Paying students for performance

A KIPP school leader who read the article I sent out about paying students for performance had a strong reaction to it.  Here is the email he sent me:

 

Typically I agree wholeheartedly with just about everything you say in your blog, but on this excerpt I disagree just as fervently.  Rewarding kids with money for grades is, I believe, completely antithetical to what schools should be doing.  Not only does it not work in the long run, but it runs precisely counter to the values we should be teaching our students.

During our school’s first few years of existence, we tied our paycheck system directly to incentives – average X amount, and you get trips Y and Z.  Rewards and consequences were linked directly to exact dollar amounts.  Then one day we made our annual pilgrimage to Rafe Esquith’s classroom, and we heard him use Kohlberg’s theory of moral development to teach his kids to think meta-cognitively about how they make moral decisions. 

Simplified for middle-schoolers, this system (if you don’t know it already) is roughly (in order from worst to best):

Level 1 – I do the right thing because I want to avoid punishment.

Level 2 – I do the right thing because I want a reward.

Level 3 – I do the right thing because I want to be known as a good boy/girl.

Level 4 – I do the right thing because I respect the rules of law/society.

Level 5 – I do the right thing because I want to improve other’s lives/don’t want to hurt them.

Level 6 – I do the right thing because it is my code.

We, of course, want our kids to reach level 5 or 6.  Kohlberg said that few people reach that, but we say that a) he had low expectations, and b) we should at least try.

What Rafe does is align every single aspect of his classroom with these values.  We try to do the same, within reason.  Here’s what I mean:

-          If we teach our kids to behave for a reward, we’re showing them that we value level 2.

-          If we tell kids we’re disappointed in them, we’re teaching them to do the right thing for the sake of their reputation – level 3

…and so on.  Now, we did hang onto some punishments, because reality says that some of our kids are on Level 1 when they come to us.  But when we do give a kid detention or any other punishment, we preface it with something like “It’s too bad you need level one reasons to…”  - it may be semantics, spin, or whatever, but as teachers our job is to spin, and it’s unclear whether such punishable offenses as being on time to school and doing homework every night are moral decisions anyway.

So after removing half our punishments and almost all direct rewards, our kids have behaved and performed even better.  This seemed counter-intuitive, so we set out to figure out why it was.  And that’s when we stumbled upon a ton of research that says that rewards – though effective in improving compliance and short-term behavior – actually decrease long-term investment.  People who are happily going the extra mile for their job actually stop doing so when they’ve been rewarded for it for awhile – like a drug, the reward has to keep increasing until it’s sufficiently high to hold the interest.  This achieves compliance, but is expensive and reduces investment.

When I was teaching in the public schools, I needed every possible trick I could come up with to get my kids to sit down and do some work.  Rewards are great for that setting when neither compliance nor investment can be otherwise attained.  But in KIPP and other such good schools, compliance is relatively easy to attain; true academic investment is the challenge.  Reward kids for doing work, and they’ll believe they’re doing it for the reward.  What happens when the reward goes away?  Not good things, according to most studies.                                                                                                                          

Back to the article: the reason the chess players are motivated is that the task is challenging, attainable, and constantly changing.  The book “Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience,” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has driven my thinking on this:  chess players get into a state of “flow” and no amount of money or anything else is more powerful a motivator than is that condition.  What we really need to do is get kids to either see homework and learning as flow-inducing activities, or give them some other reason to be invested in their own educations.   

What attracted me to KIPP in the first place was the overwhelming emphasis on the internalization of both aspects of the “work hard, be nice” mantra.  We don’t need financial incentives, and they actually hurt our cause.  The public schools that can’t get kids to sit down will do better if they pay the kids a lot of money to sit down and do homework.   But schools where the kids are already sitting down and paying attention should have a loftier goal than mere compliance.  Moreover, if we ultimately hope that all our schools become like KIPP schools, all this incentive talk will, I’m afraid, terribly confuse the message.

Sorry for the unsolicited feedback, but I thought I’d share an alternative take on this issue.