Economist Roland Fryer has been trying for years to find the magic incentive that would produce higher scores.
He tried merit pay, and that didn’t work.
He tried paying students to get higher scores, but that didn’t work.
Now, he has at last found the key:
He and his colleagues have perfected a technique called “loss aversion.”
They give teachers a bonus (say, $4,000) at the beginning of the year. If the scores go up, the teachers keep the money.
If the scores don’t go up, they lose the money!
That’s called “loss aversion.”
Barnett Berry thinks this is a stupid idea, but hey, it works. That’s good enough for Dylan Matthews writing on Ezra Klein’s blog at the Washington Post , who calls this study a success for merit pay. It is also good enough for the Broad Foundation, which funds Fryer’s quest for the golden test score.
What will people do to avoid a loss?
What if you tell teachers that you will cut off their fingers if the scores don’t go up?
What if you tell doctors that their pay will be cut whenever any of their patients die?
What if you say to economists that they lose their computers if their predictions don’t pay out?
What would you say to journalists to get them to produce better stories?
Here is the contest:
What is your best idea to raise the scores through “loss aversion”?
What is the very best threat you can think of to compel/frighten/intimidate/and/terrify teachers to make the students’ scores go up?
I will publish the responses of those who come up with the best ideas to improve American test-score productivity through “loss aversion.”
Is that enough of an incentive for you?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well there is always that old fairytale classic: Having to give up your first born child!
This is for elementary students and would work particularly well when high stakes tests are pushed down to the K-3 grade band.
The mistake in the original plan is that it focuses on having teachers have to avoid loss. That’s simply one layer removed from the REAL target: the kiddoes being tested. After all, the threat of the teacher’s loss of $4000 means little or nothing to them.
So near the beginning of the school year, the teacher buys several lovable classroom pets. Perhaps a class bunny, kitty, and puppy would have maximum appeal, but the skillful teacher will be sure to find out in advance what animals are most beloved to the children s/he’ll be working with.
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And then, after ample time has passed to ensure that every child is head-over-heels in love with at least one of the animals, signs go up over each pet’s enclosure that read, “If your test scores don’t go up, I’ll shoot this [puppy/kitty/bunny, respectively]. Love, Ms. Williams”
I’m confident that those students who don’t succumb to nervous breakdowns in short order will kick some serious high-stakes test bootay.
I would enter, but I’m worried someone would think it was a good idea and make it a law. At least in Louisiana……where I teach!
Don’t utter a word, Vicky!
Loss aversion- Publish the scores and put your picture on the front page of the NY Post… Oh wait that was done already
Loss Aversion- Circumvent tenure rules– oh darn, that’s being done too!
Loss aversion– make you teach using a script– gee whiz
Loss aversion- they reduce your budget and watch your school die a slow death
Loss aversion- make you administer even more assessments next year
Loss aversion – any teacher whose student scores don’t go up has to watch “Waiting for Superman” once for each point lost.
Teachers with the lowest 10% of scores get the old, manual, completely dull pencil sharpeners. The next 20% will get the electric sharpeners that take 8 tries to sharpen a pencil without the point breaking off. The middle 40% will get to keep their sharpener from last year. The next 20% will get to send their pencils to the office to be sharpened by a student once a week. The top 10% will get brand new electric sharpeners that are guaranteed to work for the ENTIRE FIRST MONTH OF SCHOOL!!!! (say the caps part in an Oprah voice-that makes it even awesomer.)
or
Primary grades only: The teachers with the lowest scores can only use the construction paper in that shade somewhere between yellow and brown achievable solely by leaving the paper in the storeroom for 3 years. Plus, it fall apart the moment it’s approached by a pencil.
or, my favorite
Low scores? Low copy count!
Lowest scores? Do bus and lunch duty everyday.
I have no entry, but if anyone tried one of these loss aversion tricks on me, this is what I’d say (or sing):
“Want Not” by the Roches
I hope you don’t have to start practicing! Love it.
At the beginninbg of a school year, you have to videotape yourself reading a prepared statement about how great Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee and Michael Bloomberg are, and how much you appreciate all of their hard work for teachers, and how much you would like everyone to contribute to StudentsFirst. If your scores are not high enough by the end of the year, your videotape gets put onto youtube, is sent out to everyone on Michelle’s email list, and it’s retweeted thousands of times.
How to motivate teachers to do better?
Check out the Harvard Business Review. There is a classic article there from the . . . 1950s? 1968 originally? often reprinted . . . Frederick Herzberg, “One more time: How do you motivate employees, Harvard Business Review, 46 (January/February), 53–62.
Motivator-Hygiene Theory. Loss aversion? That’s a demotivator, a destroyer of motivation, a destroyer of teams — and ultimately it can lead to violent revolution.
Motivators, in order that Herzberg first found them: Achievement, Recognition, the Work Itself, Responsibility, Advancement, Growth. Later research notes people will work hard to get on a winning team with good people (but not a winning team with schmucks).
