Teachers’ salaries should be based on their students’ academic performance.
The extent of salaries of teachers is a controversial issue in the sense that it is ambiguous whether it should depend on the academic performance of students. The performance-based salary system might be beneficial for incentive issues, but it can hurt the communication between teachers and students on the other hand. Therefore, we cannot fully accept such a mechanism as an objective truth for the reasons as follows.
First of all, the payment mechanism basing on the correspondent success of students might enhance the effort of teachers by giving them incentive to participate more actively in students’ academic activities. A constant rate of wage for teacher can reduce the enthusiastisism to evaluate and develop children’s level of educational achievement. For example, teacher might think that they receive their wage anyway regardless of how much they contribute to the students’ life and it might be unnecessary to monitor the progress of students in class. In addition, it would become possible to redistribute the total income among educators in favor of the good teachers as a reward for their struggle. If that is the case, some eager teachers might try more to educate students, maybe to make more money to be used for their need.
On the other hand, we cannot easily say that it is the correct mechanism for education system for the well-being of students and of teachers. For some schools where students’ success is relatively lower than others, it would be a great challenge to increase the performance of students and it would discourage teachers’ salaries. Moreover, there would be a grade inflation in the sense that some teachers might cheat and give higher grades to gain an additional amount of income. If that is the case, it become more and more difficult to evaluate the true development in the academic records and results in unrealistic educational interpretations.
As a result, it is not easy to accept a statement completely even if it has correct emphasis on some issues, as the determination of salaries of teacher on the basis of students’ performance. It can also be said that there can be other ways to increase the focus of teachers on their jobs other than student performance-based mechanism, which might have less harmful side effects as a whole system.