Merit Pay Is Still A Bad Idea

Daniel Willingham gives 6 reasons in 3 minutes.

HT: The Answer Sheet Blog

Microsoft As Object Lesson

Cory and others have covered the Vanity Fair analysis of Microsoft's collapse.  I have gone back to the article several times because it's a powerful object lesson of the way institutions decline.

First, the mighty usually fall:

"Once upon a time, Microsoft dominated the tech industry; indeed, it was the wealthiest corporation in the world. But since 2000, as Apple, Google, and Facebook whizzed by, it has fallen flat in every arena it entered: e-books, music, search, social networking, etc., etc."

Second, the reason for that fall is frequently becoming the thing that one despised or defeated:

"By the dawn of the millennium, the hallways at Microsoft were no longer home to barefoot programmers in Hawaiian shirts working through nights and weekends toward a common goal of excellence; instead, life behind the thick corporate walls had become staid and brutish. Fiefdoms had taken root, and a mastery of internal politics emerged as key to career success. . . .

"' They used to point their finger at IBM and laugh,' said Bill Hill, a former Microsoft manager. 'Now they’ve become the thing they despised.'”

The loss of joy and the political feudalism sprang from a single source:

"At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. The system—also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”—has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor.

“'If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven were going to get mediocre reviews, and one was going to get a terrible review,” said a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.'”

The fragmentation produced a predictable result:

"One Apple product, something that didn’t exist five years ago, has higher sales than everything Microsoft has to offer. More than Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing, Windows Phone, and every other product that Microsoft has created since 1975. In the quarter ended March 31, 2012, iPhone had sales of $22.7 billion; Microsoft Corporation, $17.4 billion."

Microsoft's decline began with a centralized evaluation system and merit pay. Political bureaucrats who plan on implementing those systems across an entire state apparently believe they have more talent and managerial skills than the people who managed Microsoft.

I doubt that proposition. In fact, if I were a political bureaucrat looking to improve a statewide system, I'd bet that every person in Microsoft's management is smarter than I am. If I wanted to avoid Microsoft's fate, I'd spend more time with some barefoot people fond of wearing Hawaiian shirts.

(I am phone blogging, so I reserve the right to reformat the post when I access a computer)

President Obama Continues The STEM Uber Alles Drumbeat

President Obama loves STEM:

The Obama administration unveiled plans Wednesday to create an elite corps of master teachers, a $1 billion effort to boost U.S. students' achievement in science, technology, engineering and math.

The President also loves drones,  so it seems appropriate to let Darth Vader provide the President with a useful reminder:

Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the potential of the Force.

I know Vader is just a movie character.  A more realistic test may be having  the President explain the STEM device that allowed him to create the oratory that convinced millions to enthusiastically support him in 2008.

Breaking News: Merit Pay Still Doesn't Work

New York City used this RAND corporation-Vanderbilt study to justify ending its program. Jersey Jazzman uses that occasion to cruelly points out that there's no Merit Pay Fairy:

we looked for the Merit Pay Fairy in Tennessee: she wasn't there. She wasn't in Texas, either. Corporate reformers stayed up all night in Chicago waiting for her; she never showed. She wasn't in Michigan. We even tried looking for the Merit Pay Fairy in 18th Century England; sorry, mate.

Governor Daugaard is nothing if not a skilled politician, so he must have some October surprise in store to insure that Referred Law 16, his version of merit pay, is enacted. If there's no Merit Pay Fairy, he probably won't insult voters' intelligence by trying to produce one. I'm just guessing here, but the Governor may try one of the following to show voters that he is indeed the person who can make merit pay work when no one else could.

• He and his friends can produce a live Sasquatch they bagged during the Governor's Hunt. Bigfoot is set in Deadwood, so there's a fictional precedent.

• He can produce the WMDs that were supposed to be in Iraq. I'm sure he's got people on his staff who could write a believable story about finding them in a couple of abandoned missile silos.

