[another_story]

There's also an increased distance between those doing the actual work and those making decisions about how it should be done. Bureaucratic depth keeps any real change from taking place, instead leaving those on the ground level to try and work within a set growing rules. Any attempt to affect change has to be filtered through so many levels and takes so long.

As a longtime teacher, I don't think there are any solutions that can effectively reform existing educational institutions. I also don't think there are any solutions which can affect change which won't leave some group(s) disadvantaged.

One thing I'd like to see is a return to schools and districts which are allowed to operate with more autonomy and with budgets not tied to a local tax base, or federal money tied to test scores. I'd also like to see ways teachers and administrators can effectively remove repeat offenders from classes. Teachers are unable to create effective learning environments when they have no way maintain order, which seems to be the case in many schools. Let poor parenting blowback on the parents and maybe you'll get parents to take some responsibility.

All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to. Teach in Asia, Africa and even Europe and you'll see a palpable difference in the way people view education. As a teacher you're able to improve your craft as opposed to surviving day to day.

[wrp]

> The culture in America doesn't respect...educators in the way it used to.

Things may have gone downhill since the 1950s, but it was never very good. Think of the scorn directed at the teaching profession in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and the traditional proverb, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." I don't know when it began, but the general disrespect for educators is centuries old in Anglo culture.

[SteveGerencser]

There is a better, older, phrase that would be great to promote over that tired saying:

“Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.” — Aristotle

[birdyrooster]

You are a contrarian in the best sense, thanks for sharing this!

[SteveGerencser]

As a true 'jack of all trades' I feel that it's my duty to share these quotes, or the full version of widely used quotes.

[another_story]

Great quote, thanks for sharing.

[ecshafer]

My solution to the education attitude issue in the us, which is very real: pay the families that perform best in school districts. Take the top grades on each years final tests and give the family money. The entire society will change overnight, as people will suddenly be asking kids why they aren’t studying.

[cjohnson318]

I think we tried that in the form of scholarships. Basically, the students with the highest grades get discounts from different colleges. It's not exactly the same, but the effect is similar, and this system has been running for generations.

I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty. Parents who earn less usually don't have time to help kids with their school work, or don't understand the school work, or don't know how to study or teach children. Sure, there's exceptions to this everywhere, but that's the general pattern.

Incidentally, Louisiana has/had a program called TOPs that covers in-state tuition for students that get over a 3.something GPA. Who benefits the most from it? Kids whose families make above the median income in the state.

I don't think giving X dollars to the families with the top ranking students would change society overnight.

[peterfirefly]

> I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty.I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty.

True, but the arrow of causality is not from "poverty" to "low test scores".

Children of poor (and sometimes illiterate) Chinese immigrants did and do quite well!

[cpursley]

Careful, you’re not allowed to utter the “C” word here in relation to educational outcomes.

(The word is “Culture”)

[vacuity]

Your phrasing is crude but there is truth in it. In theory, African-American communities could be much better off with some drastic changes in culture, and it would be far more feasible for the government to pick up the slack and level the playing field (affordable quality education, abolish legacy admissions, etc.). Any amount of public school infrastructure and funding doesn't inherently get people to learn; students play a part in their own success. Of course, changing culture is much easier said than done.

[cjohnson318]

> In theory, African-American communities could be much better off with some drastic changes in culture

African-American communities could be a lot better off if they had been able to take advantage of the same veterans benefits programs that white veterans were able to take advantage of, if they had been able to get home loans on the same terms that white counterparts were able to, if Black professionals had been able find work outside of Black operated businesses, and so on.

But yeah, Black people are real lazy if you just ignore hundreds of years of history. Black people ain't lazy, they just don't have the same opportunities as everyone else because when they walk into an interview with a white manager, there's a real good chance that manager is thinking something like, "In theory, African-American communities could be much better off with some drastic changes in culture".

[paulryanrogers]

Cultural problems within the poorer communities in the US cannot be solved completely internally. Because sadly many of the problems come from systemic racism forcing people into a box of sorts. Escaping that requires overcoming a mountain of challenges. My SO taught in some of these schools, and the circumstances in these communities is tragic.

It's a bit like telling prisoners they can all leave if they'd just try harder, meanwhile the outside world has been pouring concrete around the outside for decades.

[doalldrugs]

I agree if only black people would change.

[incone123]

I find this site more open to constructive debate than elsewhere.

Thanks for specifying which c word you meant, as the only one in the post you replied to was Chinese.

[xvedejas]

Merit scholarships were already out of fashion by the time I was applying for colleges (circa 2010). Especially at more selective schools (those with lower admission rates), merit scholarships have been displaced in favor of diversity scholarships, which I suppose reflects the changing priorities of those schools.

