Professional teaching work incentives and their relation to assessment and individual economic incentive policies

Abstract

Strengthening the teaching profession has been recognized as key to improving the quality of education worldwide. The logic that education policy in Chile has taken to achieve this goal is based largely on the design and implementation of assessment programs leading directly or indirectly to individual economical incentives. However, how aligned are the assumptions of these programs with what actually encourages teachers to do their job? The performance of four focus groups and six semi-structured interviews give rise to the main finding of this study: there are four cores that encourage teachers’ professional job. With this, they attribute a negative sense to both performance evaluation programs and individual economic incentives programs. These results allow discussing the economistic and culturalist assumptions underlying assessment programs and economic incentives in Chile.