Thursday, October 29, 2015

Where evaluation meets merit pay

I have written previously about merit pay for teachers, and about teacher compensation in general. Today I read an article, based on the results of a serious UK study and analysis, which provides recent and concrete evidence of the problems of linking pay to student "performance".

Teacher retention

Business sees value in customer retention; studies have shown that new customer recruitment costs 5 - 30 times as much as keeping an existing customer. Surely the same is true of teachers, especially when the processes of understanding and adapting to a new school and a new culture and of developing relationships with superiors, colleagues, students and parents, all of which can take two years, are taken into account. So how can schools improve teacher retention?