[AmpsterMan]

Scholarships also just possibly dried up after the great recession. My wife and I both graduated from same state with similar GPA, though I was 2010, she 2012. We qualified for the exact same scholarship. Mine covered 100% of my tuition, hers 75%.

[twothamendment]

My son struggled to read when he was young. Over the summer we set a goal and attached a payout to it. Yes, I bribed my son to read. The problem is now I can't get him to stop.

Money talks.

[cgriswald]

Learning is a kid’s job.

A kid is working a decades long project to figure out how he wants to spend his life and do the work to make that happen.

Imagine facing that and being told you have to do something you aren’t interested in doing without a clear concept of why it even matters… and without really any say in the matter anyway.

I don’t know if I would have the tenacity to tackle a twenty year project partially against my will and I don’t have to worry about developing socially, growing physically, etc.

Pay the damn kids, I say.

[stevekemp]

We've got a six year old, just about to start school in a few months, and we've done the same thing.

We started giving him a quarter of a lego minecraft set every time he read two pages of text - either in English or Finnish - then we had to move to a bunch of bricks every time he read a full chapter.

The surge in his effort, and abilities, was almost frighteningly quick.

(Here in Finland kids can go to daycare from 1 year old, and start in pre-school when they're six. School-proper starts at seven.)

[ZeroGravitas]

I don't think you can parent without some level of bribing but note that research has been done suggesting that extrinsic motivation can negatively impact intrinsic motivation.

One personal anecdote of mine is a school friend who announced that he was never going to read a book again after finishing school (with good grades). For him, reading books was not a thing he loved, just a means to an end.

https://www.weareteachers.com/understanding-intrinsic-vs-ext...

[light_hue_1]

Sadly, the link you provided shows how much nonsense there is in this space. They provide two sources of "evidence". Both of them are total junk.

For example, they say: As educators, we have heard a lot about the downside of extrinsic motivation. Studies have shown that extrinsic motivation produces only short-term effects, at best. One study out of Princeton University goes so far as to say, “External incentives are weak reinforcers in the short run, and negative reinforcers in the long run.”

That study? https://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/RES2003.pdf It's an economic model of how idealized humans might work! It literally says nothing about real humans or children.

The second piece of evidence comes from the founder of this website excelatlife.com A website by a psychologist who treats anxiety and depression, and "Dr. Frank's strong interest in Eastern philosophies and Buddhist psychology has led her to train in various forms of Tai Chi/Qi Gong as well as other mindfulness methods for over 15 years. She is a third degree black belt in American Kenpo and continues her involvement in martial arts at the Martial Arts Center." She knows about as much about childhood education as you do.

Maybe your statement is right, but your evidence is non-evidence.

[ZeroGravitas]

That was just a Google result that I scanned and found reasonable, so I have no great desire to defend it strongly, but:

The economics paper is trying to reconcile the economics orthodoxy of "incentives matter" with the experimental evidence (that it references from across decades) that incentives can in some cases hurt.

It's intro is a decent survey of the issue, and has the meta benefit that economists if they could prove this effect didn't happen would be happy to prove that. Instead they are trying to adjust their model to account for it.

> Kohn (1993) surveys the results from a variety of programmes aimed at getting people to lose weight, stop smoking, or wear seat belts, either offering or not offering rewards. Consistently, individ- uals in “reward” treatments showed better compliance at the beginning, but worse compliance in the long run than those in the “no-reward” or “untreated controls” groups. Taken together, these many findings indicate a limited impact of rewards on “engagement” (current activity) and a negative one on “re-engagement” (persistence).

> A related body of work transposes these ideas from the educational setting to the workplace. In well-known contributions, Etzioni (1971) argues that workers find control of their behaviour via incentives “alienating” and “dehumanizing”, and Deci and Ryan (1985) devote a chapter of their book to a criticism of the use of performance-contingent rewards in the work setting.2

> And, without condemning contingent compensation, Baron and Kreps (1999, p. 99) conclude that: There is no doubt that the benefits of [piece-rate systems or pay-for-performance incentive devices] can be considerably compromised when the systems undermine workers’ intrinsic motivation.

> Kreps (1997) reports his uneasiness when teaching human resources management and discussing the impact of incentive devices in a way that is somewhat foreign to standard economic theory. And indeed, recent experimental evidence on the use of performance- contingent wages or fines confirms that explicit incentives sometimes result in worse compliance than incomplete labour contracts (Fehr and Falk (1999), Fehr and Schmidt (2000), Gneezy and Rustichini (2000a)). Relatedly, Gneezy and Rustichini (2000b) find that offering monetary incentives to subjects for answering questions taken from an IQ test strictly decreases their performance, unless the “piece rate” is raised to a high enough level. In the policy domain, Frey and Oberholzer-Gee (1997) surveyed citizens in Swiss cantons where the government was considering locating a nuclear waste repository; they found that the fraction supporting siting of the facility in their community fell by half when public compensation was offered.

