Incentives & career paths

Published February 24, 2017
The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.
The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.

TWO equally talented women, studying the same subject in the same university, ace their Master’s level course. One of them decides to become a primary-level teacher at a government school as she wants to teach children. The other decides to join the bureaucracy through the civil services examination. The teacher, even after 30 years of service, and only if she is lucky, will just about reach Grade 16. The bureaucrat, if she survives for 25 odd years, has a decent chance of reaching Grade 22. Even if the bureaucrat does not reach Grade 22, she will still retire in Grade 21 at the very least.

Why do we restrict teachers from reaching a senior level and getting a higher pay? Do teachers not deserve promotions if they diligently do the job that has been assigned to them? Why is there a ceiling in terms of grades for teachers?

The nature of the two jobs is different. Entry requirements are higher for teaching jobs; usually a degree or diploma in teaching is also required beyond a subject-specific Bachelor’s or Master’s degree. Beyond entry, the two jobs might not be very different. It might be true that as bureaucrats achieve seniority in their career their responsibilities, and the size of organisations/budgets they have control over, might increase a lot more than in the case of primary school teachers. But does that mean that the primary school teacher’s job is any less important? Why can a primary school teacher not retire from her school in Grade 22 if she has performed very well over a 25- to 30-year service career?


We are missing the larger narrative of who becomes a teacher in Pakistan and why.


The problem here might be the unified grade structure that puts teachers and bureaucrats on the same Grade 1-22 scale. If we want bureaucrats and teachers to be rewarded differently, we need to separate the two grade systems — but we need to ensure that the career paths of teachers are also rewarding and incentivise performance through recognition, promotion and increase in salaries. Why should ceilings be imposed on teachers?

Under the current circumstances should anyone become a primary school teacher if they have the option of being a bureaucrat and/or of following other more rewarding careers? Unless a person is very passionate about teaching and does not care about rewards/returns he or she will opt for other careers.

Who ends up being a teacher then? Mostly people who could not enter other professions and for whom teaching as a profession was not the first choice. In various surveys of teachers, when asked if teaching was their first choice in terms of a profession, an overwhelming majority replied in the negative. They wanted to do something else but when all else failed, they had no choice but to enter the teaching profession.

In the current and recent narrative on reasons for public schools not doing well, the teachers have always been cast as the villain of the piece. The story was, and is, that teachers in the public sector get higher salaries and have better job security than their counterparts in the private sector, that they have higher formal qualifications and get more training but do not outperform the private-sector teachers in terms of students’ results. The culprits, in this narrative, are the teacher: they are reluctant to work hard, and when they are pushed they form ‘mafias’ (unions and associations) to resist.

A lot of recent reform efforts, for public schools, have come out of this narrative. We have hired monitors to conduct surprise visits of schools to check on attendance and class performance of teachers, departments for staff development conduct their own monitoring, and children are tested frequently to see if teachers are doing their job. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa even docks salaries of teachers if they are absent from school for any reason.

Though the reforms had some impact initially, most of the gains have reached a plateau by now. More importantly, we have not seen any impact on what the children are learning: the Annual Status of Education Report and the Punjab Examination Commission results have shown no improvements over the last many years. Clearly, we are missing the larger narrative which has to do with who becomes a teacher in Pakistan and why. And this is crucially linked to the career paths we offer our teachers.

Judges, bureaucrats and army personnel get land when they retire. Recently, there has been quite a bit of discussion on the issue even in the media. Where some people criticised the practice, others have justified it saying that it is not only legal and in accordance with precedence, it is also good practice to reward service to the country.

The 90 acres (around 36 hectares) that went to the last army chief might be a ‘just’ reward for his service but why does the same thinking not apply to teachers too? A public-sector teacher typically serves the country and educates/trains its future generation for decades. Retiring from a low grade they receive a pittance as pension after having spent a lifetime getting a low- to medium-level salary. Should we not reward their ‘service’ to the country by giving them plots too? Do they not need housing?

Leaving aside such motivations, people make decisions about careers based on the kind of returns they expect from the options they have. Teaching, whether in the private or public sector, offers low returns. It is no surprise that we do not get the best of our brains in teaching. Better monitoring can give us marginal gains, but it will not alter results much. For that, we need deeper administrative and management reforms: we need to offer better career paths and prospects to teachers. Currently, this does not seem to be even on the reform agenda in the education sector.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.

Published in Dawn, February 24th, 2017

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