Perhaps some of the most important figures in our lives that help in our growth as people of the society and shape our personalities are our teachers. Every time a student excels in his or her performance, be it related to academia or sports, the teachers are given due credit for their efforts in educating the child. Although teachers should be rewarded when their students give a good performance and criticized, only to a certain extent, when their students collectively perform poorly, a teacher’s salary must not be based on their students’ academic performance.



Any class contains different kinds of students. There are students that are extremely dedicated to their academics and consistently perform exceptionally well. There are also students that show no interest in their academics, maybe because their interest lies elsewhere outside the classroom or because they lack the focus or interest in school. Every teacher, during their career, have students of the latter type that they try to focus more on and consistently try to improve their performance in class. However, sometimes, the teachers are unable to get through these students. To no fault of the teacher, the student might keep performing poorly in their classes. There could be several reasons for this. The student might be facing personal issues, maybe at their homes that affect their academic performance or might be investing more of their time in pursuing other talents. In such cases, it is unfair to limit the teacher’s salary because of the student’s poor performance. The teacher might have tried his or her best to inculcate the student’s interest in the particular subject but failed to do so. The efforts of the teacher are visible in the performance of other students, including good as well as average performers. However, the performance of just a few bad students must not be a reason to determine a lower salary for a teacher. Sometimes, the poor performance of a student depends on a student and not the teacher.



Moreover, a good performance is a highly subjective metric. For say, a student who has shown average to poor performance up until now and has been improving his or her performance recently, might still not be considered a student with a good performance. However, one cannot deny that improvement in his or her performance is also a very positive aspect and credit must be given to the teacher. A very difficult subject might show average performance of the students over the years but without a teacher’s efforts, it would be expected to be worse. Determining that the teacher deserves lesser salary because the average performance of the students is not good enough as compared to other subjects that might be easier, is unfair.



However, it is certainly true that determining a teacher’s salary based on their students’ performance can incentivize teachers to put in more efforts in their classrooms. Teachers shall spend more time on focusing on students that do not perform well and try to engage more students in the classroom.



Although tying up a teacher’s salary with their student’s performance can provide incentives to teachers to teach well, determining the bar for good performance becomes a tricky situation. Also, the performance of a few bad students might affect the overall performance of the class. Hence, a teacher can be provided benefits for his or her students’ performance but their salary should not be dependent on it.