• He may start building a baseball diamond in a corn field. When asked why he's sacrificing crop land during a drought, he will whisper, "If you build it, merit pay will work."

• He can claim that he's found Noah's Ark in the Black Hills.

• Desperate times require desperate measures, so he may try to do something bi-partisan like produce conclusive proof that Al Gore did indeed create the Internet.

This Just In: Testing, Merit Pay, and HB 1234 Still Irreparably Flawed

During the past legislative session, teachers frequently cited Daniel Pink to show that merit pay doesn't work.  HB 1234 passed as Governor Daugaard twisted arms in the best Chicago politicalmachine style.

In today's Inc. Jessica Stillman reports on Justin Moore's analysis that shows merit pay is counter productive. Moore, a "co-founder and CEO of business-continuity and disaster-recovery company Axcient" takes issue with merit pay on several levels.

Governor Daugaard premises his flawed plan on the idea that money will motivate good teachers to do better work.  He rejected the idea that many teachers work for more intrinsic rewards.  Moore doesn't share Daugaard's belief that "cash is king" or "greed works."  Moore asserts:

If you have a sense of purpose in accomplishing something, you're doing it because you get some personal reward out of it, not because there's a stack of money being given to you at the end of it. It's been shown that financial incentives, while they work in certain situations, long term actually reduce creativity and eliminate some of that sense of accomplishment.

Moore also enunciates a principle that every governor, secretary of education, and testing proponent should consider:

"Measuring the wrong thing is actually worse than not measuring anything at all, because it will actually focus all your energies in the wrong place."

The testing regime certainly focuses teachers' energies on the test instead of students' education.

Moore does two other things that Daugaard refuses to do.  First, Moore eschews the top down approach:

"We rarely give top down goals," says Moore. Instead, managers sit down with employees to discuss what they need to accomplish and help them work out their own targets and metrics."

That approach sounds far different than the HB 1234 work groups that epitomize top-down thinking.

Finally, all of these reforms began with NCLB and its efforts to make 100% of students meet top down goals.  That unrealistic Lake Wobegon expectation could have been avoided if politicians had followed Moore's method for developing metrics:

The art of setting metrics, he continues, is in fact ensuring employees don't set unrealistic expectations for themselves by asking questions like: Do you really think that's achievable? Do you think you should give yourself some more cushion? Have you taken into account the unknown?

One would hope that if Moore's questions had been asked, someone in power would have come to the realization that 100% is not achievable.

Unfortunately, Axient's "disaster recovery" recovers data; it doesn't help citizens recover from bad political policies, so teachers will be left to their own devices to fix the disasters that ed reformers' policies will create.

Still More Reasons Merit Pay Is Flawed

John T Spenser lists 10 of them here.  The most troubling and accurate include the unintended consequences.

6. Subject and Grade Differences: Core curriculum classes are different from CTE / vocational, arts, physical education and music classes.  Similarly, teaching five year olds is nothing like teaching seniors in high school.  (Now freshmen, yes, but seniors, no.) How will merit pay deal with these differences?  How will they deal with tested versus non-tested subjects?  How will they evaluate teachers whose roles are so different from one another and still claim to represent a uniform, equitable standard?

8. Innovation Suffers: Merit pay rewards teachers who use "best practices" and produce higher test scores.  As teachers feel the pressure to earn a living wage, they'll be less likely to try new practices that could potentially transform learning.

9. Merit Pay Encourages Cheating: What does Wall Street have in common with Major League Baseball?  When high-stakes extrinsic rewards were offered for short-term gains, people began to cheat.  My hope is that teachers are more ethical than that, but a merit pay system sets up an unnecessary temptation that didn't exist before.

I would add three more. First, merit pay keeps the focus on teachers not students.  At the high school level, students need to take more responsibility for their educations.  Merit pay presumes that teachers bear most, if not all, of the responsibility.

Second, merit pay will promote unrealistic expectations.  Teachers are not going to teach better after states or districts impose merit pay, but the true believers have promised that merit pay will drastically improve students' ability to learn.

