Pegging pay to performance is a contentious issue for the education industry. Facing a shortage of teaching professionals, the US has begun debating this idea to as means to attract and retain good staff. Attracting talent is not so much a problem. Wave enough money around and potential workers will line up around the block to submit an application. It's sort of like chumming the waters to bring the fish to a boat. But without appropriate tackle, hooking and landing the big fish is going to be a much more difficult proposition.

We need a better analogy to understand how the human resource of our industry works. How about a well kept aquarium instead, with a diversity of niches where different kinds of organisms can be at home in, be well fed, happy and can expect to live a decently long life? One of the mistakes the industry makes is to take a one-size-fits-all approach to their aquariums, not bothering with regular maintenance, and very quickly the fish choke and go belly-up in the murk. In such environments, only the scavengers will survive by eating the crap and scum that the tank is rich with.

While education boards in the US are still debating with their unions, as of last week we have already transferred our lot to a performance-rewarded aquarium -- more like Sea-World than a living-room fishbowl, to extend the analogy. All public teaching staff individually had to choose to either keep their pay package at status quo or to adopt the new performance-based pay package our industry has decided to implement from this year on. Even if we opted out of the new system for now, on our next promotion our pay will go according to the new scheme. The assumption is that if a teacher is worthy of promotion, he or she is already performing well (and probably intends to continue performing well) and might as well be rewarded accordingly.

Now that most of us have opted for performance pay, the next question is how to measure 'performance' so that we get the pay we deserve? I think that our baseline concern is not in how much the high-fliers are going to get, but it's more about how poorly our lower performers are going to be treated.

If this new system is going to work, the one thing our policy makers have to absolutely assure us on, and our middle-management has to absolutely carry out is to ensure that while our rewards may be performance-based, our survival is not. Our schools are not jungles in which predators prowl and prey have to keep looking over their shoulders at every snap of a twig. If this is the mental picture our HR has about our new pay structure, there may be a catastrophic brain-drain which we may never recover from.

The new pay system has got to be sold as if our industry was a massive Sea-World theme park. Every organism is well taken care of and given clean tanks, suitable habitats to live in, and have their daily dietary requirements met. The environment is predator-free so each organism can happily focus on the Maslow-ian higher-order things in life, like teaching kids.

Having few worries about their basic needs, there will be a much larger pool of staff interested in doing a little bit more for better rewards. Every Sea-World needs its dolphin/orca/sea-lion shows to bring in the crowds, so these performers get additional training, more varieties of stimulation, recognition and applause. They get their names in lights and their faces on posters. They are the reason why people come to Sea-World in the first place.

But without the smaller fish-tanks for the people to admire, there would be nothing to do between the shows (performers need their rest time too) to keep the people interested. So whether they 'perform' or not, every individual organism has a role to play in the industry. Their efforts, big or small, keep their visitors happy and coming year after year, ensuring enough revenue to pay for regular maintenance, upkeep and rewards for themselves. Of course taxpayers pay for the service our industry provides, but we do want happy taxpayers who feel their taxes are well spent, don't we?

In our industry, a lot of what we do tends to be unquantifiable because we deal a lot with human unpredictability, so we really do need to view 'performance' as a value-added incentive, not a threat to our survival. Convince us of this in our daily work and in our work environment. Don't make teachers territorial and competitive with each other but value everyone and what each of us has to offer. Give more to those who do more, but don't take away from those who do comparatively less (for one reason or another). If that's how our industry shapes up, I think we'll have a winner on our hands.