Motivation and Pay for Performance

I think we’re making another mistake when it comes to the conversations around motivation. One of my basic premises in writing this blog is that we, the people having a conversation about young people and learning, are continually lead in the wrong direction – or down a rabbit hole – by calling what we do in schools education.

That mistake leads to further mistakes. One of those mistakes is motivation. I’ve argued that extrinsic motivation is has potential short term gains (at best) but long term has more potentially damaging impacts.

We know there are movements for paying teachers based on merit – for performance (getting better test scores). We also know about the experiments taking place where young people are being paid to improve their test scores.

That seems to speak pretty loudly that test scores, and more specifically scores on standardized tests, are what is important in schools.

This Time Magazine article,  Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School? describes the research of Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. in which he discovers bribes do work – for behaviors within a young person’s control – but do not necessarily work for things (like grades) that are subjective and young people cannot control.

Daniel Pink, in his video presentation above and in this CNN article argues that paying for performance (extrinsic rewards) work in a very narrow set of circumstances but for most conditions have long term negative impacts. Paying large bonuses do not produce the kind of results one might think they do. He further argues in his newsletter that merit pay for teachers is a pretty bad idea. He lays creating a system that is actually fair and based on good measures is near impossible and suggests a better alternative for improving performance is to simply raise base pay and creating a way to weed out bad teachers.

In my opinion, finding ways to improve the performance of either students or teachers in a system that is doing the wrong thing isn’t worth putting our energy into. I don’t think the results will get us anywhere closer to an educated populace – but then maybe that’s not what our government and the powers that be really want.

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