Merit Pay and the Myth of Monetary Motivation

Conventional wisdom dictates that providing monetary incentives to employees will effectively increase quality and quantity of work produced.  Arne Duncan and Bill Gates, among other influential education reformers, are buying into this wisdom and pushing for policy changes that would link teacher pay to student test scores.  This works for executives who earn bonuses for meeting sales goals, right?  What could possibly be different about teaching?  And why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?

We HAVE thought of this before- - and it has proved a failure over and over again since the 1920s.  Within the past five years alone, merit-pay programs have been proven ineffective in Nashville Public Schools, New York City Public Schools, and Duncan’s native Chicago Public Schools, to name a few.  The following are direct quotes from the research reports in question, with links to the documentation:

o   Nashville:  “POINT was focused on the notion that a significant problem in American education is the absence of appropriate incentives, and that correcting the incentive structure would, in and of itself, constitute an effective intervention that improved student outcomes.  By and large, results did not confirm this hypothesis.”

o   New York: “I find no evidence that teacher incentives increase student performance, attendance, or graduation, nor do I find any evidence that the incentives change student or teacher behavior. If anything, teacher incentives may decrease student achievement, especially in larger schools.”

o   Chicago: “We found no evidence that the [TAP merit-pay] program raised student test scores . . . We also found that TAP did not have a detectable impact on rates of teacher retention in the school or district during the second year it was rolled out in the district.”

Why anyone continues to push merit-pay programs in the face of such overwhelming data regarding their ineffectiveness is beyond me.  It is unclear why education reformers act on the assumption that education should function like a business, despite all the evidence to the contrary.  To quote Diane Ravitch: “Education is not a business. It is supposed to provide good education to all children, not to segment its market and compete with others in the marketplace. It operates on the principle of equality of educational opportunity, not a race to see who can sell the most or win the biggest market share and beat out the others.”

Furthermore, there is something fundamentally wrong with the market-driven view of children and their education as a product.  In Duncan’s merit pay plan, which bases teacher salary on test scores, the product in question is how well a child does on a standardized test.  I fundamentally disagree with this for two reasons.  First, I argue that focusing so narrowly on this singular metric ignores the true heart of education: a complex process of joy, discovery, collaboration, problem solving, creation, and social-emotional growth.  Second, the tests by which we are currently judging students and teachers are flawed.  At present, there is no accurate way to measure how a specific student has grown over time with a specific teacher.  Teachers are judged on all scores, regardless of how long a student has actually been in their class.  In areas like D.C., where there is a high percentage of charter school students being unceremoniously kicked out come test time, the public school teachers are then assigned the punishment for failing students who have only been in the class for a few days.  Is this a reasonable and fair way to judge teacher effectiveness?

Finally, there is new evidence from scientist Daniel Pink disproving the conventional wisdom that the best way to motivate someone is with external rewards like money.  Pink found in his research that “the secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.”  Teachers have known this for hundreds of years.  Clearly, we didn’t choose the profession because we were dazzled at the prospect of earning a few extra hundred dollars for raising test scores.  We do this work because we love “those rare moments when understanding of the world alters and a previously impossible thing is admitted” (Audrey Niffenegger).  In honing our craft year after year, we feel we are, in the words of Daniel Pink, “doing better by ourselves and our world.”  We are already motivated and working as hard as we can.  Let’s stop trying to force merit-pay to work and begin looking at actual solutions.