Paying students to perform is not a proper incentive

By Ronald Chennault
Guest Contributor
Afro-Netizen

The New York City public schools system made news recently for embracing the idea of paying students for performance on standardized tests.  Actually, it’s Roland Fryer, the young African American professor of economics at Harvard, who has really been the focus of the reports.  It is Fryer’s “incentivising” idea that the NYC Department of Education has embraced.

Fryer has experimented in the New York schools before now, when Chancellor Joel Klein invited him to try out his idea in 2004, albeit on a small scale. This time around, however, up to 40 schools will participate—involving 9,000 students—in a pilot phase.  The funding for the incentive program will be raised privately, and is part of Mayor Bloomberg’s larger initiative to give cash payments to poorer adults as a way to alter their behaviors and reduce poverty. 

Fryer’s particular plan for fourth- and seventh-graders will vary payments to those students depending on performance.  Fourth-grade students will receive anywhere from $5 for just taking each of 10 standardized tests administered throughout the school year to $25 for each perfect score.  The seventh-grade students will receive from $10 to $50 per test.  To top it off, each participating school will receive $5,000.

Similar forms of incentivising certainly exist in other arenas, and even exist on a smaller scale in some educational contexts (e.g., dollars for each book read during the summer), so the details of Fryer’s plan are not altogether unheard of.  And its goal of motivating students to learn—or at least to perform better academically—is noble enough.  But is this the best way, or any way, to go about accomplishing that goal?

Part of the thinking behind Fryer’s idea seems to be inspired by motivational strategies used on him by his grandmother, some of which involved monetary rewards.  While financial incentives may be fine for parents and guardians to employ with their children, to have them become policy in a public educational context is a different animal.

The “achievement gaps” (especially the test score gaps) between white students and Black and Latino students and/or between students with higher socioeconomic status and those with lower SES have been the subject of a great deal of debate and focus of lots of research over the past few decades.  Fryer’s own work, in fact, has investigated certain aspects of these gaps.  Significant disparities exist between the opportunities and outcomes of white and more affluent students and nonwhite and less affluent ones, so the gaps deserve our best thinking and most sustained effort in order to address them.  For these reasons, the fact that Fryer and the New York City Department of Education have set their sights on the disparities is to be applauded.

It is also tempting to sympathize with the spirit of the proposal—paying students to perform on tests that take up much more of the educational landscape than they should, but that can have serious consequences for their individual futures and their schools’ futures.  Moreover, given the misuse of standardized testing that is a part of NYC’s testing system—and the city’s policy of using the results of one test to determine whether a 3rd-grader will be retained or promoted, for example, is certainly a misuse of its standardized tests—any mechanism that gives Black and brown students a boost in this highly flawed competition is hard to oppose.  If only the potential for harm weren’t so great.       

There is a substantial body of research that provides evidence that tangible rewards substantially undermine intrinsic motivation.  The findings of this research make it clear that educators should be very careful when using reward-based incentive programs.  In fact, programs that reward students based on their performance—the very type of program created by Fryer—seem to have the most profound effect on undermining motivation.   

Former Harvard president Lawrence Summers believes that “Roland is an evidence-driven guy rather than prejudice, instinct or tradition…”  For his own part, Fryer presents himself as a person who follows evidence wherever it leads him.  Yet these claims fly in the face of his actions.  If Fryer is so driven by eivdence, then he shouldn’t be ignoring the evidence provided by others regarding tangible rewards.  And he is not alone.  A few years ago, Chancellor Klein endorsed the 3rd-grade retention policy imposed by Mayor Bloomberg, even though strict retention policies in Chicago and many other school systems had not resulted in increased academic growth for students.  For all of their claims to the contrary, it’s not apparent that Fryer, Klein, or Bloomberg are making decisions informed by the most robust evidence available.    

The most disturbing aspect of all of this is Fryer’s appointment as the system’s “chief equality officer,” a role in which his primary charge will be to advise Klein on how to improve the academic achievement of Black and Latino students.  And this is his first big idea as equality officer? 

I’m all for bold experimentation in overcoming the seemingly insurmountable barriers to success in urban public schools.  But what about starting with other ideas that we already know are effective: mandating smaller class sizes, especially in the early grades and especially in classrooms with disadvantaged students; avoiding placing the least prepared educators in the most challenging schools; arguing for and creating assessment systems that include local assessments (as the state of Nebraska has done and as the New York Performance Standards Consortium has already developed in 28 schools across the state), which students and teachers are likely to find more meaningful and hence take them more seriously, just to name a few. 

Why experiment with kids in schools using methods of questionable effectiveness when many other evidence-based practices already exist?

I wish Brother Fryer well; he has a tough job ahead of him.  At the end of his tenure as chief equality officer, however, he can return to his privileged position at Harvard or just about anywhere else and find a bright future awaiting him.  I’m much more concerned about the woefully underserved kids in NYC schools he’ll be studying for the next few years.  Will his attractive incentives leave them better off than where they are now?                   

Comments

[Jennifer]

I work in education and I have found that students who perform below the standard come from homes where parents are not interested in education and learning.

Many view school as being the central place of inspiring learning and building academics. The school CANNOT be the only place learning occurs.

It is a triangle where the parent and child must actively cooperate with the educational institution.