Performance pay, educators more for more positive academic results, is not new. It is a concept that has been tried in isolated ways in the United States for several decades. These efforts usually are limited to grade school and usually are short-lived. According to Donald B. Gratz, author of "The Problem with Performance Pay,” most attempts to pay educators based on performance are founded on flawed logic including 1. That educators are unmotivated, 2. That the institution overall is failing, and 3. That measuring the academic achievement of the students is all that matters. Each of these assumptions, according to Gratz, can easily be refuted with evidence. Most educators care about their students. Our schools and colleges produced the society that has created the world of computing, the Internet and convergent cellular phone technology. The society demands that students are literate and understand math, yes, but also that they learn to appreciate the arts, interpersonal communications, and that they become productive citizens, things which are not measured on standardized tests.
At the community college level I also feel that my colleagues care about their students and do a good job of educating them. However, President Obama’s belief that community colleges are a key part of the economic well-being and growth of the nation will likely mean greater scrutiny of student success on-ground and online. I have noted that educators in distance-learning often believe that they should be paid more for developing and conducting distance-learning courses and programs than if they were doing a comparable thing on ground. However, this doesn't seem to be in any way based on student performance. The belief is that teaching online requires more work and more time than teaching on ground. I am puzzled that efforts to garner more pay are not connected to performance. It is not clear to me that an individual should be paid more merely because it takes more effort or time to teach. If that was the case, should we pay more to a person on ground if they took more time to develop a course? Individuals should be paid more if the results are significantly better than the results in a traditional face-to-face class. In college we tend to look at two primary measures of success, grades and retention. Currently, in our online classes these two measures are statistically the same as face-to-face classes. So as of now these cannot be the bases for performance pay. However, what if we begin to look at other measures of performance? Do students online retain knowledge longer or better? Does the predominant cooperative, collaborative, and discussion-based style of the online class increase interpersonal skills which makes for a stronger workforce? Admittedly, these types of things can be hard to quantify. Yet they are likely the exact kinds of measures that if totaled could justify performance pay in distance-learning.
