Response from David Langford about Paying Students to Learn

On December 11, 2008 I posted an article written by David Langford about paying students to learn.

An anonymous person commented that there is research that says there are positive effects of incentive based programs. I forwarded that response to David and asked him if he was interested in responded. He sent me the following:

Thanks for passing along my article to those who might listen. Unfortunately we are fighting a losing battle with extrinsic manipulation. It is so easy to implement these programs it is hard to stop politians and administrators. The new pick for Education Secretary Arne Duncan is also an advocate of pay-for-grades and implemented such a program in Chicago. I am fearful we may see an escalation of this thinking during the Obama administration.

I read through each of the studies the person who responded offered. None were credible comparisons of the blatant manipulation offered in the Chicago Public Schools or in Washington D.C.

Offering girls in Kenya scholarships to continue to go to school if they work hard does not compare to throwing money at kids who get A's, in a fabricated rating system, when they are already guarenteed a free education: Apples and Oranges comparisons. The study from Texas cited on paying students to take AP courses I believe lacks credibility since in order to get the predicted results they wanted they changed systemic factors such as opening AP courses to anyone interested instead of doing what they had always done by limiting class size to class rank. This is only one of a multitude of problems in this study.

The real problem is not how to make a better buggy whip, but should we be making them to begin with. I know I could produce the same positive correlation to improved work by beating children if they do not work hard. But, should we adopt that as a program and then start improving it? Automating or improving a bad process just means you can do something very bad quickly and to a larger number of people. Maybe Harvard would like to promote that study since they seem to be the source of promoting these pay-for-performance programs. I like the line in the movie Jurassic park that goes something like this, "You were so busy trying to see if you could you forgot to think about if you should!"

All of these types of programs and studies take time away from studying and fixing the real problems. No child will say I don't work hard at school because they do not pay me enough, but they will say it's boring or my teacher dosn't care. Who will work on these problems? Let's work on the real problems preventing high quality work and effort instead manufacturing new problems.

I'm interested in hearing from others about this very important topic.

Quality Learning: Paying students to learn?

David Langford is one of the smartest and best consultants I know working in the schooling world. His knowledge and experience of quality and it's application to schooling is beyond par. The following article came in a recent email newsletter from him. I couldn't say it any better! I've copied the newsletter in its entirety. Enjoy.

Quality Learning: Paying students to learn?
By David P. Langford

In the past, I believed most educators understood the inherent differences between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and valued the latter over the former. However, this does not seem to be the case. Pay-for-grades, gold stars, student-of-the-month programs and attendance rewards are all too prevalent extrinsic motivators used to push students to do a better job. I've found an overwhelming amount of evidence that these schemes do not work in the long term, and can even dangerously affect attitudes toward learning. (Alfie Kohn does an excellent job of compiling the evidence against extrinsic motivators in his books No Contest and Punishment by Reward.) There is no lack of evidence that pay-for-grades programs do not work, so why do schools continue to use them? The short answer is: because they appear to work.

Extrinsic rewards and punishments always seem to work if you do not count the costs. Studies have shown that you can get people to do almost anything if you make the motivator—payment or punishment--strong enough. For example, would you sabotage a colleague for ten dollars? Most people would answer “no.” But what if I upped the stakes? Would you do it for one thousand dollars? Ten thousand? One million? If I continued to increase the reward, most people would agree sooner or later--especially if they got to pick the colleague.

The same principle is true with students. If you pay students to get good grades, more students will get good grades for a while. Very quickly students who were only working to get the reward will discover that it is hard work to maintain good grades, and they will decide it isn't worth the effort unless the reward is increased, because the motivation for getting good grades is not to learn, but to be rewarded. The concept of "learning" to improve one's self never comes into play with the reward system. Just as teacher unions negotiate for higher pay, so student “unions” will eventually want to negotiate for a higher reward.