[hguant]

My math teacher in 6th grade had a conversation with my parents that essentially went "he's not going to learn algebra from the Hobbit, but I feel bad telling him not to read"

There are worse problems to have!

[seanmcdirmid]

If we did that, the money would mostly go to the well off already. They’ve already got a system in place, they are already deeply into what their kids are studying. It doesn’t sound like much would improve.

[ecshafer]

But school districts are already segmented by wealth. So sure money would go to some families in the wealthier school districts. But also families in the poor ones.

[sb52191]

I think you might be surprised at the distribution in wealth even within schools. Only an anecdote but I went to a public high school in somewhat of an inner city, and there was a stark contrast in financial well being across my classmates and myself. The kids from upper middle class families were the ones in AP classes and who went on to great universities, while the more median student likely came from a household that were much closer to the poverty line.

If performance had come with a financial bonus, I'd guess 90% of the recipients wouldn't notice any difference in their lives/outcomes. Maybe even a higher percentage than that.

[SoftTalker]

This is how I finally memorized my multiplication tables in elementary school. My father paid me. He made me a set of flash cards and had a schedule of credits for each fact learned but I did not get the payout until I learned them all flawlessly.

[gretch]

This Ted talk (includes a lot of data) shows that motivation via money hurts creative problem solving.

https://youtu.be/rrkrvAUbU9Y

[mkl]

Sounds like an excuse for parents to make their kids' lives hell. Such a policy would do a lot of damage.

[nebula8804]

>All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to.

Its crazy to see these stats in the link along with your comment... but at the same time see that the US leading the way(or is at least in the top tier) in technology, business, innovation, etc.

How is the country continuing to produce so much output when its mechanism for generating that output(its people) is in such dire straights? Is this a delay thing? Are we about to have a massive drop off in innovation in 10 years when these kids are the ones in their prime producing years? If that happens what the heck is the leadership/business class going to do? Their power comes from the fact that the country is producing so much.

[jfdbcv]

Because the top end of US education is still very strong, with some of the best colleges in the world.

Strong capital markets makes the US probably the easiest place to start a company and seek funding.

The US remains a place where smart, talented individuals can succeed and make far more money than peers, attracting a pool of very talented immigrants.

[danaris]

First of all, it's important to define what we mean by "innovation".

Is cryptocurrency "innovation"? Credit-default swaps? Leveraged buyouts? So much of what's been making absurd amounts of money in recent decades—and which gets openly called "innovative" by many people—is not better ways of doing things for people, but simply better ways of separating people from their money.

Second of all, it's important to look at who, exactly, is doing the hard work on the innovations that are pushing us forward, rather than simply making rich people richer. How many of these innovations come from people who got their education 15, 25, 40 years ago?

Third of all, it's important to question the very premise: I'm absolutely in agreement that there is a strong thread of anti-intellectualism in American culture, and that there have been changes in our public school system that have caused some serious problems over the past few decades...but to what extent are these problems universal? To what extent do they actually leave graduates less well prepared to be innovative?

Indeed, to what extent is innovation even a product of education, rather than culture and creativity?

[ithkuil]

I work for an American company remotely from Europe. I didn't leverage any educational facility from the US yet I'm contributing to the fact that the US is "leading the way" in technology. And the reason is simple: not only do they pay me more than an equivalent European company, often it's hard to find an "equivalent" European company where I can work on something I find interesting.

Now, something did originally created the conditions for why US is leading, but once that has happened it can become a self sustaining network effect, provided enough money is kept flowing

[Xcelerate]

> How is the country continuing to produce so much output when its mechanism for generating that output (its people) is in such dire straights?

That's because it's not the people educated by the U.S. systems that are producing so much. I worked at a FANG company and within my team of 50 engineers, I was one of two people who were born in the U.S. It's not just tech either — my father is a chemical engineer and most of the engineers he works with are from other countries.

The U.S. is currently still one of the top places that the world's best talent wants to move to; whether that continues to hold true remains to be seen.

[datavirtue]

Yes. The population drop alone is going to make all this happen. Nevermind the massive black hole of citizenry who know next to nothing and are proud of it.

[WalterBright]

The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year.

[wrp]

While I'm not completely against performance-based pay, there are some issues that would make this particular approach unworkable.

One is that in dealing with children, personal compatibility matters a great deal more. Some teacher-student relationships will "just click" and others fail.

Another is the dependence of the students' performance on their home environment.

So, even an excellent teacher will get poor results when working in a disadvantaged district. These things would have to be taken into account when designing a reward system for teachers.

[WalterBright]

A proper proposal would be a lot more words than my little posting!

