UNICEF Mongolia - Teachers College Columbia University

CHAPTER 5: TOTAL PAY OF TEACHERS AND THE BONUS SYSTEM
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flawed and deserves a thorough revision. It is a system that has developed over me and now includes
components and aspects that are incongruent with each other. Over the past two decades, the bonus
system for outcomes-based contracts and quarterly performance payments was merely added to a
system that already operated with skills bonuses. This is an example of addive school reform in which
new pracces and regulaons are merely added to exisng ones without replacing, or phasing out,
previous regulaons.
Each bonus system is problemac in itself for a different reason:
• The bonuses for Olympiads and compeons reward teachers for focusing on high-performing
students.
• The bonuses for outcomes-based contracts enrely rely on funds generated at the school level
and thus generate inequalies between large (resource-rich) schools and small (resource-poor)
schools.
• The bonuses for quarterly performance are financed from the centrally allocated salary fund
but, in effect, funcon as a 13 th monthly salary in that the bonus is given indiscriminately to
almost every teacher at the school, thus undermining the purpose of the bonus.
TEACHERS IN MONGOLIA: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY ON RECRUITMENT INTO TEACHING,
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT, AND RETENTION OF TEACHERS
The following Table 18 presents the main features of the three bonuses and also summarizes the empirical
findings from the study with regard to the actual beneficiaries. The column on actual beneficiaries lists
the percentage of teachers who received the bonus in the past quarter or in the past year, respecvely,
in the 28 examined schools of this study.
From the perspecve of educaon managers, there is considerable overlap in the evaluaon criteria
for the outcomes-based contract and the quarterly performance payments. Even though both bonus
types require significant paper work from the educaon managers, they are ulmately vague, and
the evaluaons come across as arbitrary. As a result, educaon managers do not dare to make harsh
judgments on teachers’ performance for fear of being cricized for being biased and corrupt. There is
a need to reconcile or integrate the two bonuses systems of outcomes-based contracts and quarterly
performance payments.
In addion, there is a need to revisit the evaluaon criteria. The outcomes-contracts do comprise a
formave student evaluaon component. That is, teachers are in principle rewarded for student progress
over the course of the school year and are thereby encouraged to draw aenon to mentoring individual
students. For a variety of reasons, however, formave student evaluaon is not strictly enforced. The
outcomes-contracts are driven by self-assessment and only in rare cases is the performance of the
teacher rigorously assessed externally. As a result, teachers inflate the grades of their students towards
the end of the school year in order to document progress over the course of the past few months.
Nevertheless, strengthening formave student evaluaon and encouraging aenon to weak students
would be very much needed if schools seek to systemacally aract out-of-school children and retain
them in school unl the end of compulsory educaon or beyond.
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