Paying teachers for 'quality'

How do we measure the 'best' teachers?? While this may seem an easy question to answer for some, further thought reveals that it is an extremely difficult one to answer.

Insight (SBS Television) recently ran a debate on this very topic with part of the transcript as follows:

"JULIE BISHOP: It depends very much on the merit-based system you introduce. It could be from incentives or bonuses through to AWAs. But the point is these competencies can be assessed as in any other profession. You can tell who are the people who deserve more money.

"JENNY BROCKIE: So who will be deciding? Will it be the principals?

"JULIE BISHOP: You ask any parent, any student, any other teacher, and they can tell you who the good teachers in the school are. You'd have a combination of criteria, specified measures. It could be student performance, it could be contribution to the wellbeing of the school, it could be peer review, references from parents and other teachers and students. So you could have a combination of criteria that would lead to performance-based pay. "

So, here we have the federal Education Minister, and therefore spokesperson for the Federal Government, which would like to see such a system introduced, not knowing how on earth it can be measured. Julie Bishop's dancing around this issue is evidence that while the Howard Government would support such a move, it has no idea how to go about it. The minister has never mentioned research which has already gone some way to measuring this.

All the way throughout this program, Bishop had her shoulder rubbing against Kevin Donnelly's. There's a pretty open relationship here about who is Bishop's consultant, and so, I will quote ...

"DR KEVIN DONNELLY: Just very quickly, my daughter Amelia, when she was in Grade 4, my wife and I discovered she couldn't read. Now, I wasn't really interested in the teacher giving her self-esteem or that care, share grow approach, I wanted my daughter to be able to read, to write, to do arithmetic. She couldn't read - we had to teach her at home. So I'd argue that you need to look at teaching not just in terms of these more effective domains. At the end of the day, parents want their children to be taught, they need to, especially if they're going on to Year 12 to tertiary, they need to be properly equipped. "

I'm suspecting there may be some credibility lost when 'an expert' advocates for measuring the quality of teachers but at the same time claims to have a child who 'can't read' at Year 4 and places the burden upon their child's teacher ... This is from someone who says he is a quality teacher ("I've been teaching [English] for 18 years", he says at the end of every one of his columns. And, he's partial to letting people know he has received teaching awards ...).