It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be significantly better than the existing system, which has zero incentive for the teachers to get results.

[reverius42]

> zero incentive for the teachers to get results

Except, of course, wanting to educate -- which is ostensibly the reason they got into the profession in the first place. It probably wasn't for the pay.

[WalterBright]

Every job has its drudgery, no matter how much someone wants to have that job. I would also expect teachers who love to teach also want to teach those eager to learn. This is about teaching those who are not so interested in learning.

Also, you can't say teachers are poorly paid by neglecting they only work 8 months of the year, have a gold plated medical plan, and can retire with a lifetime very generous pension.

[ordersofmag]

Can you offer any evidence or reasoning as to why I should believe this? It would seem to assert that somehow student success/failure currently sits entirely in the hands of teachers: they know what is needed and could do it if only they were marginally more motivated. I'm not a teacher myself but have been involved in the system my entire life and this doesn't ring true at all. Even if it were possible it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling. Which seems to run counter to the goals of public education.

[WalterBright]

It works everywhere in the private sector.

Having a base salary plus incentive pay for meeting objective goals is commonplace. Companies wouldn't do that if it didn't work. In my own company, Zortech, the staff was paid a base rate plus a cut of the gross sales for the month.

> it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling

Actually the reverse would happen. The best students would automatically attain grade level performance, and likely exceed it. They'll already get the bonus for those students without any effort. The gold is in getting the underachievers to achieve.

[donw]

It... really doesn't.

Sales is a great example.

In companies where bonuses are based on, say, revenue booked per quarter, salesmen play all kinds of games to jack that number up as far as it can go, regardless of the collateral damage. Piss off the engineers by promising the impossible? Who cares, I closed that McScully deal. Sold a customer a product that won't actually solve their problem? Cha-ching, bonus time!

Now, when you figure out how to tie sales bonuses to positive outcomes... that's a different story. Then the incentives match the actual goals.

But that's really hard to do. Outcomes can take years to measure, if they are measurable at all.

Hence why you end up with all kinds of really screwed-up corporate behavior. It's not because people or corporations are evil -- they just take the shortest path to the win, even if that's not really the road you wanted them on.

[WalterBright]

Companies fix it or they go out of business. I've seen them tweaking it.

[donw]

That only applies to small companies.

Schools are equivalent to large companies, and large companies can screw the proverbial six ways from Sunday for years before it hurts their bottom line, for any number of reasons.

Many Americans seem to have this mental disease whereby they think every problem can be solved with more money.

This problem can't be.

[bandrami]

You really need to see more of the actual economy, because this is embarrassingly naive.

[condwanaland]

You have another comment somewhere here saying that 80% of companies close within 5 years. You may be making the other sides point...

[hakfoo]

I suspect the problem is how you can reasonably write a general spec for that which doesn't systematically doom some teachers, especially during the bootstrap phase (arguably quite a few years).

In an ideal world, our perfectly spherical students would enter the classroom "at grade level" and ready to proceed to the next level.

But what happens if you inherit a class of students that's barely above "remedial"-- starting one or two grades back on day 1-- what's the right metric for success? Getting all the way up to "at grade level" is probably unrealistic, but should we expect them to make up 1.25 grades per year, or 1.75? Or are we in a "we started back, and are going to beat them by going slower" mentality, and even getting 0.75 grade per year would be a win?

Conversely, if you're at a magnet school, you may be taking in students already a few grades above the norm on day one of class. There are kids who can absolute bury the needle on a standardized test-- "12th grade equivalent" at 5th or 6th grade. You could simply babysit them all year and still clear the bar.

I also expect there's a huge amount of dealing with Karen parents too-- I suspect an firm hand in holding back underachieving students could result in parental backlash. Too many parents would rather see the kid tossed out the moment he turns 18, even if they haven't gotten them career or independent-life ready.

[thaumasiotes]

> But what happens if you inherit a class of students that's barely above "remedial"-- starting one or two grades back on day 1-- what's the right metric for success? Getting all the way up to "at grade level" is probably unrealistic, but should we expect them to make up 1.25 grades per year, or 1.75?

Well, obviously, they've been making less than 1.0 grades per year so far; you'd expect them to keep going at that rate, not to suddenly double their rate.

[csydas]

but it doesn’t really work in the private sector. MBOs are common for US companies and to this day i’ve got teams across other departments that haven’t met MBO at 100% for years but the higher management seems it okay. the minimum work is still done but the full goals are never realized and these departments are just stuck in a rut. but, who cares? the minimum work is done, the progress numbers still go up, just we don’t have the ideal end result, just an acceptable one.

teachers already run the line of barely enough compensation to make it worthwhile except for those who are inclined towards teaching.

teachers are expected to do too much and there are too many goals imo for the position. whether we want it to be the case or not there is a huge social and mental health aspect to their jobs, and the standards look to be wildly inconsistent even within the same city as to what a successful education means.

like would you want to put a ton of effort in on a project knowing that the very next quarter you’re going to have to basically change the entire stack you’re working with and have a completely different set of regulations and project goals? and on top of it all, you need to get your team to even take the project seriously? and to make it even more fun a bunch of your teams’ families and friends are telling the world that the language you picked is awful and evil and are trying to regulate it out of use?

how much would you want for conditions like that every single project?

