid higher bonuses to men
results occurred only in the first two years. performance pay, even in UK EFL. The top-rated teacher on
than woman.
improve.
Yet such bonus schemes do not come
At Bellerbys the median average bonus
cheap. Since 2006, the US government was twice as much for men as for women. ratemyprofessor.com currently is
introduce them. improves performance. Research published University of Alabama.
Douglas Klutz, a law professor from the
Worse still, performance related pay rarely
has shelled out $1.8 billion to schools that
Reading through the student
in the Harvard Business Review shows it
In the private language school sector,
comments, which include such insights
works well for routine jobs like shelf-stacking
paying bonuses for test results can be hard to
where learning and creativity are important,
implement. or factory assembly lines. But in any job as ‘hes [sic] so hot’ and ‘Great class.
For schools in the language travel
Easy A if you show up,’ it’s hard not
business, it is well nigh impossible: the performance can actually get worse. to wonder if students are really the best
average learner coming to the UK, for The researchers, Dan Cable and Freek people to evaluate teaching.
example, stays just three weeks. Vermuelen, give three main reasons: First, There have been thousands of
Instead, some schools are looking to the minute you introduce performance pay, research articles written on the subject of
base performance payment for teachers on you change motivation. student evaluation of teaching.
another metric: student feedback. The intrinsic enjoyment of doing the work Researchers have examined various
Language schools are not the only is replaced by the extrinsic reward of earning factors such as the teacher’s gender,
bodies to take this approach. It is, in fact, attractiveness and expressiveness, as
fundamental to the British government’s Some schools
Teaching Excellence Framework, which is well as the difficulty of the course and
designed not to increase pay for teachers but are looking to base how much the students actually learn.
as a basis on which individual universities performance payment for As with the comments from Klutz’s
can raise their fees. students, the results can make worrying
teachers on another metric: reading. One study in particular
found that teachers rated ‘hot’ on
student feedback ratemyprofessor.com on average scored
0.8 points higher on a five-point scale
more money. than the plainer teachers.
Second, all measurement systems are Another study found that an actor who
flawed. It is simply impossible to come up was coached the day before to present
with a simple metric to measure a complex a meaningless talk to medical students
job. received good feedback despite the talk
Finally, as Cable and Vermuelen put it: being full of ‘double talk, neologisms,
‘When a large proportion of a person’s pay is non sequiturs and contradictory
based on variable financial incentives, those statements’.
people are more likely to cheat.’ Research into gender has shown,
That was certainly true in my days in surprisingly, that there doesn’t seem
publishing. Sales bonuses were paid on to be a disadvantage for either men or
the number of books shipped out of the women. Researchers did however find
warehouse in any one year. that, whereas low-rated male teachers
These were calculated in the January of
the following year and bonuses paid out in were considered ‘boring’, similarly rated
February. female teachers were ‘too smart’, ‘not
But books are sold on a sale or return smart enough’ or were simply a ‘bitch’.
basis. Student evaluations of teaching allow
So sales teams simply shipped out a mass students to have a voice and can be a
of books before Christmas knowing most useful source of information, but they
would be returned, unsold, three months need to be used with care.
later. References for this article can be
Just after the bonuses had been paid. found on my blog at:
http://malingual.blogspot.tw/2017/05/
student-feedback-dos-and-donts.html
MELANIE BUTLER
Editor at large Russ Mayne is Centre
@MelanieButler_E Manager at Dalian Institute
Should teaching really of Technology, Leicester
feel like a race? campus.
editorial@elgazette.com 27