Why paying kids to get good grades is a bad idea
I cringed this morning when I read the piece in the Wall Street Journal about schools paying students to get good grades. The writer points out that such programs have had mixed results, and hangs his story on a new study of a 12-year-old Texas program. He writes:
In Texas, high-school students enrolled in Advanced Placement classes who got top scores on math, science and English tests were paid up to $500... The research, by C. Kirabo Jackson, an economics professor at Cornell University, found that over time, more students took Advanced Placement courses and tests, and that more graduating seniors attended college. Most of the gains came from minority students in the 40 high schools studied, accounting for about 70,000 students in all...
Previous data collected by the nonprofit Advanced Placement Strategies Inc., which runs the Texas program, found that in the 10 schools where it was initially launched, passing AP test scores doubled in the first year, quadrupled in the second year and have continued to increase. The program is now used in 61 schools statewide.
But exactly how much the cash incentives contributed to the improvements remains unclear. Teachers in these districts received additional training and bonuses of up to $10,000 when their students scored well. So it's inconclusive whether paying the students, rewarding the teachers or a combination of these led to the improved test scores.
That inconclusiveness isn't stopping the rush to copy the program: six states (Arkansas, Alabama, Connecticut, Kentucky, Massachusetts and Virginia) will start doing the same thing this year, thanks to $13 million grants from the National Math and Science Initiative.
The reason this particularly bothers me is because earlier this year I read a book by the Duke economist Dan Ariely. In a chapter titled "The Cost of Social Norms," he documents how people will do a lot of work for no money, since they are getting social rewards. For instance, the respect of your teachers and parents for getting a 5 on the AP Calculus exam.
Once you introduce money to a situation, though, social norms get replaced by economic ones. This is deeply problematic, as Ariely explains in this video:
In his book, Ariely describes an experiment with a day care center that was having a problem with parents showing up late to get their kids. The day care instituted a fine, but it didn't work well. Why not? As Ariely writes:
Before the fine was introduced, the teachers and parents had a social contract, with social norms about being late. Thus, if parents were late—as they occasionally were—they felt guilty about it—and their guilt compelled them to be more prompt in picking up their kids in the future... But once the fine was imposed, the day care center had inadvertently replaced the social norms with market norms. Now that the parents were paying for their tardiness, they interpreted the situation in terms of market norms... Since they were being fined, they could decide for themselves whether to be late or not, and they frequently chose to be late.
The real problem, though, came later, when the day care center dropped the fine. Social norms—the guilt parents felt at being late—didn't automatically return. In fact, when the fine was dropped, late pick-ups actually rose slightly, because both the social norm and the fine were gone. "Social relationships are not easy to reestablish," Ariely writes. Which is why I cringed.
UPDATE: In response to yeah man's very valid point in the comments section below, I've written some more about this in a new blog post here.
Barbara!
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1
My gut says that in the case of good grades the money might build a social norm that outlasts the program.
All it would take would be success stories of good jobs & etc.
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2
I have a success story at Billionairecupid.com any how..
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3
If the social norms in place were working there would have been no need for this program in the first place. So what is the purpose of saying "my gut doesn't like this even though it's working" without proposing a better idea?
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4
@yeah man: I'm not sure we can make a blanket statement that pay-for-performance programs are working. The second sentence of the Journal article, which seemed pretty well-researched, is: "But whether they work is hard to say."
My point is that even if certain programs do seem to work in certain situations, they could have unanticipated negative long-term effects, like those outlined by Ariely. I'm not reacting from my gut as much as from social science research.
It is a very journalist thing to do, though, to point out a problem and not offer solutions. Still, I think there's value is mentioning a house is on fire even if you don't happen to be holding a fire hose.
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There is a whole swath of literature on extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivitation and the effects on behavior.
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Two points:
1) Barbara, I saw you interview with that author, and your picture does you no justice. I would like to request an update. And I'm not coming on to you or anything, but the younger foto is just not as good a representation as your current look. In short, you're better looking than the foto which is posted.
2) Negative feedback inhibits different response curves than positive feedback. Giving someone a bonus is far different from penalizing bad acts. Let's suppose you fined workers for showing up late as opposed to offering them a bonus at the end of the year for exemplary performance. Huge difference. The example is not indicative of the type of behavior that may be elicited because the effort to correlate the date is based on incomparable premises. I hope this guy has other examples, because that correlation is extremely weak.
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@Bryan from Houston: Thanks. I like your premise—that women get prettier as they get older.
And I definitely take your point about negative vs. positive feedback. If you watch the Ariely video (I'm not in it, so it'll be difficult to get through), you'll see that one of the first examples he gives is one person helping another with a flat tire. That's the sort of thing plenty of people would do for free, but if you offer that same person $1 to change a tire up front, chances are he'll be a little put off. Certainly, his labor is worth more than that—even though he was just willing to do the same task for nothing. That's a thought experiment, but there are other real experiments in the book that get at the same point.
@Corey: Anything jump out at you in that literature that you'd be up for sharing? I like this conversation a lot.
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Regarding Dan Ariely's piece, same could be said for paying for deceased organs. It is one thing to ask someone to donate their dead child's heart. It is another thing entirely to ask for the dead child's heart and say, "... and I'll throw in $800 too....".
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Barbara,
Nominally, extrinsic motives (i.e., money) tend to reduce creativity in most situations (one exception is business settings). Intrinsic motives tend to increase creativity (on the average).
It's been a while since I've delved into the topic but I recommend Robert Sternberg's pop psych book on the topic. For those who don't know, Sternberg is one of the most prolific researchers in psychology and especially famous in the field for his Triarchic Theory of Intelligence. Unlike most pop psych books, his "Creativity" is well sourced (citing actual peer-reviewed research) and is a good read.
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10
Paying kids for good grades / test scores is a gamble. Do we really care if Billy and Susie are getting 4s and 5s on AP exams? Honestly, no. We care that they know important things, that they know how to know other less important (or more obscure) things. That's the point of school and tests, right? If paying kids gets them to better know those things and, importantly, learn how to learn, then great. That's the gamble, by paying them to know things that we're secretly tricking them into learning to learn and like learning. It's the super healthy sugar cereal approach. But if all we're buying is good test scores (which I say we don't REALLY care about), why bother. Especially if it costs us the social norm that good work is its own reward. If you're not actually 'purchasing' the desired underlying behavior (and I am skepticaly on that point) then you're wasting your money.
By the way, the old school sociological and economic term for the larger issue of commoditizing something at a 'permanent' cost to society is gesellschaft (self or market oriented) vs. gemeinschaft (community or other oriented).
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11
Very often, these students are struggling in middle- and high school because they didn't learn what they needed to learn in elementary school. I was a Spanish teacher once, and had a class full of high school freshmen who were reading English on a third-grade level. Cash incentives are might motivate students to WANT to do better, but what good is it if they don't have the tools?
And what about kids with learning issues or ADD?
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12
Thanks, Corey. Some good info.
@tegwar: I couldn't have put it better myself. And I'm lovin' the German.
@Lulu Lulu: I think you raise an excellent point about deciding to spend our money on paying kids to get better grades. There's an opporunity cost: that money could be going elsewhere.
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13
Wow, I missed a lot. Did "yeah" miss my meaning? The question really is whether the pump-priming metaphor applies. There are communities in which academic achievement is disdained, in part because the benefits of achievement seem uncertain. Long-shots.
My parents both worked in those kinds of schools. My dad's school was stuck there for decades(*). My mom's school had better luck, when an Asian influx changed community standards.
* - despite a major motion picture about academic achievement being drawn from that actual school.
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