[astrange]

Performance reviews aren't always based on "objective goals" and it'd be bad if they were, because almost anyone outside of sales could game them. Typically it's a kind of stack ranking based on how you performed relative to peers, where relative means in the vague opinion of your management tree.

[WalterBright]

Public teacher unions are adamantly against subjective reviews, which is why I suggested an objective mechanism.

> in the vague opinion of your management tree

I know it's popular to believe that management has no idea who the real performers are. But every office I've worked in, everyone knew who the good performers were and who the deadwood was. Including the managers.

It's also true that every person I've talked to who had been laid off was sure he was unfairly targeted. Even the ones who'd come to work strung out on coke.

[bandrami]

Let's apply this to bankers, too. They must give a checking account to anybody who shows up, and their pay can be based on how much money is in those checking accounts at the end of the fiscal year.

[denton-scratch]

> because almost anyone outside of sales could game them

Perhaps you haven't worked in sales? My experience of sales meetings was that most of the meeting was taken up with discussions of how to optimise commission. The sales manager was totally in on the game; after all, he got a skim of his salesmen's commissions.

In no other environment have I seen people so obsessed with juking the stats.

[bandrami]

Even sales manipulates them -- giving away way too much to lock in a longer deal this quarter because it makes this quarter's numbers look better had been a problem at places I've worked.

[bandrami]

It doesn't really work in the private sector though; it leads to destructive and short-sighted juking of the relevant metrics.

[WalterBright]

Companies wouldn't use it pervasively if it didn't work.

[jcranmer]

Pervasiveness seems to be more a function of whatever the latest workplace fad is rather than based on underlying assessments of how well it works. I've heard upper management outright say things like they're mandating return-to-office simply because everybody else is doing it.

[danaris]

This is laughably optimistic.

There are plenty of things companies do, pretty pervasively, that have been proven both scientifically and empirically to be detrimental.

[bandrami]

Lol

[aleph_minus_one]

> Having a base salary plus incentive pay for meeting objective goals is commonplace. Companies wouldn't do that if it didn't work.

Management methods are full of cargo cult "science".

[waterhouse]

One way to achieve that, for a teacher, would be to get all the good students into your class, and avoid having any bad students, or find reasons to kick them out. Do you have countermeasures for that?

[WalterBright]

Sure. Assign the students at random. Some years the teacher will get a better batch than other years, but it would all even out.

[davidgay]

Don't forget to bus the kids randomly across town (county? state?), or else your suggestion is ineffective.

That has always been a very popular and well received idea (or maybe your should think a bit before blaming teachers).

[WalterBright]

Why would it be ineffective? Suppose you're a teacher at a school where the kids are all below grade level. Sounds like a much larger opportunity to get those bonuses than a school where all kids are above average.

> or maybe your should think a bit before blaming teachers

Teachers are only human, and humans respond to positive incentives. The current system has no incentives.

[davidgay]

You claimed that the fix to getting lucky with a batch of good students (or unlucky with bad) is random assignment. Now it seems that you're claiming that getting a bad batch is a good deal as it will be easier to get them to improve...

[ryandrake]

I think you have baked into your plan an incorrect assumption: You are massively overestimating the effect a teacher's input has on student output. Of all the things that lead to student education performance, the quality/performance of the teacher is very low on the list. Teachers are not factory workers, where if they are more skilled, or faster, or better trained, they'll produce more widgets faster.

Most teachers can predict each of their student's year-end educational performance by the end of the first parent-teacher meeting week. Students whose parents who are not involved or where there is no culture valuing education at home are pretty much screwed, no matter how much effort is spent on them, and students whose parents are dialed in and taking an active role in their educations are going to succeed regardless of whether the teacher is even there.

Basing a teacher's bonus on student performance will have one effect: Teachers will be incentivized to move to schools or districts with better students.

There are teachers who are better than other teachers, but it's not generally measurable in "student outcomes". Just like there are better programmers than other programmers, but it's not measurable in "company revenue".

[throw9away6]

I think it’s the reverse. The baseline remedial student growth is say .8 grades per year. Therefore to get 1.0 grades of progress you would need 125% baseline effectiveness. To get the same with a 1.2 growth rate student it would only take 83%. Students also can’t be judged in isolation, remedial students adversely affect other students so that needs to be taken into account somehow.

