Oh, there definitely is. Pay the teachers bonuses based on how many of their students achieve at grade level.

I propose this often, and it inspires massive pushback every time.

Just give the teachers a $1,000 bonus for every such kid. Give the teachers a free hand in how to go about it. It'll be the cheapest and most effective boost to education you've ever seen.

You'd have to give a very free hand, and it'd likely end up with many students being kicked out of class. So they'd have fewer students, and close to all of the ones that stayed would be achieving at grade level. Not sure if that's better or worse in the end ...

If they get more achieving grade level, isn't that what we want?

Not necessarily if it means there will be a barbell curve, and we get equal or more students doing even worse. Teachers will quickly bucket kids into 3-4 groups:

1. Doing fine, no need to even pay attention to these kids. Now your top performers don't grow as much. 2. On the edge - where most attention will go 3. Meh - maybe a small percentage jump into category 2, where they will be cared about 4. Let them rot - most of the kids at the bottom will just be let to rot

Do you really think that they aren't already letting the bottom quartile rot? It's hard to see how things could be worse.

In my career in public schools, I never noticed any efforts by the teachers to grow the top quartile. Or anyone else, for that matter. I attended 4 public schools in different locales. I was pretty much ignored by all the teachers.

I remember first grade. The teacher would set us up in a circle, each student reading one sentence. I found this very dull, and so read the rest of the book while the other students would grind out the sentences. The teacher then asked what the students guessed the next chapter was about. I of course piped up and dumped a summary of the rest of the book. The teacher was not amused, and curtly told me I was not allowed to read ahead of the class.

Nurtured, my adze.

Things have probably gotten worse since. For example, Seattle got rid of all their gifted tracks.

I went to a public school where the entire motive energy of the staff was applied to the top quartile. Being in that quartile, it was really great. Every class was leveled and the best teachers taught Honors classes. I cannot describe how refreshing it was to be in a class where those 2 or 3 disruptive kids had just... disappeared.

This is also fundamentally a better way to run a country. It really doesn't matter whether the bottom student in the school does or doesn't learn how to add two three-digit numbers by the time he graduates high school. But the top student learning more advanced topics could actually matter.

This is just a carrot version of the NCLB policy. Public school administrators already push teachers to focus on low performers. Teachers hate it because the rest of the class stagnates from not getting attention and the low performers often don't improve much because of serious home-life problems that teachers can't fix.

Carrots make all the difference.

Private industry uses monetary incentives all the time. They do it because it works.

A carrot in the right place makes all the difference, the issue here is this is not the place that the carrot needs to be. Most thought-work, learning in this case, is intrinsically motivated. We can classify this motivation as being one or more of the following needs: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In order for that kind of motivation to function, basic needs must be met. A teacher can have as many carrots dangled in front of them, but you’ve given them an impossible task in a large number of cases.

> this is not the place that the carrot needs to be

The carrot is placed exactly where we want it - results.

> you’ve given them an impossible task

I don't buy that for a minute. It's amazing how people find ways to accomplish impossible tasks when the right motivation is given.

>They do it because it works.

You're making an assumption that the issue is that the teachers aren't putting in the effort.

Children are not simple input/output machines you program. A food insecure child with illiterate parents is going to require individualized and intensive resources, where a child who has Doctors for parents will generally show up to school with the knowledge they need.

Gamification of schools is a really great way to get teachers to completely ignore the development of most of the class to focus on one or two kids.

It's amazing that after the widely documented failure of NCLB, people are still promoting these 'work harder' systems.

> You're making an assumption that the issue is that the teachers aren't putting in the effort.

Not at all. I'm looking at we aren't getting the desired results. We've tried everything but the obvious - pay for results.

> Gamification of schools is a really great way to get teachers to completely ignore the development of most of the class

Quite the opposite. The bonus is per student.

> It's amazing that after the widely documented failure of NCLB, people are still promoting these 'work harder' systems.

NCLB was nothing like I proposed. It's also not about working harder. It's about results.

