According to an international survey, India has ranked 8th in the world in respecting its teachers but it has stood at 26th spot out of 35 countries in terms of paying them.
Needless to say, the wage paid to teachers in India is way less than the pay considered fair for the job. It is not India, but Switzerland, Germany, USA, Canda, and Taiwan- who are paying their teachers well.
According to the Global Teacher Status Index (GTSI) 2018 by the Varkey foundation, in its debutant entry in the global index, India is ranked much below the developing neighbor Malaysia and much smaller countries such as Portugal, Chile, Czech, Hungary, Columbia among others.
In India, the issue is not just not paying well to teachers, but also pay cut when the job is not done well.
According to the GTSI, it has been found that more than 60 percent of Indians think that teacher should ‘be paid according to the record of their pupil’. This means that a teacher will be paid more when the outcome of the class is high and will be paid less when the outcome is low, mentioned in the Indian Express report.
But, the data shared by this report also revealed that the outcome-based approach towards teaching profession has decreased over the year.
While 74% of people in the UK showed that they wanted to have such a paying system in GTSI conducted in 2013, but the number has gone down by almost 34% in 2018. Same with other countries including Finland.
For the first time, the index reveals that there is a direct link between teacher status and pupil performance as measured by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores.
Even though many parents want their children to become teachers in India but the actual wage might scare them away. Despite among last 10 countries when it comes to paying teachers, ironically India ranks fourth on the list of parents encouraging their children to become a teacher, following Malasia, China, and Korea.