I’m not saying it couldn’t be done but you would need a pretty sophisticated model to try to figure out who is or isn’t effective. Then once you turned on the model you would need to constantly tweek it to handle metrics based tampering.

[throw9away6]

If you did that some years would be great and some total losses. The reason being that at each grade level there are 4-10 kids that are completely unmanageable. If you allowed random to happen some percentage of the time you would overload a class with mayhem

[bandrami]

I find it weird the intensity with which people believe that teachers rather than students are the bottleneck here. If you want to add an incentive it makes much more sense to incent the students to do well.

[slowmovintarget]

No. Children are not the bottleneck. Parents are. All the statistics we have say that children in homes where the adults value education and urge their children to learn do better, regardless of other circumstances. Unruly children are typically the result of parental neglect. There are many many examples among poor families of well-behaved children achieving a trajectory that raises them out of poverty within a generation. But it all has to do with the attitude toward education and behavior in the home.

The classic example is poor Asian immigrants that produce successful professionals within one or two generations. Strict behavioral expectations in the home, coupled with an attitude of parental sacrifice for their child's educational opportunities causes significantly better results decade over decade. But this is an attitude that often doesn't translate to many American households.

Vouchers might be one way to help, but it still requires parental involvement in creating the incentive for the child.

[bandrami]

How would vouchers help? It's not like changing schools increases parental involvement. If that's your model the use of public money that makes sense is paying parents to be more involved.

[WalterBright]

An incentive for the teachers is better than no incentive.

I recall a case at a company I worked for. They snagged a major contract with IBM, but it had a tight deadline. They hired a team of 6 or 7 greybeards to do the work. The fun thing was they each got a $10,000 bonus if delivered on time.

They delivered it on time, got the $10 grand each (a lot of money in those days), IBM was happy, all good. So I asked them, did the $10 grand bonus motivate them to get it done on time?

They were offended, saying they were professionals and would have worked just as hard without it.

I laughed, and didn't buy it. Do you?

Here's another case. There was an earthquake in LA, and one of the cloverleaf freeway interchanges fell down. They contracted out the job with a tight deadline, and a bonus of ONE MILLION BUCKS per day it was finished ahead of schedule. It was finished several weeks ahead. Ka-ching!

Money talks, BS walks.

[lordnacho]

While I agree with the idea that people respond to incentives, you are making it out to be a lot simpler to design these schemes than is actually the case.

The examples you give are straightforward. You already have a bunch of people who know how to do a job, so you pay them to do it quickly. Basically you are giving them money to go and tell their families they are going to be working late for a while and they have to postpone their holidays. These are both examples of a simple task with a definable, specific goal. Everyone can tell when the junction is built.

With this teaching math thing, there is no finish line. The people who decide if the kids pass are... teachers. Grading your own work is not going to lead to healthy outcomes. You want to adjust for how easy the task is because you don't want easy classes to get paid and difficult classes to be excluded from getting the bonus. But then who defines the baseline? Teachers again. Maybe not the exact same teachers but they are all part of the same system.

Finally there's the problem of feedback. Incentives work when the person who is incentivized knows how things are going and knows how to change the outcome. It is not clear at all that teachers know that if they just show Billy Bob the times tables as a rhyme then he will pass his test. It is not clear at all that teachers even know whether Billy Bob understands the times tables, or is just repeating what is being said.

This is the problem with all incentive engineering schemes. I'm an engineer too and I wish it were simple. But the history of it is rife with all sorts of catastrophes.

[WalterBright]

> Grading your own work is not going to lead to healthy outcomes.

Sigh. Why do people keep bringing this up? Of course you'd need an assessment test that is not under the control of the teacher. Nobody sets up an incentive program where the person being incentivized evaluates himself.

Come on. Give me a reasonable riposte.

[lordnacho]

I think you need to steelman my arguments, per HN guidelines. I didn't say that each teacher would literally mark their own work, the fair interpretation would be that another teacher or committee of teachers would do this.

Here's what I wrote:

> But then who defines the baseline? Teachers again. Maybe not the exact same teachers but they are all part of the same system.

So how do you intend to grade the teacher's work, except by other teachers, who are in the same position?

This is just like having board members appointing CEOs out of the same pool.

In fact, it's a pretty hard problem to deal with in general, and it appears many places in society, so it's fair to ask how this would be dealt with.

If we're going to build an incentive system, we don't want it to be gamed.

[bandrami]

Right but you give the incentive to the construction company, not to the food truck that feeds the workers. The teachers aren't the problem (to the extent there even is a problem, which is an embarrassingly unexamined question), the students are. So give them an incentive to stop being a problem.

[WalterBright]

Giving the teachers an incentive to find a way to incentivize the students is a perfectly reasonable approach.

