Why incentives for teachers are a bad idea.
Teaching is an act of creation: the creation of a new, richer, improved cognitive structure in the
mind of the pupil. This can occur through increasing the amount of information stored in that
mind (such as learning the batting averages of a baseball player); it can occur through the
generation of new connections among the pieces of information stored (like developing an
understanding of the physics of the curve ball through a consideration of spin, velocity, and air
conditions); most dramatically, it can occur through a radical reorganization of the pattern of
connections (through understand how baseball is “not only a game” but is indelibly seared into
the self identity of New Yorkers and Bostonians).
Creativity in teaching is all about this process. The teacher needs to focus, in a series of one on
one or one on many interactions, on the way in which her/his students learn. Unless the teacher
focuses on this process, it will be hard for the teacher to adjust the teaching style to match the
varied learning styles of the students.
Financial incentives will disrupt this focus in two ways: incentives are given for irrelevant
behaviors; incentives reduce the intrinsic motivation of the joy of teaching.
What will incentives be given for? We now live in a world with teacher incentives: incentives for
special training, incentives for higher degrees. This leads teachers into the pursuit of credentials,
not, except incidentally, into better teaching. What then would be the criteria for “effective
teaching?” There are two relatively simple criteria that might be used: Both are flawed. The first
is to have students rate the teacher’s effectiveness, but this tends to develop into a popularity
contest with teachers abandoning their professional responsibilities to do what most pleases the
students. There is some evidence that higher ratings are associated with grading leniency, at least
for average teachers. Another flaw is that teachers are judged relative to their peers. That is
student’s mean ratings are anchored to the average level of teacher performance in the school.
Even in a school with a superior level of teaching, a quarter of the teachers will be stigmatized as
being in the bottom 25%. Similarly in a truly awful school, there will be teachers in the top 10%
even if these would be at the bottom of the heap if they taught in a better school.
The second criterion is to look at test scores, or at graduation rates, or at college placement.
Although it can be argued that these are reasonable criteria that demonstrate the fruits of
learning, good teaching is only one of the factors that lead to success. The quality of the intake is
more critical, hence Harvard’s success. It is very difficult to control these factors to obtain an
accurate assessment of the teacher’s contribution to the success of their students.
A third criterion would be to look at the improvement in students over time. The problem here is
that teachers will focus on those students in the middle of the pack who have both the capacity to
improve and room to improve. They will be less likely to focus on those at the bottom of the
class who may have difficulty learning, nor those at the top of the class who don’t need the
teacher’s attention to each a relatively high standard of performance.
It is hard to see how incentives for teachers will do anything to enhance the activity of teaching.
Incentives are the anticipated outcomes for successfully reaching some level of performance; as
such they focus attention on the outcome rather than on the process of reaching that outcome.
Moreover they reduce or inhibit the intrinsic value of the work process. Students who work with
incentivised teachers become means to ends rather than ends in themselves. The teacher worries
about the student’s grades or the test scores result rather than on whether the student has learned
anything.
Incentives for teachers are an idea whose time should not come.
