A study by researchers at the Centre for Civil Society finds that budget private schools have some of the best ideas as far as incentivising teachers’ performance is concerned. Researchers Mansi Kabra and Ronak Jain interviewed 55 teachers and seven school-heads from four elite private schools, three budget private ones, three government ones and one government-aided school in Delhi.
The study found that though the differences in pay were wide—the threshold was high for government school teachers (R27,000 a month in primary schools) while budget private schools paid as low as R2,000 a month to beginners—salary didn’t affect teachers’ performance significantly. This seems to bear out the Aser findings as well, given despite the high teachers’ salaries, government schools have thrown almost consistently poor learning standards while the low salaries in budget private schools don’t seem to have stopped their teachers from contributing to improving learning standards in private schools. Budget private schools have also experimented with various forms of performance-linked pay, which is absent in government and elite private schools, and have found these to have motivated their teaching staff.
These schools have also better monitoring and evaluation systems, and better formats for recognising excellence, than their elite peers and government schools. In fact, the researchers’ top recommendations for schools is to adopt some of the practices that are already becoming common in budget private schools.
Read the story on The Financial Express website.