Finally, merit pay will postpone effective reforms.  Schools will try this experiment for another four or five years before concluding that it has failed to reduce any reforms.  While the doomed experiment is working toward it's logical conclusion, effective reforms will not be implemented.

Teachers Need To Collaborate More

In an Atlantic essay, Jeffery Mirel and Simona Goldin report on teacher isolation

In his classic 1975 book, Schoolteacher, Dan Lortie described teacher isolation as one of the main structural impediments to improved instruction and student learning in American public schools. Lortie argued that since at least the 19th century teachers have worked behind closed doors, rarely if ever collaborating with colleagues on improving teaching practice or examining student work. "Each teacher," Lortie wrote, "... spent his teaching day isolated from other adults; the initial pattern of school distribution represented a series of 'cells' which were construed as self-sufficient."

This situation continues to the present day. A recent study by Scholastic and the Gates Foundation found that teachers spend only about 3 percent of their teaching day collaborating with colleagues. The majority of American teachers plan, teach, and examine their practice alone.

The authors report that other counties emphasize collaboration, and that American teachers do not oppose collaboration.

In other countries, such as Finland and Japan, where students outperform those in the U.S. in international tests such as PISA and TIMMS, collaboration among teachers is an essential aspect of instructional improvement. The problem is not that American teachers resist collaboration. Scholastic and the Gates Foundation found that nearly 90 percent of U.S. teachers believe that providing time to collaborate with colleagues is crucial to retaining good teachers.

Corporate reformers, politicians like Governor Daugaard, and bureaucrats like Secretary of Education Melody Schopp see merit pat as an essential element of reform.  Mirel and Golden report that merit pay may hinder collaboration efforts.

While we are making good headway in support of these efforts, one problem looms. A number of contemporary reformers have put great faith in the idea that teacher competition (e.g., merit pay) can dramatically improve educational outcomes. The jury is still out regarding the effectiveness of such reforms, but we greatly fear that such policies will undermine teachers' collaborative work. Ironically, competitive teacher assessment schemes could reinforce teacher isolation. If teachers are competing with one another for merit pay, why should they collaborate with one another? They might as well go back behind their closed doors.

Several quick points about the Mirel's and Golden's fears. First, merit pay advocates will no doubt scream that teachers who don't collaborate because someone else may get a bonus are hypocrites.  These merit pay advocates fail to explain how a bonus that is allegedly large enough to motivate people to do a better job is not large enough to motivate people to keep their best ideas to themselves.  The business world seems to view employees who work hard to get a bonus by freezing out their colleagues as valuable, motivated workers not hypocrites.

These reformers also don't explain why merit pay is worth the risk.  As the Mirel and Golden point out, "[t]he jury is still out regarding the effectiveness of . . . [merit pay] reforms."

Schools need to change.  Increasing collaboration is a good step; unfortunately, political gamesmanship will probably prevent collaboration from happening.

A Saturday Morning Movie: HB 1234: Teaching in a Time of Colorlessness

I know I can't compete with blockbusters like The Hunger Games, so I tried the art house approach.  I hope everyone except Governor Daugaard enjoys HB 1234: Teaching in a Time of Colorlessness.

Occupy The DOE

Valerie Strauss reports that Occupy movement has inspired some to create an Occupy the DOE next week.

A group of activists is planning a four-day protest event starting next week called “Occupy the DOE in D.C.” that is aimed at alerting the Obama administration to growing unhappiness with its education reform policies.

The event includes seminars, led by professors, activists and others, as well as marches and speeches that together are designed to express opposition to the education policies of President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, which critics say have, among other things, increased the importance of high-stakes tests and promoted charter schools at the expense of traditional public schools.

Unlike some other Occupy protests, the organizers of this one got the required permits to stage all of the planned events.

I tend to become skeptical of teachers who brag about getting their lesson plans done on time.  I also worry about the fact that the Occupy Movement has more iterations than television's CSI and NCIS franchises combined.  However, the group's goals seem very sound.

