A new book about motivation raises interesting questions about how we translate (and in my opinion often mis-translate) business concepts into educational policy.
The book is “Drive: the Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us,” by Dan Pink. Pink’s Twitter-length summary: Carrots and sticks are so last century. Drive says for 21st-century work we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery and purpose. By carrots and sticks, he means short-term punishments and rewards (e.g. cash bonuses) doled out in a tightly-controlled environment. Elaborating, he adds:
There is 40 years of science that says that for complex, conceptual, creative tasks—the sort of things that most white-collar workers are doing now that the more simple routine work can be offshore or automated—carrot and stick motivators don’t work. Or I should say they rarely work, and they often do harm. And this is not even close in the field of science.
Pink’s book is not about education. It is about business. But in this interview, he discusses the implications for school. His ideas interest me because, for more than a century, educators have been applying business models to schools. But it often seems to me that much is lost in translation.
Those in the education realm apply antiquated and discounted business models. Or they behave as if these models have been a silver bullet in the business realm when, in reality, they have worked imperfectly, or only under certain conditions.
Especially interesting is Pink’s take on performance pay for teachers. Before researching and writing his book, Pink supported the idea of teacher performance pay. His new take?
If you raise their base salaries and give them some autonomy, they’ll do that. If you also give either building principals or superintendents the ability to get rid of—and I am just estimating here—the 10% or 15% of teachers, like the 10% or 15% of any profession, who are duds, I think that is a simpler solution. It is not perfect, but it has far less collateral damage than tying [pay] to standardized test scores or doing these elaborate performance measurements.
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Thank you for your post, Holly. Could someone present educational research demonstrating that rewarding individual teachers for student achievement is either practical or effective? There’s certainly research showing that rewards and punishments are ineffective in many situations.
I don’t know examples of schools or districts that were improved by “incentivizing” teachers.Yet, this is one of the keystones of educational reform policy. Seems to me this idea is based on the thesis that teachers are motivated by money. If that’s true, I wonder why they chose this profession in the first place.
There is the weird sentiment in these pages that performance plans are monochrome, one-size-fits all proposals. There are well-designed performance plans and poorly designed (and instituted) performance plans — in both private, nonprofit and public workforces. These plans as a group cannot be categorized as either carrot or stick — some fall out on each side. Performance plans are a tool, and like all tools can be applied well, or poorly. And many teachers are very much “motivated” by the wage disparity with other jobs to change professions.
Many people (I include myself) believe that exceptional teachers are greatly underpaid. If we have any hope of increasing the salaries of these teachers — particularly in this fiscal climate — we need compensation that is differentiated on some level of quality (not just length of service or degrees obtained). While I would agree with Pink’s observation that giving principals authority over their staffs would help overall teacher quality, I don’t see why this would be an either/or proposition. Virtually every other industry has differentiated pay based on some measure of quality, as imperfect as those may be. To deny this in K-12 public education seems foolish.
I don’t know anyone on any of the multi-dimentional sides of this issue who believes that the current system of compensation in most unionized teacher workforces is fair and/or makes sense (including pensions and other benefits). Unless one believes the status quo works, it seems to make sense to try some different models. A well structured performance pay system — in combination with other modifications — seems like it could be worth a try. The only attribute truly deserving of scorn in this discussion is inertia.
I agree with Alexander on this one. It would be wonderful if I could be compensated for the time and effort and expertise I can bring to broadening the standard curriculum and spending time on special trips outside of the class day. Perhaps we could come up with some kind of ‘value-added’ way of enhancing teacher pay and realistically incentivize the profession.
Now, how to do this without the union throwing a fit…
Can we please set aside for a minute our worries about the union throwing a fit and remember that DCTA appointed 5 people (I was one of them) to sit down with 5 DPS appointees for 18 months and design ProComp. If we’re going to continually refer to the expectation of bad behavior, at least honor the history of good behavior too.
Alexander writes, “Virtually every other industry has differentiated pay based on some measure of quality …” Everyone else is doing it is not an explanation I accept from my kids and I think we have a responsibility to do better here.
In particular, we need to think about how the outcomes of business and the outcomes of education are similar, how the are different, and how they are related to compensation practices. The extent to which desired outcomes in business and in education are the same should serve as a some kind of guide to how much the associated compensation systems should be the same.
In the end, it really doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing. “What should we be doing here?” is the question we need to answer. Ideas from other sectors of the economy may or may not be helpful in this context. If there are data to support the use of any compensation technique (whether it’s in wide use or not) we should investigate that. If there are data that suggest some comp practices might run counter to our objectives in education, then we need to think very carefully about that before we implement anything.
I agree that we need to try new approaches. I don’t understand why we are so fixed on the business world as the source of our inspiration. Why restrict the possibility space of comp options at all? If this is really an all hands on deck situation (the Civil Rights issue of our generation), then it seems to me we should be doing some way outside the box thinking about now. (I should note that I do not consider ProComp to be very outside the box, especially after it was revised last year, but it’s a first step on the proverbial 1,000 mile journey. Now we need some more robust data about its effectiveness.)
I also agree with the point of Holly’s closing quote. Professional pay + an appropriate degree of accountable autonomy has the potential to bring about very positive change. I was recently reminded of the work of Ryan and Deci on Self Determination Theory (http://www.psych.rochester.edu/SDT/theory.php), a very timely re-discovery because it provides a theoretical basis for much of the discussion we’ve had at DGS about both student and adult motivation.
This points to an opening to think about compensation beyond money. Non-monetary comp (like autonomy for those who have shown they can use it productively) does not feature at all in any of the current conversations I hear. I think that is a mistake.