[peterfirefly]

How do you incentivize IQ?

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

My parents gave me a few bucks for As and Bs. My school also gave me some scholarship money based on my scores.

[light_hue_1]

> The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year.

You're talking as if this isn't how the system works today. Your proposal is literally how US education has worked since the 80s. The disaster you see in the public education system in the US is in part caused by merit-based systems including merit-based pay for teachers.

The key problem is that we cannot measure how educated someone is. We can only measure their results on a test. Garbage in, garbage out.

This means that everyone teaches to a test. That's a horrible experience for teachers and students. And it literally leads to the solution the article warns us about: water down all the tests and eliminate as much knowledge from the curriculum as you can so that everyone excels and everyone gets their merit-based pay.

We also know that merit-based pay has a tiny impact on student scores in the short term at the scale that one teacher can control over a student-year, under 0.1 standard deviations. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/000283122090558...

So not only does merit-based pay for teachers not work, not only does it not raise scores in any meaningful way, not only does it erode the curriculum, it's literally a big part of the current problem in the US.

Oh, and let's not forget kids with any kind of disability. Under this system they become a massive liability. Instead of teachers trying to help such students, they're quickly routed to the closest holding area so that they don't affect scores. This has been going on for almost 20 years now because of No Child Left Behind.

This is why teachers are opposed to the idea of doubling down on merit-based pay. It's not because the best teachers don't want to make more money. It's because it only rewards the teachers of kids that are already performing well, while punishing teachers in schools that aren't performing well, without any means for the teachers to meaningfully intervene.

[throw9away6]

Why does teaching to a test not work? If the curriculum was standard and the test was well made it should work fine. All my college grades were 50-100% test based and it seemed to work fine. Maybe you break down the content into testable units or something instead of one big test but still what’s wrong with tests?

[light_hue_1]

There are a bunch of reasons why teaching to the test doesn't work.

1. Because tests are a crappy way of assessing knowledge.

There are students who are amazing test takers, but don't really understand the material. There are students who are terrible test takers, like they have test anxiety, but have an incredible understanding of the material if you talk to them and they work through a problem in front of you.

2. Because it's a terrible teaching methodology.

No one wants to learn about something because it's on the test. That's horrible motivation. They want to learn about something because it explains something cool they could never understand, because it provides a new perspective, because they get to do an exciting thing, because it's a fun competition with others, etc.

When you have to teach to a test, people teach to a test. There's pressure from administration to do it because the merit-based pay isn't just for you personally, it's also for the school as a whole. When test scores don't go up your school gets punished too. So now you drill the specific problems on the test over and over again. Do test scores go up? Sure, by that 0.1 standard deviations we talked about. Does joy go up? Does understanding go up? No.

3. Because tests can only test so much.

Practically, only so many topics can be on the test. There are big topics that are important to know in every class. There's tension here: if you design a test that's in a sense fair for a machine, you pick a random page, a random paragraph and ask a specific question about that paragraph, well, ok, you have a test that tests everything. Sort of, at least at the level of memorization. But, immediately people would say this is a terrible test for a human: why does it matter that my child remember the minutia in page 32, paragraph 3, when there are 7 big topics in this course, the topics that are important to build on for next year, and my child mastered them all? And that's fair criticism.

So now, tests become about the big things. Which makes sense, that's what you need for the future. But that interacts with 1 and 2. So now you drill the big topics over and over again. It becomes a game about memorizations.

4. Because we start teaching test taking skills instead of material

Many people are not good test takers. And that's fine! The goal of tests is not to test if you're a good test taker. It's to test if you know the material. We specifically design tests to avoid testing how good you are at taking tests.

Well, when the stakes are so high at Mr/Ms's Smith's retirement fund is on the line, and St. Margaret's operating funds for next year are on the line, people teach test taking. This is miserable for students. You basically teach it by taking a lot of tests over and over. And then of course teaching test taking strategies.

5. Because it makes losers and winners.

If a teacher and school knows that Jimmy isn't going to make it to grade level, will they work with Jimmy so he can do his best. Maybe catch up a little this year? Maybe find an alternative teaching style. Maybe there's a 10% chance that it will work out for Jimmy and he'll go on to university and do amazing things. No. Teaching to the test and merit based pay means that teachers will dump Jimmy. Even if they don't want to do that, the administration makes them. Jimmy is a liability, sure, but it's worse. All the time spent on Jimmy becomes a liability too. Better to just discard him to the scrap heap, he's unlikely to pass the test anyway. We'll double down on our efforts to help Bob instead. He's middling, he has a 70% chance to pass the test. If we double down maybe we increase that to 90%. That's much better for us. This is terrible for students and it feels really bad as a teacher too.

There's much more that is wrong, this is just a short summary.