Extrinsic Theory: Improved Grades = Reward

Most always these reward schemes are touted as a “new trial program,” as if the idea of extrinsic motivation is a new one. In Washington D.C., Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who is making a valiant effort to improve a failing system, was asked why they implemented a "new" program that pays students to get good grades and attendance and she responded, "When critics say that it's sad to pay students, I say it's sad that only 8% of D.C. eighth-graders are proficient in math. People in the suburbs use incentives for their kids all the time, like giving them $10.00 for an 'A.' Kids in our program can save money for college or get a bank account." (Parade Magazine, November 16, 2008, p. 26.) It's unfortunate that we have such huge education gaps in this country and I am certain Chancellor Rhee feels the need to do something about it, but the bottom line is that two wrongs don't make a right. Just because some parents bribe their children to get better grades does not mean we should apply the same principle to all students. We can easily sabotage motivation through the best efforts of well meaning people.

If the pay-for-grades theory is correct, there should not exist a single example of students succeeding on their own. Yet there are thousands--if not millions-- of students who work hard because of a love of learning. Dr. W. Edwards Deming often stated that it only takes a single example to invalidate a theory. Having only 8% of students proficient in math is a dismal statistic to face, but the problem is in the system--not the students. Manipulating students with money will improve some students' performance for a short period of time, but what happens to students when you can no longer afford to pay them and their attachment to learning is for money? Smothering intrinsic motivation is a cost too great for even one student.

Intrinsic Motivation: Acquired Knowledge = Joy in Learning

When learning rewards and punishments are eliminated, systemic performance results will always return to what they were before extrinsic manipulation. Remember, 98% of the problem comes from the system, and students have little or no control over systemic factors. Manipulating student extrinsic motivators does not address the basic cause(s) of the problem. Try asking students with a Force Field Analysis to identify driving and preventing forces of learning, then prioritize the preventing forces with an NGT. You might be shocked to realize that existing factors preventing learning have nothing to do with lack of pay-for-grades. One of the most misguided efforts of quality improvement is trying to improve something that should be eliminated, such as automating grading systems, increasing training for behavior modification or improving the pay-for-grades program. I can guarantee you, in low performing schools there are fundamental problems with:

Teacher training and support
Leadership and management
Process Management
Communication
The way schools are built and maintained
The way technology is being used or not used
Funding for classroom books and materials
Vision and purpose


One of the reasons many extrinsic motivation programs have stayed around for so long and are continually resurrected and improved is because they are convenient for the people managing the system. They keep the focus off leadership and mistakenly place it on the people working in the system. In every education system I have consulted--from the U.S. Naval Academy to primary and secondary schools in the U.S. and Australia to pre-schools in Argentina--the story is the same: we blame students for poor performance without first considering the systemic causes. In psychology this is known as the fundamental attribution error.

If you want a significantly different result, you must first change the system. I applaud Michelle Rhee in Washington D.C. for trying to improve a broken system, and I offer my help. She has made many excellent systemic changes in D.C. such as closing 23 under-populated schools and paying for librarians, art, music and P.E. teachers at remaining schools. These systemic efforts will help to improve student motivation for learning.

Systemic problems are normally out of the circle of influence of students and none of these systemic problems will go away simply by bribing students to work harder within a failing system. Leaders must learn to, as Dr. Deming once said, "work smarter, not harder." If you want a different result, try changing the system and watch what happens to behavior, instead of continually doing what we have always done by leaving the system alone and trying to change the behavior of the people in it.


©2008 Langford International Inc. All rights reserved.
e-Mail: office@langfordlearning.com
12742 Canyon Creek Road, Molt, MT 59057
Phone: 406-628-2227 Fax: 406-628-2228

External vs Internal Motivation and the Theory of Knowledge

More and school states and school districts are developing programs designed to 'motivate' students to improve on standardized tests. Combine that with incentive programs for teachers to improve test scores and we have a train wreck in the making.

I still marvel at the fact that good, well meaning people, have a limited understanding of how people (and the brain) actually work. Unless of course these aren't well meaning people (which I refuse to think about). 