THEREFORE, WE DEMAND AN END TO THE FOLLOWING:

•       ALL high stakes testing and punitive policies that label schools, punish students, and close public community schools

•       ALL high stakes testing that ties teacher evaluations, pay, and job security to high stakes test results

•       Corporate interventions in public education and education policy.

•       Corporate run for-profit charter schools that divert public funds away from public schools

•       Mandates requiring teachers to use corporate approved, scripted programs that sublimate and negate authentic and meaningful learning experiences imparted by varied and rich curricula

Re-reading this list, it seems that South Dakota teachers can sum them up in one sentence: repeal HB 1234.

How Schools Will Determine Merit Pay Under HB 1234



Ok time to determine who gets the bonus.   What about Mrs. Smith?

 My apologies to Mssrs. Becker, Pietz, and Welch for using them to make a point when they all indicated that they did not support merit pay.  (Photo taken by Kelly Hertz for this Press & Dakotan story)

Preempting Propaganda: Part I

Governor Daugaard will undoubtedly defend his horrendous merit pay and testing law that now faces a referendum effort.  If he follows the current Republican Governors' playbook, he will vehemently assert that those circulating petitions are "defending the status quo" or supporting the existing state of affairs which is less grand than it was in the halycon days of 1971.

A status quo does not magically spring up. Education policy is set by the governor and the legislature. Republicans have created South Dakota's education status quo.


Since 1971, South Dakota has had two Democrats serve as governor.  They both served in the 1970s.  Since 1980, Republicans have occupied the governor's mansion.  Since 1971, Democrats have had control of the House of Representatives from 1973-1976 and 1993-1994.

At the federal level, one must remember that testing became a good in and of itself when President George W. Bush, a Republican, implemented No Child Left Behind.

Governor Daugaard has not disavowed any of his predecessors; he is continuing increasing the testing regime put in place by a Republican.  In short his bill continues a status quo that he claims is failing.  (For now, we'll leave aside that little bit of propaganda that is asserted as fact but lacks evidence.)

Language matters and Daugaard should be held responsible for his Orwellian rhetoric as well as his disastrous legislation.

Related:  Dr. Newquist has a great post on how education used to deal with logical fallacies here.

Daugaard's Assualt On Teachers Part Of Republican Governors' Strategy

The Republican Governors' Conference must have assigned a group project.  Writing in The Answer Sheet blog, Diane Ravitch shows how Governor Daugaard's merit pay, continuing contract, and testing proposals seem to have been plagiarized.

Gov. Jindal is in a race to the bottom with other Republican governors to see who can move fastest to destroy the underpinnings of public education and to instill fear in the hearts of teachers. It’s hard to say which of them is worst: Jindal, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Rick Scott of Florida, John Kasich of Ohio, or .... There are so many contenders for the title, it’s hard to name them all.

They all seem to be working from the same playbook: Remove any professionalism and sense of security from teachers; expand privatization as rapidly as possible, through charters and vouchers; intensify reliance on high-stakes tests to evaluate teachers and schools; tighten the regulations on public schools while deregulating the privately managed charter schools. Keep up the attack on many fronts, to confuse the supporters of public education.

The governors appear to be working from the ALEC playbook, ALEC (or the American Legislative Exchange Council) being an organization that shapes model legislation for very conservative state legislators.

Using the right coded language is a very important part of the assault on public education: Call it “reform.” Say that its critics are “defenders of the status quo,” even though the status quo is 10 years of federally mandated high-stakes testing and school closings. If possible, throw mud at the defenders of public education and say that they only have “adult interests” at heart, while the pseudo-reformers — the rich and powerful —are acting only in the interests of children.