It doesn't teach people to become educated, curious, smart, interesting, kind, well-rounded. To ask interesting questions. To want to learn. It forces teachers to turn people into widgets and to discard them like widgets.

[donw]

I don't think that would make a difference.

Incentives are whack across the board in education.

At every level, hiring and purchasing are done on the basis of political loyalty, rather than competence or fitness-for-purpose. An entire cathedral has been built upon patronage, and that cathedral will fight quite literally to the death rather than reform itself.

We're just now approaching the end-stage of what that looks like in-practice.

[astrange]

We aren't approaching any kind of end stage anywhere in anything.

As a guy said once, there are neither beginnings or endings to the wheel of time.

[WalterBright]

Hence the vehement opposition to the idea, sadly.

[donw]

Cash incentives aren't going to make a difference.

The only thing that works is school choice. If parents can choose the schools, the schools have to deliver results.

[WalterBright]

> Cash incentives aren't going to make a difference.

If they don't make a difference, then there won't be any payouts to make. It's a can't-lose proposal.

[sokoloff]

I’m generally supportive of finding ways to better use the talent of teachers and if paying incentives is part of that, great.

But this claim is pretty absurd. Imagine that payoffs (in a poorly designed system) are based on a random number generator. That won’t have any lasting, society-wide effect (I suspect you agree), but would result in some payouts.

Incentive design is the difficult nut here, but if cracked, there’s a lot of value to the next generations.

[davidgay]

> The only thing that works is school choice.

Citation needed.

[throw9away6]

School choice only works because you can choose to not be in a school with high need kids. The public schools can’t choose their student so it’s a huge disadvantage

[s1artibartfast]

That's a feature not a bug and public school districts should do the same.

Because districts are required to provide education to all students, they should establish special schools that are essentially prisons for children with behavioral issues or daycares for the mentally handicapped to segment the student population when necessary.

[bandrami]

DC has been doing full school choice for 20 years now. So your bold innovative goal is to "be like DCPS in the early 2000s".

That's gonna go over great in Fairfax County.

[SoftTalker]

I think that could work but you would need to give teachers more control over the discipline and syllabus in their classrooms.

If you can't maintain order and can't adapt your teaching to meet the needs of your students, there's limits to what can be achieved.

[WalterBright]

Of course there are limits on what can be achieved. But we won't know until we try. It's hard to be worse than the current system of no incentive whatsoever.

[tremon]

It's hard to be worse than the current system

This is hardly ever true, for any kind of system.

[bandrami]

Where did you get the idea that US public schools are in some kind of crisis? They're doing pretty well, like they always have, but people are remarkably willing to simply accept claims (often by parties with financial interests in making them) that they aren't.

[WalterBright]

> Where did you get the idea that US public schools are in some kind of crisis?

Declining achievement levels, the perfectly horrible results in inner city schools, and the disparities between different racial groups.

[bandrami]

> Declining achievement levels

Nope. Do the homework here.

> the perfectly horrible results in inner city schools

Another claim remarkably free of any data

> the disparities between different racial groups.

African American kids today score better than white kids 30 years ago did.

[fn-mote]

These suggestions of "pay for results" have a complicated history. I suggest anyone interested actually search the literature on it.

Ever since I saw the critique of the 2012 NYC value added measure results, which shows VAM scores uncorrelated between different classrooms of the same teacher [4], I have been very skeptical that any kind of incentive pay will work. (Also, this NYT article is pretty damning considering the source. [3])

The question is not whether VAM can work, it is a question of does a particular implementation work. The paper [1] is a classic (search for it).

In this particular case: the exact method is not clear but it sounds like there is no adjustment for prior achievement, so all teachers of advanced classes will automatically get the bonus? What if instead what is being measured is the change from year to year? Same result: in this case history is an excellent predictor of the future.

[1]: Rothstein, Jesse. “Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 125, no. 1, February 2010, pp. 175–214.

[2]: Methodological issues in value-added modeling. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11092-019-09303-w

[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/education/teacher-quality... (paywall)

[4]: https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/analyzing-re... (Found it!!)

[slowmovintarget]

We have already seen that such incentives produce the wrong effect. At the whole-school level, what we see from incentives like this is that the system gets gamed such that the standard is lowered so that pay milestones are achieved, as opposed to the actual results of educating the children.

Tests get dumbed down. Teaching to tests instead of to understanding occurs.

Pay teachers more, but put them in a system where the students matter, not the money.

[TheCoelacanth]

That seems like more of an incentive to get a job at an already high-performing school than it is to do a better job of teaching.

[coconuthacker42]

And when you suggest that maybe the distance between those making the decision and those on the ground shouldnt be too large, and maybe those on the ground are allowed to take decisions on their own, youd be branded a commie :/