Money & Motivation

Here are two articles I'd like you to look at. The first is from Friday's (4/15/10) New York Times. Charlie Crist, the governor of Florida, vetoed a bill "eliminating tenure for Florida public school teachers and tying their pay and job security to how well their students were learning."

Now, some people would see that as Crist caving in to the powerful teachers' unions, but according to the governor "his decision was not political. He cited 'the incredible outpouring of opposition by teachers, parents, students, superintendents, school boards and legislators'.”

There are two problems with the bill, as I see it. First of all, as the governor noted "the changes envisioned would put 'teachers in jeopardy of losing their jobs and teaching certificates, without a clear understanding of how gains will be measured'.” In other words, what test truly measures how much students have learned. Secondly, I feel that a lot of what students gain from their classroom experience does not directly pertain to a standardized curriculum.

But here's a bigger problem, and this second piece addresses it. It's from Newshour on PBS, so I don't imagine any of you happened to see this last Thursday. It's nine minutes and nine seconds, but really worth watching for any of you planning on working for a living.

DANIEL PINK: We tend to think that the way you get people to perform at a high level is, you reward what you want and punish what you don't want, carrot and stick. If you do this, then you get that.

That turns out, the science says, to be an extraordinarily effective way of motivating people for those routine tasks, simple, straightforward, where there's a right answer. They end up being a terrible form for motivating people to do creative conceptual tasks.

So, as far as you're concerned, if the point of school is to make you learn certain things -- we should reward you when you do, and punish you when you don't. (And money turns out to be a goos way to do that -- but more about that later. And as far as I'm concerned, rewards (money), or punishment (loss of job) will motivate me to make sure you learn those things (or, perform well on the tests judging those things). The problem? We -- the both of us -- lose creativity.

BARRY SCHWARTZ, psychologist, Swarthmore College: Money isn't a natural part of anything we do. It's not a part of practicing medicine. You know, the natural thing to practicing medicine is healing people. Getting paid for it is unnatural, similarly with law and with any profession, teaching. So, maybe what happens is that what money does is, it disconnects people from the real point and purpose of their activity.

What should be my motivator as an educator: my students, or my pocketbook?

Can't it be both? Well, consider sales commissions. If I were a salesman, the more I sell, the more I make. Makes sense right? The more students I can make pass the test, the more money I make. Well, a company called System Source P. C.s did away with commissions. What happened to sales?

PAUL SOLMAN: Weinstein says sales spurted 44 percent as soon as commissions were canned in 1994. Profitability rose threefold.

Oh.

MAURY WEINSTEIN: We find that money often disrupts relationships. It disrupts customer efforts. And, sometimes, it makes the customer feel like a piece of meat, where you can't trust the salesperson's recommendations. And that's a very slippery slope at that point.

Trust. Relationships. Are these things necessary in school? In life?

DANIEL PINK: We do things because they're interesting. We do things because we like them. We do things because we get better at them, because they contribute to the world, even if they don't have a payoff in getting a reward or satisfying some -- some biological drive.

This is not a plea for a kinder, gentler approach to business. This is a plea for saying, let's wake up. Let's get past our outdated assumptions, and let's actually run businesses in concert with what the science shows about human performance.