From the just released OECD PISA survey of educational performance (p. 19 in the Executive Summary):
Since both PISA 2000 and PISA 2009 focused on reading, it is possible to track how student performance in reading changed over that period. Among the 26 OECD countries with comparable results in both assessments, Chile, Israel, Poland, Portugal, Korea, Hungary and Germany as well as the partner countries Peru, Albania, Indonesia, Latvia, Liechtenstein and Brazil all improved their reading performance between 2000 and 2009, while performance declined in Ireland, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Australia.
This is not good news (although partly it may be due to recent increases in immigration). Across Australia, we need to find ways to get higher quality teachers. Fixing up the career and salary progression of teachers would be a good start, so that teachers are rewarded if they stay in the profession, and aren’t tempted to leave for better paying jobs in Government education departments.
N.B. PISA stands for Programme for International Student Assessment.
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My understating is that there is little if any relationship between teacher salary and performance on a national level. For instance, Scandinavian countries have some of the best educational outcomes but relatively low pay.
On some data I looked at Australia and the US have some of the highest salary levels. While ever society treats teachers poorly in terms of attitudes (e.g. Those who can do, those who can’t teach; look at all their holidays – what a perk) people will not be attracted to what is essentially needed to be a vocation.
Gavin, thanks for your comment. Cross-country comparisons can be problematic because you can never be sure you’re controlling for all the relevant variables (e.g. unobservable cultural differences). Maybe the Scandinavians place a higher social status on teaching than Australians or Americans do, and that higher social status compensates for lower pay. Anyway it doesn’t really matter a lot what happens in Scandinavia. We need to formulate policy based on the Australian situation. The Australian evidence is much more supportive of the need to fix up teacher salaries (I’m not necessarily talking about an increase in average salaries but rather higher salaries for the best teachers, and lower salaries for the worst, so the total wage bill doesn’t change). We know that better pay will attract better teachers. Former ANU economics Prof Andrew Leigh found a strong link between teacher starting salaries and the number of people wanting to study teaching, which impacted positively on the average aptitude of education students.
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