Jeff’ badly misunderstands my point. I am not urging one specific behavior or plan (kids: don’t be lemmings off a cliff) — my appeal is to look broadly across multiple organizations, not all of them private, and see if there might be anything among their numerous different approaches which might allow us to learn a better way to compensate high-quality teachers. It would seem to me to matter greatly what others are doing if we want to find a way to best effect this change (if you prefer, substitute the “don’t reinvent the wheel” parable to your kids). If everyone in education claims hunger, why not see if we can learn from the varieties of ways other people eat?
I share the inhibitions that business always holds the exact answer (I think Medicine is a better comparison) — but I am not so callous as to reject ideas based on their origin. You manage, in one paragraph, to both cry out for “new approaches” and simultaneously dismiss all ideas associated with private enterprise. In rejecting the source, you bypass the argument: Is your claim that quality should have no bearing on compensation? I’ve rarely heard that voiced, so expand if you wish.
“Professional pay + appropriate autonomy” is not much of a plan. As an innovation school, did Green decide to do anything different with compensation? Not many people on these pages get such an opportunity — I’m intrigued to know if you did anything with it.
ps – also thought this was interesting http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/business/10mba.html?em
Alexander, let’s agree on something first. I also do not believe time in service and degrees earned should provide the primary (or only) differentiation of teacher pay. I’m not ready to toss both of them yet but I do believe they are radically over-emphasized in the traditional salary schedule.
I understand what you’re saying and I am increasingly of the opinion that it actually is time to reinvent the wheel. What we’ve got is grounded in a society that has passed and a paradigm that is slowly giving way (as systems oriented thinking supplements and in some cases replaces strictly reductionist models in the sciences). What we’ve accomplished to date amounts to tinkering around the edges and I think the large-scale results speak for themselves. Is there hope? Of course. Are we on the brink of solving this problem? Not at all.
I don’t think I dismissed all ideas associated with private enterprise. I simply question why ideas from private enterprise are the only ones that come up in conversations about teacher comp reform. In fact, I said directly that such practices could be used when there is a reason to do so. Maybe I’m reacting to other conversations I’ve had on this topic more than to this exchange. If that’s the case, I’m sorry.
It probably would matter greatly what others were doing if those others were getting outcomes something like what we want or had needs like we have. That’s why I wrote, “The extent to which desired outcomes in business and in education are the same should serve as a some kind of guide to how much the associated compensation systems should be the same.” If they’re not getting what we want or doing well something like what we’re doing, then it seems like a waste of time to worry too much about how they pay people.
As far as quality, you badly misunderstand my point. I object to industrial thinking about quality in an education setting, not using perceptions and measures of quality in decision making. Whether we recognize it or not, our school system and the ways we think about it are grounded in 20th century industrialism. I’m sure you have a more nuanced understanding of quality than that and so I’ll conclude that we’re mostly talking past each other here. I doubt we really disagree.
It’s funny because as I was writing my first response, I was thinking about “quality” and _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_. I didn’t really think that would play here so I decided not to include it, but since you brought it up …
What does quality mean in education? Today to most people it means test scores (or the processing and meta-processing of test scores) and if anyone tries to put a finer point on it, maybe it means dropout rates or some such. I do not consider these reliable enough indicators to makehigh stakes pay decisions . Focusing on growth helps but that has problems too and we have evidence that making testing stakes too high encourages bad behavior (like cheating).
That may put me in the minority opinion but that’s OK (I’m certainly in the minority of people who regularly talk about this stuff but I’ve seen evidence that the public isn’t really sold on high stakes testing either). I hope we agree here that people are allowed to disagree on points like this and that the jury is still out on the effects of linking teacher pay to test scores.
Unfortunately, the indicators of quality I would prefer to focus on require a longer attention span that America seems to have these days. I have not read it yet but I’m hoping the new book on the longitudinal data from JeffCo Open School sheds some light on how we might think of educational quality in a different and more productive way.
As for comp at DGS, we plan to use ProComp as a starting point but have no immediate plan for where to go from there. We have many other more pressing issues to address in getting the school off the ground (as I’m sure you can appreciate).
Honestly, I spent 5 years of my professional life working on teacher comp reform (4 of them full time) and I really don’t have the appetite for any more of it (I returned to the classroom for a reason). There is potential in ProComp that has not really been utilized effectively on any large scale (for example, the natural feedback paths connecting the core elements of Student Growth Objectives, Professional Development Units, and Professional Evaluation). We’ll start with taking fuller advantage of the system as designed and see what happens. It’s not where I would like it to be in terms of “professional pay” but in this economy, it could be far worse so we’ll work with it.
We also give some attention to non-monitory compensation, like the relative autonomy a teacher will get when s/he moves from associate to full partner. We talked about such things back when designing ProComp but it was beyond our scope and it felt like an even more poorly defined problem than the one we were working on so we left it on the table.
I’m sorry you don’t think professional pay + accountable autonomy is much of a plan (another opportunity for us to agree to disagree). This concept is central to our model of partnership and teacher-led governance. I don’t know enough about WDP to guess if this would fly there or not. We’ll see how it works for us and we look forward to a day when DGS joins WDP at the top of the charts so the next crew of upstarts will have multiple homegrown models of success to consider when planning the next step forward.
I object to industrial thinking about quality in an education setting, not using perceptions and measures of quality in decision making. Whether we recognize it or not, our school system and the ways we think about it are grounded in 20th century industrialism. I’m sure you have a more nuanced understanding of quality than that and so I’ll conclude that we’re mostly talking past each other here. I doubt we really disagree.
Jeff points out a good point, with school systems being ran using an industrial model, when the product is a service (education) and we are in the information age, then human resource capitial can not be managed or compensated effectively. The system needs to wake up and get into the 21st Century. I find it impossible in the current state of school systems where a professional pay + accountable autonomy model could work. The industrialized model that is based on regimented systems flow, does not produce a good evaluation of services delivered.