The licensing of teachers, which the Government proposes to do, will probably be a good thing.

Teachers, once registered by a special government agency, will be required to abide by a code of ethics and to maintain minimum performance standards, failure to achieve which could lead to decertification.

All this, however, assumes that the Government eventually fashions the appropriate legislation for the certification process and it is enacted by Parliament, after which specific regulations will be crafted. We wouldn't advise anyone to hold his or her breath one bit that this will be accomplished anytime soon.

In any event, this process for seeking teacher accountability appears, on the face of it, a bit cumbersome and fraught with potential pitfalls. We would not, for instance, be surprised if a teacher were to challenge the registering council in the courts on the ground that it's a licensing regime tantamount to a restraint of trade. The regulations, therefore, will have to be crafted with care.

Better performance

So, while this newspaper has no quarrel with the aims and objectives of the planned Jamaica teaching council, we believe that there is, in the short-term, an immediate and far less complicated way to achieve the ultimate goal of this agency: that is, better performance from teachers - which translates to better education outcomes.

Whatever happened to the concept of performance-based pay? This, unfortunately, is an idea that has long been resisted by that very typical trade union, the Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA) and the rest of the education establishment. There is every explanation, more correctly excuse, about how the teaching profession is different and what may be useful for other sectors is inappropriate for this supposedly special profession and its unique environment.

As surprising as it might seem, the teaching establishment has been able to gain great buy-in to this woolly logic. At the very least, the Government has been bamboozled, supposing that it is somehow too scared to do otherwise.

How else could the administration have agreed, as it recently did, to approve an additional $15 billion in additional payments to teachers without demanding anything in return or any clear explanation of what taxpayers can expect? Ostensibly, the increase is to bring teachers' salaries to 80 per cent of what prevails for similar jobs in the private sector. That, though, just can't be that; not in these hard economic times when taxpayers will have to dig deep to meet this commitment.

The bottom line is that there are accepted measures for educational outcomes, all of which are utilised in Jamaica: numeracy and literacy competence, test scores, matriculation rates and so on. Representatives of the JTA and other apologists like to point to the social disparities and the basic educational gaps between schools in Jamaica, which affect outcomes. This, we do not discount.

However, these are minor obstacles not preclusion to drafting merit reward and accountability measures for teachers, as they do for professionals in other sectors. It is possible, for instance, to add a weight to a school for the social demographics of its students and have this impact on the criteria against which teacher's performance is weighed.

It is time for the whining to end and for teachers to be held to new accountability standards, starting with measuring what they produce for the pay that they get.

The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner. To respond to a Gleaner editorial, email us: editor@gleanerjm.com or fax: 922-6223. Responses should be no longer than 400 words. Not all responses will be published.