Asking Teachers In A-List Education Systems “What Works?”: Shanghai Teachers’ Perceptions of Performance Pay

• In Event: The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Accountability and Datafication in Education: Global Perspectives

Proposal

Performance pay is grounded in the belief that enticements and competition improve learning, teaching, and educational markets (Hanushek & Lindseth, 2009). Specifically, advocates maintain that performance pay maximizes teacher effort, and thus bolsters educator quality, school quality, and education markets. While research shows bonuses do not substantively improve learning and teaching (Balch & Springer, 2015), we know little about exactly how bonuses are enacted and shape teaching. Performance pay policies scale around the world, research must interrogate how bonuses impact the teachers and teaching. Policymakers need research that explains how incentives are enacted and operate inside of classrooms. Centering the voices of teachers and leaders generates new knowledge that can help direct performance accountability policy improvement.

Those who aspire for high ranks in comparative international assessments and other proxies of global economic leadership are turning to regions such as Shanghai for policy lessons on “what works” (Author, 2017). The author employed qualitative case study (Yin, 2003) and semi-structured, qualitative interviews (Patton, 1990) with 26 teachers and two principals in two high performing elementary schools in Shanghai. Using the frames of expectancy and goal setting, the author analyzed teacher perspectives on how financial bonuses shape teaching. Expectancy theory suggests intrinsic motivation is driven by one’s perspectives of expectancy (i.e., effort leads to reward), instrumentality (i.e., performance leads to reward) and valence (i.e., attractiveness of the expected rewards) (Heneman, 1998; Vroom, 1964). Perceptions of different aspects of fairness and goal attainability mediate expectancy, instrumentality, valence, motivation, and capacity for improved or desirable performance (Rice, Malen, Jackson, & Hoyer, 2015).

Findings show most teachers perceived valence and instrumentality as low and expectancy as high, and perceptions on fairness were mixed. The majority of participants expressed high expectancy, but they were unclear on how much merit pay they received, how merit pay corresponded with their performance, and why merit pay varied from month to month. The majority of teachers found bonuses slight and insignificant in salary improvement. Teachers thought that merit pay aimed to incentivize teachers to put forth greater effort in student support activities, and this had little to do with improved teaching quality. When probed on how effort toward instruction was rewarded, teachers explained this was not the function of incentives.

These findings interrogate two economic persuasions of bonuses. First, bonuses are said to provoke individuals to exert maximum effort; yet participants reported they were not compelled to put forth more effort because reward sizes were unattractive. Secondly, bonus advocates say greater effort leads to better performance and a better labor force. These participants reported that the rewarded effort, whether maximum or not, was for activities outside of classroom instruction. In addition to the political and policy costs and undesirable effects of incentives, this study suggests incentives have the potential to further direct teacher attention away from instruction and toward ad hoc activities. For incentives to achieve the desired end result of improved student outcomes, instructional improvement must be the core policy outcome (Darling-Hammond, 2013).

Author

• Priya Goel La Londe, University of Hong Kong