From Leonie Haimson:
As merit pay
and other forms of financial incentives proliferate throughout our
nation’s schools, promoted by corporate ed reformers like Arne Duncan,
Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, and Bloomberg, expert Dan Pink points out how it doesn’t work, in an excellent article in today’s Washington Post.
In
fact, the research is overwhelming that financial incentives undermine
intrinsic motivation. Of course, none of the policies being imposed on
our schools have ANY backing in research or experience.
The
below article in today’s Washington Post includes a reference to the
very same DC teacher, Tiffany Johnson, who is quoted in every article
about the DC Impact system, saying that she may stay teaching in DC
longer after getting a big bonus. Whether the fact that Ms. Johnson is
the only teacher ever featured in these articles is due to the laziness
of reporters or because it is hard to find another such teacher I don’t
know.
She was featured in a biased NYT front page article
on New Year’s Day, later cited by Howie Wolfson, NYC Deputy Mayor, when
he was challenged to come up with a single piece of evidence that merit
pay was not a waste of taxpayer money. This
NYT article apparently convinced Bloomberg to push for merit pay in his
State of the City Address – though now, it seems like this proposal was
nothing more than PR blather, as this it is not reflected in the DOE
budget
On Jan. 9, Ms. Johnson was interviewed on local DC TV; and a few days later, she was quoted again in a story in the Daily News, making the very same points. I hope she has a press agent; she could go on the road with Michelle Rhee.
For
another view that backs up the findings of Pink and other experts about
how damaging such systems can be to teacher morale, see how the Impact
system in DC caused Stephanie Black to quit the profession -- in a post on our blog that has been read nearly 3000 times and reprinted in many other places since.
As teacher merit pay spreads, one noted voice cries, ‘It doesn’t work’
By Lyndsey Layton, Wednesday, February 15, 12:24 PM
Merit pay for teachers, an idea kicked around for decades, is suddenly gaining traction.
Fervently promoted by Michelle A. Rhee
when she was chancellor of Washington’s public schools, the concept is
picking up steam from a growing cadre of politicians who think one way
to improve the country’s troubled schools is to give fat bonuses to good
teachers.
The Obama
administration has encouraged states to embrace merit pay, highlighting
it as one step states could take to compete for more than $4 billion in
federal funds through the Race to the Top program. Indiana and Florida
passed legislation that requires merit pay for teachers; Louisiana Gov.
Bobby Jindal (R) announced a few weeks ago that he wants the same.
The
most recent convert: New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I).
“This is an idea whose time has come,” Bloomberg declared at the U.S.
Conference of Mayors meeting last month. “I’m confident that if the
teachers are allowed to decide the matter for themselves, they’ll
support it in New York City just the way they did here in Washington,
D.C.”
What if they’re all wrong?
Meet Dan Pink, author of the 2009 bestseller “Drive.”
He’s a former White House speechwriter, a student of social science, a
highly sought-after lecturer and an influential voice when it comes to
what motivates Americans in the workplace.
What does he think of merit pay for teachers?
“It doesn’t work.”
* * *
Pink,
47, is holding forth from his writer’s studio in Cleveland Park, a
converted garage that sits behind his six-bedroom house. Here,
surrounded by a wall of books dotted with knicknacks made by his three
children, he pads around in stocking feet, a living testimonial to his
work.
“Rewards are very effective
for some things — simple things, mechanical things,” he explains. “But
for complicated jobs that require judgment and creativity, the evidence
shows that it just doesn’t work very well.” Teaching, of course, is one
of those jobs.
The impetus for his
investigation of what drives us came in an e-mail from a reader, who
wanted to know how to motivate his employees. Pink got knee-deep in
research on the subject and was surprised to learn that offering a
reward to entice someone to perform complex tasks often does not have
the desired effect and can even make that person perform less well.
He
was struck by a 1973 study by psychologists Mark Lepper, David Greene
and Robert Nisbett that illustrates this clearly. Watching a preschool
class, the researchers identified the children who most enjoyed drawing.
They divided those children into three groups. The first group was
shown an elaborate “Good Player” certificate and the children were asked
if they wanted to draw to receive the certificate. The second group was
asked if they wanted to draw and, if they did, were given the
unexpected reward of a “Good Player” certificate afterward. The third
group was asked if they wanted to draw but was neither promised an award
at the beginning nor surprised with one at the end.
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 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.
He could have been talking about himself.
Like
legions of others, Pink came to Washington for the politics. Fresh out
of Yale Law School, he worked on campaigns and fell into speechwriting.
“I
could type fast and write reasonably well,” said Pink, who first worked
in the Clinton administration, initially as an aide to then-Labor
Secretary Robert Reich and then-Vice President Al Gore, becoming his
chief speechwriter in 1995.
The pace was furious, the setting glamorous.
But
after a while, Pink began to question what he was doing. “Here I was,
close to the epicenter,” he said. “But so much of it was about the game
and so little about doing things. And I was lucky — I was working for
Reich and Gore, and these are good guys, serious guys. But even then . .