Soon after I spoke, Jindal’s newly selected State Superintendent John White had a conference call with reporters to challenge what I said, which was odd because he was not present and did not hear what I said. He had no substantive response to my research review showing that charters, vouchers, and merit pay don’t produce better education. He had no substantive response to my critique of the vagaries of value-added evaluation of teachers. Instead, he pointed to the New Orleans model as a paradigm of “reform,” meaning, I suppose, the benefits of closing down public schools, turning the children over to private management, breaking the teachers’ union, and hiring inexperienced, uncertified teachers.

Ravitch's comments do prompt a few sardonic questions.

1. Did the Governor come up with his "I'm a lobbyist for the students" line by himself or did the other Republican governors help him with his homework?

2. Dr. Ravitch puts Governor Daugaard in the too many to mention category. Does that mean he's not in the top 20% of Republican governors and won't get merit pay?

3. Was there a special session about ignoring evidence or are these governors just winging their responses?

4. Is the Governor hoping to create a South Dakota miracle or a South Dakota model of reform? (I hope he remembers that the Texas miracle was based on a lie and that the data do no not support a New Orleans model or Michelle Rhee type reforms, but then again, I'm a hopeless romantic.  I still hope my students will use the study guide to remember the names of Greek gods and heroes.)

Quotation Of The Day: Political Sycophant Edition

Bob Mercer gives us a little insight into the merit pay debate with the following report.

As Sen. Elizabeth Kraus put it, a governor with 78 percent approval rating deserves the opportunity to lead in this matter.

The logic, and I use the term advisedly, behind Senator Kraus's remark is that ideas proposed by popular people are good merely because the ideas came from a popular person.  I hesitate to mention that popular Roman emperors frequently proposed gladiatorial combat as part of a larger public policy.  Taken to it's logical conclusion, Senator Kraus's statement implies that the most popular person in the school should set school policy; in short, the prom king and homecoming queen should make policy instead of the administration and the school board.

It seems that some members of the South Dakota legislature believe they are in a parliment and the executive and the party chief are one.  To vote against such an executive requires courage and may have some political cost because the legislator is beholden to the executive not constituents.

I had always operated under the idea that the American legislatures acted as a check on executive power not an enabler of someone who had 78 percent approval rating.  Of course, that concept of a legislature as a check requires legislators with political courage not high school royalty hangers-on.

A Modest Proposal For HB 1234

This Representative Bernie Hunhoff suggestion appears one day too late* for the South Dakota House to show some commone sense, but the South Dakota senate can still act on it and give the House a second chance.  Hunhoff writes,

There’s nothing to be lost by deferring HB1234 to the 41st day. That’s how we politely kill bad ideas in the South Dakota legislature.

And then let’s do something great. Let’s create a year-long Blue Ribbon Task Force that challenges us all — state officials, state legislators of all stripes, teachers, community leaders and all other stakeholders — to present a plan to the 2013 Legislature that can be a roadmap to giving South Dakotans the best schools in America.

We already have some of the best schools. Our students consistently score above average. And we get all that for the least money. We spend far less per pupil than any state in our region. In fact, to reach the average spending of the seven-state region we would need to invest an additional $215 million in our schools. Obviously we can’t accomplish that any time soon, but if we don’t begin to rebuild our base funding we are going to hurt our schools and raise property taxes. Nobody knows that better than residents of the Yankton School District, where we are facing the controversy of an opt-out because the state has severely cut its funding of our schools.

Maybe I’m a hopeless optimist, but I still believe we can have the best schools in the country. To be the very best, we need to:

1) Give schools more creativity, freedom and local control;
2) Provide adequate base funding;
3) Inspire a spirit of cooperation and teamwork at every level.

HB1234 does none of that. Well-intentioned or not, it has already damaged the educational environment. Let’s stop the damage and come together to work together toward the goal of America’s best schools. 

I have no hope that the South Dakota Senate will follow up on this suggestion, but it's good to know someone in the legislature had the wisdom to make it.

*Hunhoff did offer an amendment from the floor, but the vote failed 49-20.

