Fabio Rojas* reports in a recent post over at Orgtheory.net on the use of incentivizing strategies to enhance student performance in schools. These strategies range from the silly and the antic (the principal offers to dye his hair pink if average test scores increase) to the more serious and potentially costly. As Fabio points out, one of the more significant experiments in this direction has shaped up this summer in my very own backyard. The New York City Department of Education has enlisted Roland Fryer, the young Harvard economist, to serve as its ‘Chief Equality Officer.’ In this capacity he’s proposed an experiment in incentivizing student achievement (among other things), by offering cash bonuses of up to $500 to select 4th and 7th grade students if they demonstrate improved performance on tests.
I think there’s a little bit of irony in the fact that, despite our concerns about public sociology and the anxiety about the ground the discipline’s lost to economics, we should look on approvingly as the City hires a star economist who then introduces solutions that rely on a time-honored economic calculus: improved performance in exchange for hard, cold cash. I’ve absolutely no doubt that Fryer’s interests in improving student engagement and motivation are genuine, and he’s taken an appropriately open-minded view about evaluating its results. Joel Klein, the NYC Schools Chancellor, has defended this experiment on the grounds that ‘nothing else has worked’ and adding new incentives to the existing incentives (pleasing your parents, obtaining social recognition, improving your prospects for higher education, doing well for the sake of learning etc.) should be attempted given the absence of other feasible alternatives.
If I believed this were entirely true, I’d regard this experiment somewhat more sympathetically, also taking into acocunt that at present, it’s just an experiment (scalability would be a huge barrier to a more complete implementation of the program; still, as it is, it’s quite a disbursement). Still, I’m bemused / puzzled / slightly disturbed by the fact that the ‘Chief Equality Officer’ of the New York City school system should be an economist who’s interested in using economic tools to attack problems that many sociologists of education would consider as falling within central stretches of their territory. The study of motivation and achievement, of family and school effects, of educational stratification and social inequality – all bread-and-butter issues within the sociology of education, and yet sociologists have been relegated to the sidelines as critics of the City’s efforts in this area rather than as its chief innovators and leaders.
The easiest explanation for this is: what do you expect from a city run by a billionaire president businessman (whose policies, by the way, I think have demonstrated some significant results in certain other areas of city management)? And why not seek out solutions wherever they may come? Given the dimensions of the ‘motivation deficit,’ we shouldn’t be concerned about defending disciplinary boundaries. Rather, we should attempt to draw from whatever intellectual and academic resources that are available to us to effect the best possible strategy and solution.
Still, it’s worthwhile considering the larger question about what sociology can offer because the attention given to one kind of solution is all that much less given to the range of other types of solutions. Fabio suggests that incentives are only a strategy that ignores the larger problem: viz., schools are really awful places to spend one’s time:
You need incentives because most schooling is terribly boring and, frankly, often useless. Schools were designed to impart a one size fits all education in a factory style setting. That’s why kids need to be rewarded if they are to exert any meaningful effort. You have to compensate for the negative school experience…There’s definitely a role for rewarding educational effort, as Fryer proposes, but the biggest changes will come when people rethink the school from the ground up so students actually want to be there, instead of a place you endure while waiting for that nice middle class job.
I’m not clear why we need to offer cash incentives if the price of being bored and learning useless stuff is getting a nice middle class job. However, there’s no doubt that a lot of schooling is just terrible. Many students go to schools that are understaffed, poorly equipped and dangerous; and many students find the school day a complete chore. But rethinking the school top-to-bottom and starting all over is an impulse that many have had and followed, without leading to the significant results that were hoped for or expected. Both Tyack and Cuban and institutional theory tell us that the modern school form has extraordinary resilience, despite the fact that all sorts of experiments have been attempted over the past hundred years. We seek utopian solutions, but we end up only tinkering at the modern school’s edges.
In order to change schools, we need to begin by not underestimating the school’s still-significant sources of resilience and persistence. I don’t have empirical studies or data in front of me, but we know that there are many schools in which the students are interested and motivated for a variety of reasons. At the very least, many kids want to go to school because the alternative is staying at home, which they find even more boring and sometimes dangerous. Indeed, the focus on academic performance alone miminizes the socialization functions of the school as a place where one learns how to make friends and interact with others. We can dismiss this as negligible and tangential to the school mission, but part of the reason why we keep kids in schools is not to make them learn *things* but learn how to interact with one another. On this count, even in badly-performing schools I’m not sure the modern school is *such* a failure, although rampant disciplinary problems indicate that there are significant difificulties here, too.
My main concern is that the introduction of cash incentives suggests an attempt to infuse economic capital where social capital is perceived to be lacking, but as we know the danger with introducing money into a social arena is that it has a funny way of becoming the arbiter of all values. A hard-working student may find her academic interests and motivations altered in unanticipated ways if she learns that all her effort comes with a cash value (maybe not, but maybe still…). I don’t want to be dramatic here, because I think there are limitations to this kind of cash-based incentive strategy in the context of schooling. But the fact is that we still know little about the complex ecology of motivations and incentives which circulate through educational settings – including families, communities, neighborhoods, and schools themselves – and we play a little bit with fire when adding money to the mix.
Until someone comes up with a convincing way of rethinking the school from the ground up, I’d suggest more straightforward reforms. Why is it, for example, that our neediest schools often have the most inexperienced teachers? Perhaps we could offer cash incentives to the experienced teachers to teach in bad schools? Why is it that teachers are afforded so little opportunity to learn from one another – especially from successful teachers, who know how to teach well and motivate their students? Is there something wrong with our professional development models?
Even in New York City there have been some interesting experiments that are worth looking at. For instance, the City has been at the vanguard of an effort to rethink the high school career, allowing students to have ‘extended’ stays in high school stretching beyond four years. Can we reconstruct alternative paths to the high school degree? This would mean being a little imaginative with our understanding of careers, which are changing in any event with multiple pathways and educational involvements emerging across the life course. Sociologists might be able to participate more in the evolving discussions of this topic.
Finally, surveys repeatedly indicate that students express aspirations regarding their educational futures and long-term social mobility prospects that far exceed reality; even poorly-performing students voice their expectations that they’ll go on to college and obtain a college degree when in fact their chances of doing so are quite poor. This might be taken as evidence of a kind of what Turner (1960) long ago called the folk norm of ‘contest mobility,’ which encourages a temporally ’stretched’ view one’s prospects for mobility, as participating in a long-term contest that stretches well into adult life. If this is the case, however, the problem of timing and sequencing of motivation becomes an issue: why be motivated now, when I get motivated – get ’serious’ – later? What would ‘rethinking the school’ entail for our prevailing mobility norms, ideals, and fictions? Would cash incentives bring reality in line with aspiration? Or might other means, techniques, and strategies be gleaned through the sociological imagination, whenever it cares to revive itself?
* I owe Fabio a debt, since this is the second post in a row that’s been prompted at least in part by his posts at Orgtheory.
