Teacher Attitude Towards Performance Incentives in Georgia Dissertation

Teacher Attitude Towards Performance Incentives in Georgia - Dissertation Example The effectiveness of the teachers has a greater influence on the learning of students, than any other factors affecting the student learning in the control of schools in the world that include the size of the school, the size of the class, and the effectiveness of â€Å"after-school programs† (Bacharach & David 2009). There have been concerns on Georgia about the contribution of teachers towards the studying of students and the quality of the teacher workforce and there have been calls to reform the compensation of teachers. The survey result would be an indication of how the teacher attitudes differ by personal characteristics such as subject area, school assignment, or experience as well as the teacher workforce that include the school performance and the level of trust among teachers and principals. There have been calls by policymakers, analysts, and education advocates that the criterion used on teacher compensation is inappropriate and therefore it has been criticized as being too uniform and rigid. Critics claim that the present system in Georgia is not efficient as it concentrates on the experience of teachers and the qualifications they hold alone and this makes the teaching profession unattractive to result oriented people who might be having technical skills (Michael, 2007). Moreover, the critics of this compensation system for teachers argue that the present system does not do much in regard to motivate and reward effective teachers. Therefore instead of the uniform pay of teachers that goes ahead to ignore the labor market realities, reformers argue that they have provided the teachers with a varied incentive. However, despite the reformers claiming of the different incentives to teachers, this does not have any effect on the teacher motivation. The incentives have given too little as compared to the teaching assignments (Ballou, 2009). The Problem in Question According to a US study, there has been the comparison of the effectiveness of rew arding a select group of teachers against all the teachers in the school (Baugh, 2009). An analysis of the National Education Longitudinal Study, the US Department of Education's School, and the data from the Staffing Survey on performance pay came up with a conclusion that rewarding a select group of teachers was effective in student learning as compared to the whole school (Brodie & Ron 2008). However, several recent studies reveal that rewarding of the entire group of teachers in the whole school have a positive affect on the test scores of students. In addition, the research shows that through rewarding the teachers uniformly the teachers have an opportunity and encouraged to cooperate with the other teachers in the school by sharing their experiences. Critics of the selected pay program believe that the whole-school performance pay system are more acceptable to the teachers and less â€Å"controversial† (Donald & James, 2010). Regarding this, evidence of the problem that calls for farther research on the problem before policy recommendations are made. The purpose of this study is to find out why the teachers have different views regarding the pay for performance initiative. Definitions In this section, the definition of performance pay is dealt within general to set up a context on how it applies to the teachers specifically in Georgia. Therefore the key word in this paper is pay for performance in Georgia. This is the plan to have a direct relationship between the employee pay and the output of the employee. The pay for performance plan often considers of a select group of persons or the whole group of people. This plan is in line with the mostly held belief in humans that employee need to be rewarded depending on their