South Dakota Republicans With Courage

The majority of the state's Republicans voted to support HB 1234, Governor Daugaard's merit pay plan.  Many also uttered pablum-lite talking points like “Democrats focus on teachers and salaries; Republicans focus on students and achievement.”or “What it’s saying is that the current compensation model doesn't work” The latter statement, a trite assertion of the obvious, apparently made without irony, should have mentioned that the compensation system is the worst in the nation and has been for years.  Further, there's no evidence that this plan will actually improve compensation. I will also note that Representative David Lust, the latter speaker, claims that the bill is not a "magic elixir" for achievement. Somebody missed a memo somewhere if Republicans are supposed to be about achievement not salaries.

Several, however, deserve thanks for recognizing that the plan has never been shown to work, so I'd like to say things to Republican Representatives Bolin, Deelstra, Hubbel, Kopp, Liss, Russell, Schaefer, Stricherz, and Tornow.

Update:  Bonus quotation of the day goes to Representative Jim Bolin who says, “(Daugaard’s) plans on the education front are a major blunder,”   Bolin also points out that the bill will not imporve student achievement.

A Plan To Evaluate Legislators

Bob Mercer reports that Nick Moser wants to amend the South Dakota Constitution "to eliminate the provision that legislators receive five cents per mile for their trips to the Capitol at the start of session and their trips from the Capitol at the end of session."

Mercer writes that "[f]or the rest of their trips they already get standard mileage rates paid by state government."  Apparently, legislators want the same mileage rates for the trips to open the legislature and return home at the session's conclusion that they receive at other times

I'm usually not a fan of constitutional amendments, but I will support this one with a few caveats.

First, only those legislators who have degrees in agronomy should be guaranteed the increased mileage payment.  The legislature needs more farmers among its numbers, and this mileage payment might provide an incentive for farmers to run for the legislature.

Second, only the top 20% of the rest of the legislators can receive the increased mileage payment.

Third, the evaluation determining whether one is in the top 20% will be determined as follows.

A. The per capita income in the legislator's district is in at or above the state average.

B. All voters in the legislator's district score proficient or above on a test developed by a Texas company.  The test will cover knowledge of events that transpired during the past session.  After all, legislators should be responsible for communicating information to their constituents.

C. Legislators put a "How am I driving bumper sticker" along with a toll-free phone number on the back of their cars so that constituents can be sure that the tax money is being spent responsibly and complain to the proper authority if it is not

D. Governor Daugaard will dirve behind each legislator and fill out an evaulation on the legislator's driving.

I expect Representative Moser to be "excited about that,”

Surely he will continue to say,

“It is going to come down to what your outlook is on it. It is not going to take away from anyone.  I . . . [am] very excited to have the opportunity to get that bonus. If I wasn’t chosen for the bonus, I would be excited for my colleague who was chosen. I don’t see where there would be any criticism from that.”

Kevin Lein Offers An Evaluation Suggestion

Harrisburg principal*, Dr. Kevin Lein, weighs in on Governor Duagaard's merit pay proposal. In a letter to the editor,  Lein suggests,

Designating a portion of the governor’s proposed funding to train and utilize our retired teachers as an independent evaluation team would generate confidence and fairness in the system of rewarding teachers for their hard work and talent. A large percentage, 70 percent, of the assessment process could lie with educators who have worked in this business for more than 30 years, with the remaining 30 percent of evaluation the responsibility of administrators, peers (as per the Danielson Framework suggestion) and connect with pre- and post-testing that displays student growth.

My first quick and dirty reactions are as follows:

1. It's a small step in the right direction.

2. Will the evaluators have paradigms like high school debate judges?  Right now, I'm pretty sure that one or two recently retired teachers will like what I do and one will hate what I do.

3. I have seen nothing except Danielson's own marketing propaganda that shows her method is the best way to evaluate teachers. 

4. This seems to be an effort to get administrators off the hook.  I'm not sure it changes anything for teachers or students.  Lein writes, "the difficulty of implementation and designation of those deserving of this extra compensation is a problem that will lead to unintended negative morale and circumstance."  I don't know if this plan will mitigate most of those problems.  It may keep morale from sinking below its current floor, but I can't see it raising morale.

