I recently received an email from a parent in North Carolina who told me that the legislators there want to adopt merit pay for teachers. They are very impressed with the Chetty-Rockoff-Friedman study that claimed that a great teacher could have lifelong effects on students, like raising their lifetime earnings by about $500 a year. And they are impressed by the Roland Fryer study claiming that teachers get higher test scores from their students if the technique called “loss aversion” is applied to them.
For starters, the Chetty-Rockoff-Friedman study was not a study of merit pay. It was an analysis of school records from the 1990s in a big city where there was no merit pay. The best conclusion one can draw is that some teachers are more effective than others, but there is no clear indication in their work about how to identify them or whether you can get more of them by offering bonuses.
The Fryer study is, in my view, ethically problematic. Fryer, be it noted, is an economist who is obsessed with using money as a lever to change behavior. A few years ago, he created a plan to pay students if they got higher grades or test scores, but concluded that it didn’t work.
Fryer is at Harvard, where his work is subsidized by the Broad Foundation.
The “loss aversion” theory goes like this: Instead of paying teachers a bonus if their students get higher scores (which has consistently failed for nearly a century), offer them a bonus upfront, then take it away if the scores don’t go up. The theory is that the teachers won’t want to lose the money they were already paid.
Bruce Baker was less than impressed with this study. See here and here.
Suppose we took loss aversion seriously?
What if we said to teachers, raise test scores or we cut off a finger. Every year the scores don’t go up, we cut off another finger.
That would surely produce test score gains.
What if we said to economists, make accurate predictions about the economy or we confiscate your computer.
What if we said to lawyers, if you lose any cases, we take away your license.
You can see the possibilities.
We might get test scores gains by threatening to take away something that mattered, but wouldn’t that make teaching less attractive as a profession or even a job?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
But our whole society is, at this point, about loss aversion–which is why there’s so many people doing so little to improve anything. We don’t even recognize proper activity anymore.
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What if we said to economists, make accurate predictions or we take away your bonus?
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Actually for the economists who are hired to make predictions in industry, I imagine they get fired for making incorrect predictions.
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Exactly. Who would allow their profession to be subjected to something like this? It is beyond insulting. They are treating teachers like children, like taking away a child’s video games because his report card was low.
Speak slowly to these economists. They have trouble understanding.
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Perhaps bankers are more willing to have these clauses in their contracts: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothyspangler/2013/05/28/clawbacks-becoming-fashionable-on-wall-street/
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Good grief, TE, did you read the article? “These provisions state that any compensation previously paid to an employee that is subsequently found to have been the result of CRIMINAL OR OTHERWISE ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES must be repaid to the firm.” [emphasis added].
Surely even you understand the difference between having a bonus revoked for criminal activity vs. having a “bonus” (which never really was a bonus) because some schmoe decided you didn’t measure up?
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Actually it is also being used to clawback bonuses paid out if the investment turns sour. It is an attempt to line up the incentives for the employees with the long term desires of the firm.
Any thoughts on the difference between subtracting points from a thousand or adding points to compute final grades? I am tempted to try the subtraction method if it will motivate my students to spend more time on my classes.
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Here are a couple more articles:
http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/14/investing/bank-bonus-clawback/index.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-15/jpmorgan-said-to-weigh-bonus-clawbacks-after-loss.html
Note that JP Morgan states that it “…can cancel stock awards or demand they be repaid if an employee “engages in conduct that causes material financial or reputational harm,””
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TE – if you’re trying to “motivate” your students by either giving or taking away points, you don’t understand what motivation is.
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The question is if it is the equivalent of threatening to cut off a finger if I take points away. My usual practice is to add points.
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Would it matter if I graded by starting each student off with a thousand points and deducted points over the course of a semester or started students off with zero points and added points through the course of a semester? Is the former system like cutting off body parts and thus unethical but the latter one just fine?
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The rhetorical question of your last sentence aside, we can model the grading question via judging practices at student competitions. Some organizations leave the scoring practice to individual judges, some specify the practice, whether it be to add or to subtract points.
Over several summers of panel-judging at Nationals, I have asked this exact question, and have found both methods in use. [The Junior Classical League does not specify a +/- practice.] When I have been chief judge, I had the opportunity to rank-sort each judge’s scores before transcribing them to a tally page to average. [If only I could retain those pages! What a journal article!]
Without such objective data in hand, my impression is that most artifacts of scoring practice vanish when scores are averaged, and a finite cohort of students will end up in roughly the same rank order via any scoring practice. [This is over an average field size of 24.]
