JTA says no to performance-based pay
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CARL GILCHRIST, Observer staff reporter
Friday, April 02, 2004
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| CAMERON. we have education regulations and law governing how teachers operate and we must use those regulations |
THE Jamaica Teachers' Association says it is not in support of a government proposal to pay teachers based on their performance, saying there are other ways to deal with incompetent teachers.
"The association does not and will not support performance-linked pay.," JTA general secretary, Dr Adolph Cameron said Wednesday night.
. "There are people from the ministry who know that the effort in place now to develop a performance management system does not have as its base any link with pay,"
Cameron told an awards ceremony at the Renaissance Jamaica Grande in Ocho Rios, to honour Florence Morris-Barrett, former principal of the Ewarton High School in St Catherine.
Dr Cameron said the guidelines in place to govern how teachers operate should be used to weed out teachers who are not doing their job.
"We have education regulations and law governing how teachers operate and we must use those regulations to get rid of those colleagues who are not doing their work," he said.
His comments came against the background of today's launch of the government's pilot programme in some schools to determine if teachers' pay should in fact be tied to performance in the classroom.
The pilot project is to include schools from Regions One and Five that covers Kingston, St Andrew, St Thomas, Manchester and St Elizabeth.
The government's effort is in response to the continued poor performances by some students at all rungs of the education ladder.
Former president of the JTA, Sadie Comrie, had said last year that the teachers' union conditionally supported performance-based pay for the island's teachers. "The JTA does not have a problem with performance assessment as long as it is administered objectively and transparently," Comrie said in an address at the Ascot High School in St Catherine on April 29 last year.
Meanwhile, Dr Cameron said Wednesday night that government should not get complacent now that the JTA has decided to sign the memorandum of understanding, which places a three per cent cap on wages for public sector workers over the next two years.
"What we must ensure is that the sacrifice that we make over the next two years will result in economic growth in this country so that when 2006 comes, nobody comes and say to us they don't have anything to give to us," Dr Cameron said.
The JTA, he said, decided to sign the MOU as "the country was in a difficult economic situation and if it were to collapse then all of us would be in it".
He said it was a difficult decision for the JTA to make as it meant that the island's teachers would be giving up salary increases for the next two years.
At the same time, Cameron urged the government to get a commitment from the private sector to ensure that they keep prices down to ensure that the standards of living of the teachers were not eroded.
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