UNICEF Mongolia - Teachers College Columbia University

CHAPTER 5: TOTAL PAY OF TEACHERS AND THE BONUS SYSTEM
level in ways that make it a non-performance-based salary addion. There is a tendency for schools to
give the same amount to all teachers, except for those who are clearly underperforming. Frequently, all
teachers of a school receive 30 percent of their base salary every four months as part of the bonus for
the skills-based quarterly performance. This translates to a salary supplement of 7.5 percent of the base
salary per month for almost every teacher in Mongolia.
From the 123 teachers in the database of this study, only one teacher did not receive a quarterly
performance bonus. This means that 99.2 percent of all teachers receive a bonus, most of them for the
same percentage of their base salaries. As menoned before, however, there might have been a selecon
bias among the interviewed teachers and this rao may be over-reported. Therefore, the research team
of this study also interviewed a total of 35 educaon managers in 28 schools and asked how many
teachers did not receive a performance-based bonus in the last quarter. Of the 35 interviewed educaon
managers,
• 29 educaon managers (83 percent) answered “none”; that is all teachers received a quarterly
performance-bonus;
• three educaon managers (9 percent) answered that one teacher (typically a teacher that
clearly underperforms) did not receive the quarterly bonus; and
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• three educaon managers (9 percent) answered that there was a problem with the salary fund
and that they have not yet made the quarterly payments.
In other words, only nine percent of schools withhold quarterly bonus payments to teachers. The
educaon managers confirmed that only in exceponal cases is the bonus withheld to signal to the
teacher that major changes in behavior or performance are expected. Thus, the quarterly bonus payments
are not used to reward high-performing teachers, but instead are only used to punish poor-performing
teachers. Apart from the ambiguity of the evaluaon criteria, it is perhaps also for cultural reasons that
only poor performance is punished while high performance is not especially recognized in the form of
bonus payments. Despite aempts to suspend the social redistribuon pracce, seen most recently in
2008 when the award-winning scores were reduced to two categories (A and B), educaon managers
and principals in effect undermine the idea of performance-based bonuses by handing out bonuses to
almost everybody on the staff.
This clearly defeats the purpose of the results-based public administraon reform. In effect, the bonus
funcons as a 13 th monthly base salary rather than as a performance award. What is called into the
queson is not the social redistribuon pracce, but rather the mulplicity of awards that, except for
the controversial Olympiads and compeons, are very vaguely defined and are therefore suscepble to
subjecve judgment and non-formal evaluaon criteria.
5.3. SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS
The empirical data gathered at the school level enable us to esmate actual salaries or total pay of
teachers. The average total monthly pay of teachers—with addional teaching hours, funconal and rank
supplements, and bonuses—is 374,171 MNT. A typical high-income total pay for a teacher is 546,737
MNT, and a typical low-income total monthly income is 317, 079 MNT.
This chapter also analyzed the bonus system in greater detail. The bonus system in Mongolia is deeply
TEACHERS IN MONGOLIA: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY ON RECRUITMENT INTO TEACHING,
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT, AND RETENTION OF TEACHERS
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