5. How will this evaluation or any evaluation affect teachers who mentor student teachers?

6. How many teachers has Lein talked to about this proposal?  Teachers should bein the room when these discussions are being held.

*An earlier version of this post erronously identified Lein as superintendent.

Quotation Of The Day: South Dakota Merit Pay Edition

From Bernie Hunhoff in today's Press & Dakotan

[The Governor's] proposal is getting serious attention, even though he acknowledges that it may not work and he doesn’t know where he’ll get the money.

If a legislator of either party proposed a new multi-million dollar program — without a funding source or confidence that it would work — he probably wouldn’t get a co-sponsor or a second in committee.

But now we’re going to spend weeks debating the merits of merit pay when we should be figuring out how to help school districts rebuild from the budget mess created not by them but by Pierre.

I'm encouraged that Rep. Hunhoff expects debate.  I'm discouraged that single-party dominance probably means that the Governor will get exactly what he wants

A Modest Proposal For Merit Pay

Let's all stipulate that all adults want students to succeed.  Let's further stipulate that all students want to succeed.  Some students may not have discovered that fact; some students may not know how to succeed, but all want to.

For purposes of argument, let's all agree that money does motivate all people to succeed.  I don't agree, but the Governor takes it as a matter of faith.

Let's also stipulate that one should apply stimulus as close as possible to the thing one wants to stimulate.  That's why those who want people to type faster pay more to the keyboardist who hits the most correct keystrokes. They don't pay the bonus to the floor manager who walks around making sure no one spills coffee on the keyboard.

I'm assuming that principle explains why the Governor has not proposed merit pay for administrators and counselors.  Teachers are closer to students.  He may wish to gain revenue from reality TV show featuring principals wrestling, but I digress

There is, however, one group closer to students than teachers: the students themselves.  Why are they left to their own, apparently inadequate, intrinsic motivations?

I, therefore, modestly propose that all students who score in the upper level of the Dakota STEP or its Common Core replacement be paid $300.  Further, all juniors who score one (1) point above the national average on the ACT or SAT be given an additional $500. I would not object if the Governor, who believes STEM is the ultimate end of education, added $200 dollars to those who achieve the overall national average but score two (2) points above average math and science.

I'm not sure why anyone would object to this proposal.  It uses the Governor's logic about money being the best motivator.  It applies the stimulus to the people with the most at stake.  It will probably affect more than 20% of the students, so those with egalitarian impulses should love it as well.

Quotations Of The Day: Daniel Pink Edition

From this Wall Stree Journal interview:

WSJ: What's at stake for companies that stick to the carrot-and-stick approach?

Mr. Pink: First, it's bad business strategy. These supposedly hard-headed businesses who claim to value facts and evidence are actually in many ways abiding by folklore about what really motivates people. What's at stake is whether business decides to run by folklore or science. I'll take science. The continued overuse of carrots and sticks puts businesses on a path that is extraordinarily dangerous.

Later in the article,

WSJ: Why would employees be less concerned with external rewards, like cash bonuses, now and more concerned about inner motivation, or as you say throughout the book, "the third drive"?

Mr. Pink: Part of it is the nature of work that is this migration from left-brain, rule-based, routine, algorithmic work to right-brain, nonroutine, creative, conceptual work. They're as different as information-age work, industrial-age work, and agriculture-based work. You need a different system to get the best out of people doing different work.

I also think especially now, as we turn the page on this decade, there's a sense that something has gone wrong. That we're not doing things the right way. You see evidence of that in different kinds of business corporations such as the low-profit limited liability corporations -- these are not pure profit maximizers. Even the Harvard Business Review is writing about how profit maximization isn't the answer.

So, reliance on carrots and sticks might be dangerous and profit maximization isn't the answer, but South Dakota will probably go forward with a plan that applies those dangerous and ineffective concepts to education.