Evaluating the Impact of Teachers’ Remuneration on the Performance of Students: Evidence from PISA

Students’ Learning Outcomes (SLOs) do not only depend upon the teacher’s knowledge and teaching skills but there are many other contributing factors that affect the overall performance of students. In this paper we argued that teacher’s salary/ remuneration is an important factor and it has an effect on students’ performance because this variable can captures many other aspects as well; job satisfaction, motivation, desirability of profession, job preferences, and continuation of teaching career. In this research, the impact of teacher wages on students’ achievement has been assessed by studying wages related sub-factors; starting salary, salary after fifteen year of experience, salary per hour of net teaching time and salary ratio to GDP per capita. For this purpose teachers’ remuneration data and PISA 2000, 2003 and 2006 survey data of students’ scores of fifteen year old pupil enrolled in lower secondary school in OECD member countries were used. The remuneration/ wages related independent variable/s was regressed on the dependent variable students mean country score. The results showed that there is a positive impact of teacher remuneration on students’ performance.