>Not at all. I'm looking at we aren't getting the desired results. We've tried everything but the obvious - pay for results.

What you're proposing is not "obvious" to anyone who actually studies education.

>Quite the opposite. The bonus is per student.

How familiar are you with education? Children develop at different paces but are grouped by age, at least until high school. Teachers don't just teach to get the kids to the next grade, or at least they shouldn't. Under what you are proposing, it doesn't make sense for a teacher to spend any time on a kid who is already going to go on to the next grade. There is no incentive to challenge them with harder books, or harder math problems.

Like, we literally already tried this with NCLB. The ended in the most obvious way possible. Teachers taught to get test results, standards were lowered to make it easier to move to the next grade, children who were excelling were ignored by their teachers who had to focus on children who were lagging.

The whole concept behind 'pay for results' is that you think teachers are not putting the effort they could in.

>NCLB was nothing like I proposed.

I encourage you to do some reading on this topic. You're literally just describing a positive incentive based NCLB. You have the same operating theory that the designers of NCLB had.

>It's also not about working harder. It's about results.

This is a meaningless statement.

> I encourage you to do some reading on this topic.

I did. The NCLB Act has precisely ZERO monetary incentives for teachers. It has nothing in common with my proposal.

https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/no-child-left-behind-...

It was obviously written and enacted by people who have no idea how incentives actually work.

>I did. The NCLB Act has precisely ZERO monetary incentives for teachers

They had negative monetary incentives for teachers and schools

>It was obviously written and enacted by people who have no idea how incentives actually work.

It was written by people who don't believe in public education. It's the literal concept you are pushing whether you recognize that or not.

> They had negative monetary incentives for teachers and schools

Please provide a reference for negative monetary incentives for teachers.

> It's the literal concept you are pushing

What I'm "pushing" is aligning incentives with the desired results. A system that works every time it's tried.

Besides, if the public schools try my proposal, in no instance will the teachers or schools be worse off. There's literally nothing to lose by trying it.

>Please provide a reference for negative monetary incentives for teachers.

Again, if you are interested, you should learn, literally, the basic of the subject on which you are speaking

https://www.nber.org/digest/feb15/impact-school-performance-...

You are at this point "debating" the foundation of NCLB, of which it doesn't seem like you know anything about.

> pay for results.

> The bonus is per student.

Something something about Goodhart's Law and cobras...

But seriously, think about the second order effects of a powerful incentive like this.

At best, you will likely turn schools into test prep centers where average and advanced students are further ignored (an effect NCLB is already criticized for). Worse is that students able to pass the assessments will realize they are a valuable asset worth $1000 per class by simply failing their pretest and passing their posttest and will figure out ways to trade this with teachers for a cut of the profit or for a grade. Given that trading these test scores is purely positive sum for both students and teachers and that both students and teachers are poor, I think you will see a highly efficient market emerge. And why would schools or states care? They are all making more money!

And the current system's have an incentive for success?

All of your criticisms of the bonus pay proposal can be easily addressed, as the other ones in this thread.

For example, test the kids once a year at the end of the academic year. There goes the incentive to fail the pretest.

The advanced students can go into the gifted track, which can be operated differently.

> And why would schools or states care?

They don't care now. Proof: Seattle got rid of their gifted programs.

You should check out some teacher forums and see what teachers are complaining about to get an idea of what would help. Classes are too big, teachers are pressured to pass unprepared students to the next level, underperforming students are hard to motivate, there isn't enough time to prepare lessons and grade, etc. There are many areas that could be improved with funding, but you should start at the known problems.

Think about this from the perspective of behavioral economics. Teaching is a profession with a high degree of intrinsic motivation given how stressful it is and how little it pays. Paying for performance on some test primarily rewards people who will game the test because that has a better cost/benefit ratio than heroically catching up kids who are performing several grade levels behind and have a difficult home life. Pay for performance tends to damage morale and increases attrition of intrinsically motivated workers (the kind you really want). This is what happens in controlled psychology experiments and it's what happened with NCLB.

