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