Everyone acts from theory - whether they are aware of it or not. The brain develops 'models' of the world and how it works and we behave consistent with those models (even abhorrent behavior is consistent with some mental model in the brain). 

So what are the theories in use by the people that develop policies for the public schooling system? It appears, from where I sit, the theory employed in school policy and practice includes:

• people need extrinsic motivation
  
• incentives motivate people
• memory is learning
  
• control and compliance are highly valued
  
• learning is teacher and testing centric
• memory and tests demonstrate 'knowledge' 
  
• order and discipline are requirements for learning
• school can be disconnected from life
• curriculum determines what is learned
• schooling develops good people
• emotions have no place at school
• people aren't people when they are at school
• school is disconnected from the rest of life

The public schooling system is the one institution that touches just about every single person in the country. There is tremendous 'potential' there. But what happens when we use extrinsic motivation and incentives to 'produce' an outcome?

Extrinsic motivation slowly destroys self esteem, dignity, cooperation and a yearning for learning - all of which are innate and high early in life. They are diminished throughout our life by what Dr. Deming calls the forces of destruction - of which extrinsic motivation is one of these destructive forces.

To paraphrase Mary Walton's presentation on Dr. Deming's teaching on performance appraisals, such an approach will "encourage short-term performance...discourage risk-taking, build fear, undermine teamwork, and pit people working against each other for the same rewards." ("The Deming Management Method," chapter 19, page 91). As Dr. Deming noted in "The New Economics," Ch. 4, p. 113, "When children are given rewards, such as toys and money, for doing well in school...they learn to expect rewards for good performance." This leaves the child, and then the adult, extrinsically motivated, relying on "things to make them feel good." And that destroys essential self-esteem. Dr. Deming expanded on this in pages 147-153.

So what should schools do? Here's a quote from a review of Dr. Deming's book, The New Economics.

To achieve notable improvement, the education system should abolish grades, merit ratings for teachers, comparison of schools on the basis of scores, and gold stars for athletics. Joy in learning comes more from learning than from what is learned. A grade is a permanent label for opening doors or closing doors, a way to achieve quality by inspection, rather than building in quality, a way to produce competition between people, rather than cooperation, a way to label people as winners or losers, a way to humiliate those at the bottom, rather than to promote their desire to learn and future achievement.

The California legislature has passed a law (awaiting the governor's signature) authorizing and encouraging school districts to provide non monetary "incentives to middle ad and high school students for achievement or improvement on standardized tests."

Here's an article about this.

Classic

Here's something that is just so classic for this day and age.

As I've mentioned before there are so many contradicting studies showing results for (or no results) for various aspects of the education system. Here are two studies - one showing improvement in achievement when merit pay plans are used. The other shows that incentives don't keep teachers from being absent from school.

I've argued previously that incentives are NOT good for schools. I believe that incentives, merit pay, pay for performance, and other such measures are a clear signal that there is something wrong with the education system. These measures have been used in business for years and there as well I see them as a sign that there is something wrong with the way the business is managed and run.

Why is it that the Education System is just now grabbing on to these methods? I believe it is because making real and substantive changes are NOT part of the plan nor interest of the people involved in education and education policy. Using incentives and the like are just one more distraction from actually doing something useful to help young people learn.

Study: Student achievement improves under merit-pay plans
Student achievement improves when their teachers are paid for their performance, according to an analysis published in the September issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. "The evidence certainly suggests when you offer incentives, you're likely to get better results," said co-author Michael J. Podgursky, a University of Missouri-Columbia professor of economics. ScienceDaily (9/4)

Florida incentive programs don't keep teachers in school
Florida schools aiming to curb teacher absences through incentives found that sick days actually increased at most schools. "Teachers tried very hard about being here because it puts more work on them when they're out of school," said elementary principal Helen Gleicher. "When you have a staff that big, things happen." The Palm Beach Post (9/3)