A reader suggests some reading for Professor Fryer and his colleagues. Fryer has spent years searching for the incentive that works. This reader says he should stop searching and read an article by Frederick Herzberg.  No, it did not appear in the Teachers College Record or the Harvard Educational Review or Phi Delta Kappan or an AERA journal. This is the classic article to which he refers:

Check out the <i>Harvard Business Review</i>.  There is a classic article there from the  . . . 1950s?  1968 originally? often reprinted . . . Frederick Herzberg, “One more time:  How do you motivate employees, <i>Harvard Business Review</i>, 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.

<b>Motivators</b>, 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, <b>Salary</b>, 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?

This blog has received a late entry into an already closed contest.

Once I realized that the National Lampoon had already threatened to kill the dog on its cover in 1973, I recognized that loss aversion had reached its apogee forty years ago.

Nonetheless, this entry was posted by a blogger-tweeter who goes by the name of “Last Stand for Children First.”

In this post, the blogger is young teacher Monica Caldwell. She was hired by one of those Gates-funded teacher groups:

Monica Caldwell commented on The Loss Aversion Contest: You Can Win!Roland Fryer, Snooki, and Building the Perfect Teacher By Monica CaldwellPeople 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.

A reader says that if Roland Fryer tries loss aversion in her classroom, she would follow the advice of this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYW44WD792Y