Teachers’ salaries should be based on their students' academic performance.Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim. In developing and supporting your position, be sure to address the most compe

You can never overestimate the influence of a great teacher on the life of a child. Accordingly, great teachers deserve to be paid well. The prompt suggests that teachers should be compensated according to their students’ academic performance, which implies that a teacher’s performance is determined based on the academic performance of his or her students. I strongly disagree with this proposal for three reasons.

First, a teacher’s income should reflect his or her performance, which should be evaluated by a number of indicators. One of the indicators might be the academic performance of their students. However, other factors exist that are no less important. For example, one indicator could be whether or not children like his classes. After all, if she sacrifices the passion and curiosity in the children for a raise in their academic scores, she damages the children’s long-term academic potential. Other indicators may include, whether he challenges students to take intellectural risks. Risk-taking often yields less-than-satisfactory performance in the short term. But it is tremendously beneficial to the children’s long-term life outcome. Focusing on the academic performance only would almost certainly exclude the room for experimentation and risk-taking, which is how real learning happens. These other indicators should also be taken into consideration while one determins techers’ salaries. And these indicators often conflict with the students academic performance.

Secondly, determining a teacher’s income purely on his / her students’ academic performance causes other issues. Once the students’ academic performance becomes the only KPI that determines a teacher’s compensation, the teacher is incentivised to adjust his / her behavior to maximise this KPI. Such behavior may include, but not limited to, rejecting developmentally challenged students, discouraging students’ participation in extra-curricular, i.e. non-academic, activities, using fear-based approach to manage students etc. In fact, one can already see the aftermath of such a teacher evaluation system in China. In order to raise the academic scores of their class, teachers would employ a variety of means such as frequent ranking and re-ranking of students after each test, public shaming of students have low academic scores, cancellation of “unimportant” classes such as Physical Education or Arts. These means prove to be efficient in achieving what they are meant to achieve - Chinese students on average are good at scoring in standardized tests. However, students’ socio-emotional development falls behind their global peers. You end up having many young adults behaving like “giant babies” in colleges and workplaces. So is the outcome of focusing on academic performance.

Last, nowadays, students’ academic performance is almost exclusively measured by standardized tests, which causes additional problems. Standardized test scores can reflect certain aspects of one’s academic ability, but they become more problematic than helpful in recent years, as more and more schools and colleges rely on them to evaluate students. Many of the world’s most important questions cannot be answered with the certainly and brevity demanded by multiple-choice type answers. And our children need to learn to identify, to pose these questions, to imagine possible solutions, and iterate on them based on the results of implementation. This requires curiosity, perseverance, imagination, creative thinking, little of which could be measured via standardized tests. As the world marches into an era of machine learning, these will grow more and more important, as the specific knowledge and information will become less and less so. Until one day, students’ academic performance could be measured to properly reflect their curiosity, perseverance, imagination and creative thinking, we could perhaps then attempt to use it as a proxy for students’ overall quality, and therefore to base teachers’ income on it.

In summary, given the issues raised above, it is problematic to pay a teacher based on the students’ academic performance, before an all-encompassing measurement is devised for students’ overall intellectual abilities.