| The reform of Chinese compulsory education teachers'performance pay is an important part of the reform of Chinese public institution'distribution system。It is of great significance to the balanced development of our compulsory education and the improvement of teaching quality and inspiring teacher's working passion.The so called teachers'performance pay is a wage system that relating teachers'wages with their assessment results, by assessing their work ability, work attitude and work performance fairly. The theoretical basis of this system is from the theoretical basis of corporate performance pay—incentive theory. There are four incentive theories that influence teachers'performance pay deeply, including Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, Vroom's expectations valence theory, the Adams fairness theory and Skinner's reinforcement theory. They are instructive to the reform of our compulsory education teachers'performance pay.The reforms of compulsory education teachers'performance pay started earlier in foreign countries. Since 80s of last century, the United States has tried to begin this reform, but it was strongly opposed by the two major teachers unions that its progress is very difficult until now. In England, the reform has not been opposed as strongly as in the United States, but it is also not easy to implement. Just because it is more unified, and its assessment is more comprehensive; it has smaller pressure and achieved good results.The reform of Chinese compulsory education teachers'performance pay announced from January 1st 2009. At present, the framework of the system has begun to emerge. The policy has had notable effect, like stabilizing teacher structure, retaining talents and attracting top talents to work in rural.But just like in foreign countries, our reform is also facing many difficulties. First, incentive performance pay is materialized slowly in many areas, and the standards are much lower than the local civil servants'average pay in the areas which have materialized. Second, many teachers have mistaken ideas about the composition,the level and the payment form of the performance pay, which makes them have low acceptability of performance pay. Third, the levels of performance pay are significantly different between different provinces and areas in the same province, the levels of schools attached to the counties are very different from those attached to the cities, and even the levels between teachers in the same school are different, when schools make allot methods of incentive performance pay they usually emphasize administrators and ignore teachers. Finally, it is difficult to evaluate teachers'performance, because teachers'work can't be counted exactly, assessment criteria will integrates with students'study results easily, different subjects, different grades and different post can't be comparable, and it is also difficult to evaluate team work.Considering the reasons, first, the unknown co-ordination responsibility of provincial finance and the heavy burden of county-level finance are the key factors of the inadequate of teachers'performance pay fund and the slow materialization of the policy. Second, the publicity for the policy was poor, so some teachers have hazy understandings about the policy, and misunderstandings appear. Third, different countries have different financial strength, and schools attached to the counties and schools attached to cities have different financial resources, so there are different levels of teachers'performance pay between them. Fourth, lack of supervision and instruction is the major reason for different pay levels between teachers in the same school. Finally, the complexity, cooperation of teaching work and the hysteresis of its effect make it difficult to evaluate teachers'performance.In my opinion, to solve problems above, firstly, it is necessary to establish a funding mechanism for compulsory education teachers'performance pay that shared fund in proportion between financial departments, and strength the responsibility of provincial finance, in order to ensure the fund timely. Secondly, each department should explicitly divide in their functions, and take on the task of explaining the policy appropriately in accordance with teachers'response to the policy. Thirdly, central finance should increase transfer payments to poor areas, and it is necessary to establish uniform standards of teachers'performance pay in the same province, and bring teachers into civil servants, so as to solve the unfair distribution between teachers'in different areas. Fourthly, education director branches, school personnel representatives and labor unions should give play to the role of supervision and instruction when schools make incentive performance pay allot methods, in order to protect against unfairness. Finally, it is necessary to establish a mechanism of performance examine that meet the features of teaching profession, to solve the difficult problem of evaluating teachers'performance by constructing multiple subjects, building a reasonable performance evaluation index system, taking multiple forms of performance assessment and establishing an effective feedback mechanism. |
