As teacher merit pay spreads, one noted voice cries, ‘It doesn’t work’

From the Washington Post:

Two weeks later, the researchers observed that the children in the second and third groups — who had either been given an unexpected award or no award at all — drew with as much enthusiasm as they had before the experiment. But the children who had been offered the reward showed less interest and spent less time drawing.

Other scientists replicated these findings through different experiments, proving the effect with not just children but adults, as well.

In 2010, the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University published what it termed the first scientifically rigorous study of merit pay for teachers. Researchers found that teachers in the Nashville public schools who were offered bonuses of up to $15,000 a year for improved student scores on standardized tests made no greater gains than teachers who were not offered merit pay.

Tangible, extrinsic rewards can dampen intrinsic motivation, Pink said, noting that these findings have been repeated in dozens of experiments over the decades. “The science on this is robust,” he said. “And it’s also among the most ignored.”

What does work?

Pink said research shows that people who hold jobs that require creativity and sophisticated problem-solving perform best when they have autonomy, an opportunity to master something and a sense of purpose.

And

“And how do you create those conditions? How do you motivate people? Do you do it through merit pay? No, it doesn’t work. You do it by engaging them with teamwork and a purpose and a meaningful life.”

The national debate over merit pay is a distraction from the challenges faced by the American educational system, Pink said, days after the Rockville event. “Well-intentioned public officials want to do something, and they look at [merit pay] as a silver bullet. The real problem is poverty,” he said.

If politicians want to improve academic performance, they should “reduce teenage pregnancy, give excellent prenatal health care and provide universal preschool — and test scores will go up,” he said. “But that’s a lot harder to do, and a lot more expensive than merit pay.”

More here.

Of course, my longstanding objection to the concept of merit pay for teachers is that it is based on standardized test scores, which correlate so strongly with socioeconomic status that you might as well, as one SAT official once joked, throw out the scores and simply write in parental incomes, which would give just about the same results. So it would be "pay" but it wouldn't have much to do with "merit," given how utterly skewed the process is for determining what constitutes "merit." That is, teachers in bourgeois neighborhoods all look pretty good because of the students they're teaching, while teachers in poor neighborhoods look pretty bad for essentially the same reasons. No merit there, which makes merit pay something of a joke.

Generally, however, I haven't been particularly opposed to the concept of merit pay for teachers, given a decent way to figure out exactly what constitutes merit. And that's pretty hard to do because learning is so extraordinarily abstract. Indeed, it often takes a decade or more after a teacher has taught a particular student to really see what kind of effect came from that relationship. Little did I realize, however, that learning is so abstract of a concept that merit pay just doesn't work in terms of motivating better teaching.

And really, that kind of makes sense. Making money, getting rich, while there are certainly practical reasons for accumulating money, being motivated by that and that alone, or even mostly that, is pretty base, and kind of antithetical to the very humanistic spirit of universal education. That is, I've believed for many years that I prefer the doctor who is motivated by compassion and a deep desire to heal and serve humanity than the doctor who went into medicine in order to make a lot of money. Same with teachers. When a teacher's desire is to serve humanity, that's where the focus is; when a teacher is in it for the money--yeah yeah, I know, just bear with me for a moment--the focus is on making money, rather than uplifting and edifying. And because it's so extraordinarily difficult to actually quantify educational success, motivation-by-money is certain to take teachers in truly weird directions, gaming the system and whatnot.

But really the big problem here is the political discourse's tendency to view education as some sort of business. It is not. Business aims to make a profit. Education aims to make better human beings. The two concepts are incompatible.

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