. I thought: Is that what I want to do with my life?”
He
had written a few magazine articles, and enjoyed it — especially the
liberation that came from writing solo, without the ritual of having a
dozen other people chime in to debate word choices, as was routine in
his speechwriting job.
In 1997, with backing from his wife, then a lawyer at the Justice Department, he quit his White House job and set out to write “Free Agent Nation,” a book about people who left traditional jobs to work for themselves.
Leaving
the security of a paycheck “was scary,” he said, “but the alternative
was scarier.” His wife, Jessica Lerner, quit her job a year later. With
the security of her continued health insurance under COBRA, they
traveled the country with their toddler daughter as he did the reporting
for the book, published in 2001.
Sales were good enough that Pink realized he, too, could work for himself. He wrote the best-selling “A Whole New Mind” in 2006, about how creativity has become essential to success in the changing economy, followed by “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko,” a career guide in Japanese comic-book format. “Drive” followed in 2009.
Pink
is living a life built on the themes that run through his books: He
enjoys great freedom to explore what interests him, he believes that his
work serves a larger purpose, and he strives to master the subjects and
the writing.
Beyond his books,
Pink does a podcast known as “Office Hours” in which he interviews
authors, academics and business leaders about work, life and other
matters and takes calls from listeners. And he gives lectures roughly
four times a month. A video of a Pink lecture based on “Drive” is among
the 20 most viewed on the TED talks Web site.
(Pink
publishes his e-mail address in every book and answers every letter he
gets. “It’s the reason I had 98 e-mails on Saturday,” he remarks.)
* * *
Merit
pay for teachers has been discussed since at least the 1950s and tried
in small ways here and there. But most efforts collapsed against
resistance from unions and the failure to develop objective ways to
measure teacher performance. In the vast majority of districts, teacher
salaries are still based on seniority and level of education.
Rhee,
who now advocates for merit pay around the country through her
organization StudentsFirst, said critics like Pink misunderstand merit
pay. It’s not supposed to inspire a mediocre teacher to greatness — it’s
designed to retain high achievers, she said. “It’s about the kind of
culture you want to create, where excellence is rewarded,” Rhee said in a
recent interview.
Eric A.
Hanushek, an economist at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University,
said merit pay will attract a different kind of educator to the
classroom: someone who wants to be held accountable and rewarded for
performance.
But Pink said that
kind of thinking makes little sense. First, he said, even businesses
have begun to question whether “if-then” reward systems benefit the
company in the long term. Second, education is not a business, he said,
despite the intention of some reformers armed with MBAs who want to
bring a corporate mind-set to the classroom. “Do you want your kids
taught by an intensely competitive person who’s motivated by money?” he
asks.
Tiffany Johnson doesn’t
spend a lot of time considering the intellectual debate over merit pay.
Johnson, who teaches at Ron Brown Middle School in Northeast Washington,
is among 476 teachers out of 3,600 in the District who pocketed a
substantial bonus at the start of the school year. She saw her pay soar
from $63,000 to $87,000 in September.
“You
feel appreciated for all the hard work you put in,” said Johnson, who
had considered applying for teaching jobs in Montgomery County, where a
starting teacher is paid about $5,000 more than in the District. “This
helps me to stay.”
D.C Schools
Chancellor Kaya Henderson was seated next to Pink at a White House event
a few months ago. She read “Drive” when it was published, but it didn’t
shake her belief in the value of merit pay.
“A
great teacher is not going to teach harder or better because there’s a
bonus,” Henderson said in an interview. “But if they make a significant
accomplishment, treating them the same way we treat the teacher who sent
their kids backwards makes no sense. . . . This whole one-size-fits-all
approach is so counter to me. There are very few occupations that have a
lockstep pay schedule. . . .
“I’m
in a situation where right now I have to change outcomes for kids. I
don’t have the money to raise teachers’ salaries to $100,000 across the
board. But I do have the money to reward my highest-performing
teachers.”
Pink thinks there’s
nothing wrong with paying teachers more. In fact, all teachers should
earn more, he said, so they don’t abandon teaching for financial
reasons.
“It’s not that money
doesn’t matter,” Pink said. “It’s that the best use of money is to get
people to stop thinking about money.”
In
nearby Montgomery County, Superintendent Joshua P. Starr opposes merit
pay. On a recent night, he featured Pink at his book club and attracted
so many parents and teachers that a monitor had to be set up for the
overflow crowd at Barnes & Noble in downtown Bethesda.
Starr
had fringed his copy of “Drive” with yellow Post-it notes and kept
flipping it open to read aloud passages he found intriguing. The crowd
laughed at Pink’s jokes, nodded in agreement and swarmed him for
autographs when the event was over.
“I
have luxuries that other superintendents don’t,” Starr said. “This
isn’t a district that needs a turnaround. . . . But I think the only way
to improve student achievement is to teach better. We don’t have a
student learning problem. We have an adult learning problem. We have to
learn to teach better.”
“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.”
© The Washington Post Company
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