> game the test

How are you going to game this test:

     1234
    +5678
    -----
    ?????

when the tests can each be unique with randomly generated 4 digit numbers? The way to "game" it is to learn how to add!

> it's what happened with NCLB

Once more, NCLB did *NOT* pay teachers for performance.

> How are you going to game this test:

Plenty of ways. Teacher takes test for student, teacher re-scores test after student is finsihed, student is placed in an IEP that gives them unlimited time and "reading assistance" for test, failing students are placed in small classes and the class size of average students is expanded, failing students are moved from normal schoolwork to test prep, test questions are leaked/sold (we're talking about a multi-billion dollar industry here, right?).

I didn't make up any of these. This is already happening, and it has nothing to do with positive/negative incentive. It's about test-based education and the natural consequence of trying to control a complex system using a simple metric. It's why education theorists are loathed by teachers--because they swoop in with grand theories of how to fix everything without understanding the system and what is and isn't broken.

It's like an outsider thinking a reasonable way to pay a coder is by how many lines of code they write and how many bugs they fix. Or a civil engineer by how many bridges and roads they produce. Because outsiders don't understand the complexity of the system they think the solution must be simple. Since you seem invested in this idea I suggest you go get some input from teachers and see what they say. My guess is you will learn that the problems with public education is multifactorial and that there isn't a simple fix.

In corrupt incompetent institutions that's going to create all sorts of perverse incentives. How about $1,000 bonus for every arrest a cop makes?

It is also insulting to teachers, as if they could have been doing a great job getting the kids to grade level, but chose not to because they weren't financially incentivized enough to do their job.

> It is also insulting to teachers, as if they could have been doing a great job getting the kids to grade level, but chose not to because they weren't financially incentivized enough to do their job.

It may not be the same people though. If teaching in the US was a well-paid and highly respected profession it would presumably retain the most qualified teachers instead of driving them away due to having to find a living wage elsewhere.

Again, that's an insult by implication. That the current failing are due to incompetent teachers and we can fix the problem by paying higher quality teachers to replace them.

> that's going to create all sorts of perverse incentives

That's why you assign the kids to teachers at random, and an independent 3rd party does the assessment.

> It is also insulting to teachers

Only the incompetent ones. The competent ones will be happy to collect those thousand dollar checks.

P.S. Write me a check for $1,000, and I'll cheerfully endure your insults.

Is that average over the country? Because there are regions where almost every student is already above average, and regions where they are below.

This sounds like a way of funneling the best teachers into the already best schools in the richest areas, and making it impossible to employ good teachers in poorer regions -- unless you have a plan to fix this (I realise you've only given a tiny explanation).

You could modify the plan so the bonus only happens for the kids who didn't meet grade level the previous year.

That way, the best teachers would want to teach the low performers, because that's where the max bonuses would be.

This would seem to involve independant, standardised testing to be held on all students, every year. Letting teachers, or even the school, evaluate students would obviously make it too easy for biases.

I will admit I'm in the UK, not the US, but we only do huge standardised tests every 3 years or so, as they are very disruptive.

You're right that an independent 3rd party would be needed to administer the tests.

My mind swims with the perverse incentives this would engender.

Terrifying, isn't it? Trying something new!

Why not cut out the middleman and pay the kid? Go to the poorest high school in town, tell the kids they each get $1,000 at the end of the school year if their performance is at grade level (and $5,000 if they're in the top 10%), and watch the place transform overnight.

I like the way you think!

Of course there is, just as there was a way for poor rural kids in China to go to the top universities: have public schools offer excellent educations. Pay teachers to offer after-school programs. Pay teachers to give challenging course work. Pay teacher to give timely and frequent feedbacks. It's not about leaving no kids behind, as some kids are simply not good at academics. It's about giving the brights kids, no matter where they come from, a chance to succeed.

BTW, there's nothing secret about Asian students' performance. It's just that even the poor families would know to pool the limited resources to educate their kids.