Sara Stevenson is the librarian at the O. Henry Middle School in Austin, Texas.
She is an activist for public education.
She is tireless.
She scans the Internet, reads voraciously, and writes letters to the editor to set people straight about the facts.
If every teacher and principal and superintendent and parent and librarian and guidance counselor and school psychologist did what Sara Stevenson does regularly, the national conversation would change.
The American public would be better informed.
The policymakers would change their tune.
The hedge fund managers would go back to dabbling in polo ponies and yachts.
And we could all concentrate on doing what is necessary to make our schools and our society better for all students.
Watch for her letters to the editor in the Wall Street Journal and other national publications.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Perfect timing. Check this and my reply to it this morning, along with the comments that follow mine. Nothing like being told that you’re not a teacher because you believe in intrinsic motivation over carrots (or sticks).
http://bit.ly/RtJJ3J
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You wrote:
“But if you’re a secondary teacher, chances are enormous that many if not most of your students are already ruined for learning by the time they reach your classroom. They’ve been “schooled” to only care about grades, not learning, IF they even care about those. A few may actually want to know things for their own reasons outside the context of the school game, but they aren’t the way they are because of some inherent flaw. Rather, we taught them to be that way from early on, and they learned the lessons we taught only too well. Early elementary kids are full of energy and curiosity and life, eager to learn for the most part. By third or fourth grade, much of that has been bent by well-meaning teachers and a system that corrupts everyone.”
You are quite correct in stating this. By the time they get to my class as freshman in Spanish 1 most have internalized this sorting and separating that we call “grades”. They believe that they are an “A”, “B” or “D” student (which is a false labeling of the student by the school and themselves, a labeling error as defined by Wilson.) Or all they want to know is what will it take to get an A or B, etc. . . . I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard “What you’re not giving points for this assignment? Why did I do it then? That was a waste of time.” Even some of the “best and brightest” students are most motivated by the “A”.
At the beginning of the year I have the students answer a simple question: I am a(n) _____ student with the answers being:
a. A
b. B
c. C
d. D
e. none of these choices
f. F
We tally them up and usually not one will have picked the correct answer which is. . . . e. And then we have a brief discussion about grades, the falsehoods and lies that they are (and those are the terms I use, sometimes even excrement of bovine origin since we’re a rural district).
This year I’m planning on adding a question: Raise your hand if you want an A in this class? And when they raise their hands, I’m going to tell them to pack up their stuff and head to the guidance office and get out of the class. Finally after some have packed up their stuff and start heading out I’ll tell them I was joking to make a point about wanting and needing to learn Spanish and not just get a grade. As I paraphrase to my students (from the movie Field of Dreams) “If you learn it they will come” (they being the grade).
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Can it not be a combination of these things. Must it be either-or?
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Combination of what? Intrinsic motivation plus carrots and sticks? I think not. The latter cancels out the former.
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Are you a teacher?
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Oh right on! I gave this book on motivation to my last principal who referred to me as ‘the listed teacher’ and a ‘person of interest’. Since I was vulnerable (NM is a right to work state) he refused to even evaluate me and his actions were held up by the EEOC as fair and grounds for dismissal.
His use of pejorative language and demotivating tactics was well known. He has an unearned dissertation, “Calling for an end to Manifest Destiny’s Influence on Education: A participatory approach to instruction” (from Fielding Graduate Institute)that, when read, sharply calls into question the legitimacy of his credential, but not by the New Mexico Public Education Department, strangely enough. Standards? We don’t got to show you no stinkin’ standards!
The disruptive and undermining influence school administrators have been unleashed to spew forth can be traced to the privateers, of course.
Thank you for reading. I plan to keep on writing.
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Here is my contribution:
The editorial Carrots and Sticks for School Systems reflects nothing more than deferential acceptance of a Gates-funded propaganda piece. The Times offers unconditional praise for a study entitled “The Irreplaceables” from a “The New Teacher Project” (TNTP), a well-funded organization dedicated to using Value-Added Measures (VAM) to abolish teacher tenure and teacher unions. TNTP claims that the performance of its new teachers generally exceeds that of experienced teachers and, moreover, that a TNTP-trained teacher can overcome the effects of poverty.
The study that serves as the basis for this editorial is filled with unsubstantiated generalities and claims based on soft (or nonexistent) data. A careful analysis that includes the social context of its genesis would certainly raise numerous questions and critiques. The overarching goal of TNTP and its many partners is to create a corps of teachers willing to have their effectiveness reduced to test scores. Race to the Top is a carrot that feels like a stick.
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The NYT – and the LAT, WAPO, WSJ and the Chicago papers – are all part of the problem. WAPO is owned by Kaplan Test Prep – what are they going to tell us about incentives and reform? All claptrap and cant from these quarters is painfully predictable and deliberately wrong headed.
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The carrot-and-stick + intrinsic motivation notion strikes me as very much like trying to do formative assessment AND summative assessment simultaneously. According to Dylan William and Paul Black, research strongly supports the notion that doing comments on student work + letter or numerical grades is just as effective as not giving the comments and just doing the grades. This should be obvious to anyone: kids read the grade, ignore the comments. Period. So comments-only is a mandatory practice in formative assessment (though there is more to it than that).
Similarly, intrinsic motivation suggests that you believe that kids, teachers, PEOPLE, are best served by doing that which they are interested in doing, pursuing knowledge they are interested in obtaining, etc. and that in general they don’t need carrots or sticks. Adding the latter says, “I don’t trust you to do what *I* want you to do” (a double problem in education) and “I believe you are too weak to do even that which you claim to be motivated to do when the going gets rough.”
The latter may turn out to be a reasonable fear, and teachers need to find ways to help students stay or get back on track when something derails them, but only in the context of the learner’s own motives. It’s fair to say, I think, as I have to my son, “If you want to be a neurosurgeon, you will need to go to school for a lot of years past high school. You will have to learn {list of requisite courses and skills}. Do you feel your current way of working and marshaling your time and resources is leading you to be able to accomplish that? If not, what might you do differently? How can I help you?”
Lest you think I’m in the least interested in seeing him become a neurosurgeon or surgeon or doctor of any flavor, it’s simply not the case. But given that particular goal and the state of how he dealt with learning at that point, I want him to have a basis to make some decisions. He still plans to go into biological sciences at this point, with a recent hint of interest in veterinary medicine, but whatever he does, it isn’t going to be to please me, I hope.
So as a teacher, I want kids to have some notion of what it might take to reach their goals. I don’t want to set their goals or discourage or block them from any given goal. But having a clue is helpful. When it comes to moving in a direction towards improving their math, I vastly prefer summative to formative assessment. And I think the assessment and motivation questions here are intimately tied together.
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What I find highly objectionable is the idea of using violence to achieve a means. Whether the saying ( carrot & stick) is just an anxiom or old adage is of no matter. The underlying concept is that a behavior that is in not in the norm requires violence or the threat of violence to change the behavior.
Now there are some who are reading this and saying “why is he being so picky or concerned with the words” but remember that words are powerful. And the true educational philosophy of these people who use the “carrot & stick” analogy, is one that shames/demeans, or uses violence on people that perform or don’t perform a certain behavior.
Is it ok to paddle students? teachers? so any implicit words & analogies that support such notion condones abuse.
Is it our job to teach or shame?
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