Chapter 4
How Can Sad Silver Medalists and Happy Bronze Medalists Help Us Close the Achievement Gap?
Public Education: The $627 Billion Problem
Can the Same Idea Work with Teachers?
Of course, students don’t learn in a vacuum. We needed to find out whether offering incentives to teachers might work, too. After all, it’s hard to run a classroom while your students are undisciplined, indifferent, scared, hungry, or absent. And it’s harder still to work so hard and face the fact that many of your ninth graders are reading at a fourth-grade level, and that fewer than half of the kids you’re trying so hard to teach will graduate.
One of the big criticisms of public education (and other public institutions) is the scarcity of incentive-based pay. In many private-sector companies, the amount you take home in your paycheck is based on your performance. Let’s say you graduate with a B.A. in business and want to go into sales. When you get a job, you generally receive a base salary with a bonus incentive. If you perform well for a year, you may receive additional benefits or even a promotion. Other incentives are available, too: if you are part of a sales team and you, as a group, sell more than your expected quota, you get a team bonus. And if your company as a whole does well, you might receive an extra kick in the paycheck.
But if you are a public school teacher (or work for the public sector in general), few of these incentives exist. Three factors determine your pay as a teacher: your level of certification, your postgraduate degrees, and your seniority. That’s it. Stick around long enough, you will be paid more, whether you are a star or a slacker.
One of the main reasons why we do not know as much as incentive programs work is because teachers unions are loathe to adopt pay-for-performance schemes. This hit home when we originally took our idea to Ron Huberman. We told him about our ideas to incentivize teachers in Chicago Public Schools. Depending on how well they did, teachers could earn up to $8,000 on top of their salaries. But the teachers unions balked. “No, absolutely not,” they told us. “We could not imagine anything like this working.” Even when Ron Huberman stepped in to try to persuade them to allow us to run our experiments, they refused.
But we still had Tom Amadio, the maverick in Chicago Heights, in our corner. With his persuasive help, we reached an agreement with the Chicago Heights teachers’ union. Fortunately, these teachers were willing to try anything to help their students.
We offered more than 150 Chicago Heights teachers a chance to earn an extra bonus.10 In one treatment, an individual teacher could strive for the $8,000 bonus; in another one, teachers working in teams of two split the bonus (the idea being that team teaching would allow them to share lesson plans and ideas). We also applied the same gain-versus-loss-framing, carrot-and-stick motivators that we’d used with the students in the computer labs. We wrote checks for $4,000 (the average reward) to some individual teachers before the school year started, with the stipulation that they would have to repay all or some of the money if student performance didn’t improve. We also wrote checks for $4,000 each to some of the teachers who were going to work in two-person teams, with the same stipulation. (Given that the average teacher’s salary in Chicago Heights is around $64,000,11 this extra $4,000 was a substantial amount. Imagine yourself getting this extra money in September, and then having to pay it back in June. No pressure, of course.)
Our results showed that when teachers were threatened with losing the rewards they had already received, student achievement in math jumped up about 6 percentile points, and in reading, about 2 percentile points. This type of incentive seemed to work particularly well when teachers worked in teams. Overall, their students’ achievement improved between 4 to 6 percentile points.
This result was nothing short of astonishing. To put it in perspective: if the low-income, minority students in Chicago Heights could repeat such percentage-point gains for each year of elementary school, it would be enough to close the entire gap between their achievement and that of wealthier white kids from the suburbs.
*****
Our explorations into public education have taught us the power of combining field experiments with economic reasoning. We learned that kids really do respond to immediate rewards, and that the threat of taking away that reward is more powerful than paying it later, both for students and for teachers. We also learned that parent participation really helps in teaching kids not only how to read and add, but also how to appreciate noncognitive skills such as patience, and how investment now leads to higher rewards later.
On the downside, we also learned that the behavior of some kids, especially kids in high school—Kevin Muncy, for example—are harder to change. Kevin was already disengaged by the time he entered Bloom Trail High; ultimately he failed all his classes. Urail King, on the other hand, ended up doing better. Borderline kids like Urail were more easily motivated by the cash and the lottery. The improvements we saw in the high schools were promising—dozens more kids graduated than might have otherwise—but they weren’t dramatic. These high school kids just didn’t appear to be as easy to motivate as we had hoped.
These insights drive home an important point: even if we offered kids like Kevin a million dollars to solve a hard math problem, he couldn’t. Why? Because by the time kids are fourteen years old, they are already tilting one way or the other. They have already missed out on important investments that make it quite difficult to achieve high levels of competency in certain subject areas. They have already been deeply imprinted by their earlier experiences; parents have lost much of their influence and their supply of coercive tools. And if at that point they are only reading at a third-grade level, bringing them up to speed is awfully hard.
If you haven’t already learned how to focus on a lesson, solve problems on your own, and stay out of trouble by the time you are in the ninth grade, your odds of success are low. For disengaged kids like Kevin, a more serious intervention is probably more appropriate.
Think of it this way: if we asked you to solve a second-order partial linear differential equation, and told you that we would pay you a million dollars if you solved it, could you? If you haven’t been trained to solve this kind of math problem, even a million-dollar incentive will have no effect. If higher-level problem solving isn’t already achieved through years of good schooling, applying incentives so late in life won’t make a difference.
This does not mean that we give up on those kids; quite the opposite. There is a productive place for everyone in our vibrant world economy. But, clearly, we need to see what will happen if we intervene with younger children. Early childhood education has the chance to give everyone an open door to the highest levels of society.
No comments:
Post a Comment