It is obvious to me that consequences and incentives matter.  For example, I had promised to get a blog post up yesterday, but I can’t really be fired from this blog, and I don’t lose or gain anything tangible from writing or not writing on time.  So, since much of my other work is connected to consequences of one type or another, the blog post languished while I completed other more “consequential” tasks.  To stay on topic, therefore, I decided to riff on consequences and incentives …

Incentives in education are in the news  all over the place these days.  Here are a few examples:

1. In Florida, the Republican-led Senate and House passed a sweeping bill that would radically reform teacher pay policy statewide.  If signed, the bill would have limited the job security and tenure of teachers and link teacher pay to growth in student learning (as measured by test scores).  The expressed goal of this legislation was to make it easier for school leaders to identify great teachers, reward great teachers, and – importantly – to get rid of bad teachers.  In other words, this bill would attach all sorts of positive and negative consequences to teacher performance.
2. The teacher groups in Florida, while professing that consequences don’t really matter since they teach only for love of students and not money, simultaneously showed how important they truly believed incentives are.  Their incentive, in this case, was the continuation of  current teacher compensation policies  which provide nearly unmatched job security to teachers and unmatched power to teacher groups.  Leaders of teacher groups worked tirelessly to defeat this bill because, if it became law, it would be harder to treat teachers as if they were all the same and this would dilute the power of their union representatives.  Hundreds of individual teachers worked similarly hard to keep a very valuable component of their compensation – untouchable job security.  Thus, these teachers saw the potential for consequences that they perceived as negative, and worked very hard to avoid negative consequences.
3. While these critics were unable to kill the passage of the bill, they did not give up.  They continued to make their opposition clear in the hopes that Governor Charlie Crist (who had expressed early support for the initiative) might step in and save the day.  Again, consequences DID matter!  Gov. Crist, you see, is locked in a race for a US Senate seat and perceived that the signing of the bill might lead to negative consequences for him, and thus he vetoed the bill last Thursday (April 15).  Crist judged that his support of the bill would have hurt his chances in the general election.  Of course, it now seems likely that his submarining of the bill will kill his chances to run as a Republican ….. some politicos believe he will now run as an independent and hope that he can go back to the teacher groups and seek support.  Since his consequences are based on predictions of the future, time will tell whether Charlie guessed right by shifting left!

In any event, it is clear that consequences mattered quite a bit to the teachers and to Charlie who, ironically, stopped a bill that would have injected some consequences into teacher compensation policy.

However, many have argued passionately for the stance taken by Charlie and the teachers, maintaining that consequences and incentives don’t matter in schools like they do elsewhere.  Who’s right?  When I am not sure about complicated issues like this, I like to check in with the kids.  Fortunately, just last week, a study was released that examined how kids in schools react to incentives.  Here is a quick summary, taken from the Washington Post and mostly Time.  The New York Times Freakonomics Blog even had something to say.  They all suggest that there may be something to this strategy.

1. Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. ran a randomized experiment in hundreds of classrooms in multiple cities. He used mostly private money to pay 18,000 kids a total of $6.3 million and brought in a team of researchers to help him analyze the effects.
2. “These are substantial effects, as large as many other interventions that people have thought to be successful,” says Brian Jacob, a University of Michigan public-policy and economics professor who has studied incentives and who reviewed Fryer’s study at TIME’s request. If incentives are designed wisely, it appears, payments can indeed boost kids’ performance as much as or more than many other reforms you’ve heard about before — and for a fraction of the cost.

This study is very interesting and worth reading – take a look at the clip from the Colbert Report above for an entertaining interview with the study’s author.  In any event — the teacher leaders are arguing that incentives don’t matter but acting as if they do while the kids are saying they do.

Whom do you think we should believe?