Hygiene factors, or dissatisfiers, again in order: Policy and Administration, Supervision, Relationship with Supervisor, Work Conditions, Salary, Relationship with Peers, Personal Life, Relationships with Subordinates, Status, Security. Notice how far down the ladder is “Salary,” but notice that it will dissatisfy, and is NEVER a motivator (except for a about 14 days after a significant pay raise, Herzberg hypothesized).
Fryer’s an economist? We need a psychologist, a coach, a leader, and a pastor, and we get an economist? Is this the same guy who figured it would be cheaper to pay the odd successful wrongful death tort suit instead of spending $1.89 to fix the Ford Pinto gas tank?
Give me an economist who values human life over machination, please. Can we sue him for economic malpractice? Terroristic threats? Call Homeland Security. Get him out of the building. Don’t listen to him until he gets an appointment to get the word from Herzberg.
(Herzberg is dead, I know. Loss-aversion should be dead, too.)
Why in the world aren’t they consulting the hard literature and research on motivation, instead of inventing new Hunger Games? Is that Fryer I hear quacking in the background?
Here is the research and history behind “loss aversion”…
The following research paper was not designed to be used for education compensation. From what I understand, the paper is highly regarded and the intention of the research is appropriate for how it was intended to be used. I cited the research because it best describes what “loss aversion” really is.
Behavioral Finance in Action
By Shlomo Benartzi, Ph.D.
Professor, UCLA Anderson School of Management, Chief Behavioral Economist, Allianz Global Investors Center for Behavioral Finance
Click to access behavioral-finance-in-action-white-paper.pdf
Loss Aversion
“At the core of many of these powerful but erroneous intuitions is people’s hyper-negative response to potential loss, or ‘loss aversion,’ as described by Prospect Theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979). Simply put, losses loom larger than equal-sized gains. Psychologically speaking, the pain of losing $100 is approximately twice as great as the pleasure of winning the same amount.”
“Psychologists speculate that loss aversion makes sense in terms of evolution and survival.”
“Loss aversion also makes people reluctant to make decisions for change because they focus on what they could lose more than on what they might gain. This is called ‘inertia,’ or the status quo bias (Samuelson and Zeckhauser, 1988).”
In other words, the climate and culture of the classroom would be fear-based, data-driven, void of innovation, and cold.
I never thought I would see the day that teacher compensation could be designed for something more fit for an animal than a human being.
So I guess the punishment for participating in such a compensation structure is losing your dignity.
Roland Fryer, Snooki, and Building the Perfect Teacher
By Monica Caldwell
People are always surprised to find out that I wasn’t an education major in college. As a hotel/motel management major I learned a lot about how to deal with employees. This knowledge was further augmented when I began managing a tanning salon at the tender age of 20. Teaching was the hardest job I ever had and the five weeks of training leading up to it was even tougher than the nearly 2 whole years I spent in the classroom.
Recently, a couple of studies have come out that really got me thinking. The first study was by the awesome Roland Fryer. He says that the key to making merit pay work is loss aversion. Now math is hard, but the way I understand it instead of giving teachers money if they show improvement on tests, you give them the money up front and then if their students’ test scores don’t improve they either cough up the dough, or your Uncle Rocco pays them a little visit. If they’re like me, they’d probably spend it all on shoes.
Another really cool report I read was called The Irreplaceables. Now, this isn’t to be confused with The Expendables which is a movie about a lot of old guys blowing stuff up, but an article by The New Teacher Project says that urban schools are not making their best teachers feel valued and instead retaining the bad ones. I can relate to this. The fire in my classroom wasn’t what got me terminated as much as all the other teachers who were jealous of my rapport with my class going to the principal.
What we need is a way to make teachers feel rewarded, retain the best teachers, and use loss aversion to scare teachers into working really hard. Now, if you believe like I do, the best teachers come from programs like Teach for America, this is really easy. When teachers go through the Teach for America program, put like a dozen of them up in a mansion that they could never afford on a teacher’s salary. Then as the school year goes on, have teachers vote each other out of the mansion, but if your kids improve on standardized tests, you have immunity.
The best part is we film this as a reality television show. Now one problem is Teach for America’s training is only 5 weeks and a reality tv show season is much longer, but that’s fixed by following the recruits through the beginning of their teaching careers. The teachers will try really hard because the mansion will have like a hot tub and cute guys and a kitchen that’s totally stocked with everything you could want. The good teachers will be retained and a few teachers may even get famous like Snooki. Hey Bravo! Call me, we’ll do lunch.
What about waterboarding?
Can’t waterboard very well at that ocean front property that I have for sale down at Lake of the Ozarks, don’t get many good waves. . . Oh, wait a minute!!
The WP link points to an article by Dylan Matthews and not Ezra Klein.
The article by Dylan Matthews appears in Ezra Klein’s blog. I changed the post to clarify it. Thanks for noticing.
The real shame is that teachers are being given incentives to be more concerned with losing something of value than education. They will cease having teachers willing to understand what they are being paid to ignore, as one economist whose name I forget once said.
Correction: “It is difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair.
Going to be a tough contest to win!