Commission on the Reform of Ontario's Public Services

Appropriate Incentives for Teachers
Ontario’s goal is a public service that delivers consistent quality, generates excellent value for
money and supports the best possible outcomes for those it serves. A public service of this
sort can only be sustained by recruiting the best and the brightest workforce. If government is
to recruit highly skilled people away from opportunities with other organizations, it needs to
offer a compensation package with appropriate incentives tied to performance, outcomes
and productivity.
These principles have particular resonance in the education sector. Public education is a vital
public service in promoting child development and future prosperity. Teachers are charged
with the critical responsibility of providing service in a manner that promotes the best possible
outcomes on these fronts. Research supports the linkage between quality teachers and
student achievement. For example, one study suggests that jurisdictions seeking to improve
student achievement “may be well-advised to attend, at least in part, to the preparation and
qualifications of the teachers they hire and retain in the profession.” 30
A precise relationship between quality and specific types or levels of teacher training is more
difficult to determine, especially because it is difficult to estimate the effects of good teaching
and how long they last. 31 However, meaningful and effective professional development is
regarded as an important component of an evaluation and compensation system that supports
student success. 32 Research could yield further information that policy-makers would find
useful. For example, the impact of a particular form of teacher training may vary by subject;
studies have suggested that there is a stronger correlation between teacher training and the
student learning experience in mathematics than in other subjects. 33 This type of information
could be applied to policies that encourage the most effective forms of teacher training.
Ontario teachers are provided salary increases as incentives to engage in continued learning
and development through the Teacher Qualifications and Experience (Q&E) grant, which
recognizes the additional experience they gain each year between their second and eleventh
year of teaching. These increases are in addition to any across-the-board salary increases
negotiated in collective agreements.
30 Linda Darling-Hammond, “Teacher Quality and Student Achievement: A Review of State Policy Evidence,” Center for the Study of
Teaching and Policy, December 1999, downloaded from
http://www.nctaf.org/strategies/assure/teacher_quality_assurance/documents/LDH_State_Policy_Evidence.pdf, pp. 38-39.
31 See, for example, Thomas J. Kane, Douglas O. Staiger, “Estimating Teacher Impacts on Student Achievement: An Experimental
Evaluation,” NBER Working Paper 14607, December 2008; Jesse Rothstein, “Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking,
Decay, and Student Achievement,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 125 (2010), no. 1, pp. 175–214.
32 Daniel Weisberg, Susan Sexton, Jennifer Mulhern and David Keeling, The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on
Differences in Teacher Effectiveness (Brooklyn: The New Teacher Project, 2009), pp. 7–8, downloaded from
http://widgeteffect.org/downloads/TheWidgetEffect.pdf.
33 Andrew J. Wayne and Peter Youngs, “Teacher Characteristics and Student Achievement Gains: A Review,” Review of Educational
Research 73 (Spring 2003), no. 1, p. 103.
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