Properly studied, over a large enough sample, this might refute Roland Fryer. [Insert here lengthy screed from the perspective of his current research subjects, ongoing at houstonisdwatch.com.] And speaking of Roland Fryer, someone else could answer from the psychology side, as to the effects that different grading practices have upon the students being graded [or not, in rare cases]….
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All of this nutty stuff starts from a flawed set of assumptions.
First is that the standardized tests are an accurate and valid measurment of student and teacher success. They are not and they are driving public education into ground. Second is that teachers are motivated by money. They, like everyone else, need a decent salary but I KNOW OF NO TEACHER WHO HAS ENTERED THIS PROFESSION BECAUSE OF THE SALARY OFFERED. Many will select where they will teach based on comparative wages and strive to improve their wages by obtaining advanced degrees, but money is not the reason they teach. It is an insult to professional teachers and the complex interaction between teacher and pupils to assume it is.
Third, there is an assumption that students coming to school have a blank slate and are interested in learning. Virtually all students I have interacted with in 27 years of teaching are indeed interested in learning, but they must get engaged in the process and buy into the content of their education. Ultimately, children decide what they want to learn. It doesn’t work to force feed education. That is like trying to push a rope uphill. To succeed in educating a child, you must (as explained 100 years ago by John Dewey) begin with the child’s own reality and lead him/her into a broader understanding of the knowledge needed to be successful in society.
A successful education system (whether public, private or charter) will require 4 things: 1) teachers who are dedicated and well educated themselves (they will become more successful as they gain experience), 2)small class sizes that will allow teachers to have time for interaction with each pupil and engage in two way communication, 3) adequate facilities and resources to provide students with the tools they need, 4) GIVING TEACHERS THE FREEDOM TO TEACH.
All this other crazy stuff like Standardized Testing, RTTT, NCLB, vouchers, and Pay for Performance just doesn’t work. It wastes limited resources and is destroying education. The real challenge for our society is to figure out how to to provide those 4 things within a reasonable budget. However, do not be deceived by the naysayers who shout that we can’t afford it. Truth is we cannot survive if we are unwilling to pay for educating our children.
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I am biased as an orthodox Jew, but, given that our system is a few thousand years old, I like to believe it works.
According to our laws and history, a child does have things they need to know – generally those things are classified as Torah, Mishna, Gemara (don’t worry about the actual meanings – it might help to think of them as Stories – Meanings – serious legalities stemming from them).
It is the responsibility of a parent to teach their child, or else to delegate someone that can. The teacher of that child, is obligated to find the paths that interest that child. Note that they are still obligated to teach the content/skills connected to interpreting these documents, but, the main obligation is teaching the child where they are.
There are clear priorities in schooling – there are ages where you begin to teach topics, but there’s never an age where you learn it “or else” – if there’s something you don’t know, you learn to consult a Rabbi who is learned enough to know and to learn it yourself….that’s your lifelong learning.
There is an obligation to study every single day.
There are no rigid tests, there is just people that care about a child, are obligated to take care of that child, and there are pedagogies that both place a commitment on the parent to teach their child in a timely manner, while not pressuring the child to do so – and the pressure on the teacher is to introduce topics at certain ages, not to complete them.
Not that I think this should be taught to every public school child on the public dime – my point is moreso that we have historical precedents for education systems that work – and our current system fits none of these models.
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Exactly right, Al Tate. It’s what I had in a private school, all four.
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A policy based on the Fryer study is ridiculous. What about teachers who take the bonus then quit? Is there going to be a national dragnet to track them down to give it back?
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I don’t think it could possibly be saying that you give the bonus to the teachers up front – something more like tell the teacher “ok you have $5000, now we’ll give it to you at the end of the year but it’s yours to lose along the way”.
Otherwise, there’s no precedent legally that I’m aware of for giving someone money and then setting conditions on which you can legally require them to give it back.
Additionally, you can bet your sweet you-know-what that even if they did put in something like this, in a very short amount of time it would move from a “bonus” to “an expected part of teacher pay that’s earned” and be removed from teacher’s salaries during the next contract accordingly.
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That sort of procedure is becoming more widely used in the financial sector. It is called a claw back.
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Loss aversion is already a tactic used by administrators in the form of diminished self-esteem. Being told you are ineffective (even if test scores show differently) because “There is something wrong with you. I just can’t quite put my finger on it.” I was told this in an evaluation last year. It had to do with my “with-it-ness.” Oh good grief. The honest truth is I have a hearing loss. I am human. I am with it. The loss aversion tactic resulted in my leaving education as a profession after 16 wonderful/4 terrible years.
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If it’s coming from the pols in NC lately, there’s a high probability it is ethically questionable. My child and I will be wearing red on the first day of school.
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