The New York City school system performed a fascinating experiment over the past three years. The goal: to see if paying bonuses to school teachers and staff might spur educators to change how they teach enough to improve students’ educational achievement. There are some object lessons for Virginia, where legislators bandy about the idea of performance bonuses as an option for school reform.
The city set aside a $50 million pot of money to be distributed over three years to 200 or so schools (the precise number varied from year to year). The goal was to test the proposition that an incentive pay system would motivate educators to change their practices to ones more likely to improve student achievement, explains the Rand Corporation in a report, “A Big Apple for Educators,” summarizing the program.
Three years and $50 million years later, the measured effect on student achievement was indiscernible. But that doesn’t mean the experiment was a failure — it yielded knowledge on how not to structure a performance plan.
Given the egalitarian ethos of educators in New York City schools, roughly two-thirds of the schools chose to divvy up their bonus, if they won it, between all teachers and staff, regardless of individual performance. Thus, the bonus amounted to roughly $3,000 per person. Even schools that differentiated between individuals on the basis of absences or unsatisfactory staff ratings “generally remained cautious about deviating from egalitarian awards,” Rand reports, and slated 74% of the staff for the modal award amount. In other words, nearly all the bonus money was paid for collective performance.
Here’s the real kicker: While teachers and staff expressed a strong desire to win bonuses, “many winners reported that, after taxes, the bonus seemed insignificant. In fact, almost one-half of the teachers … indicated that the bonus was not large enough to motivate extra effort.” Consequently, Rand reports, the bonuses had no effect on teacher-reported attitudes, perceptions and behaviors, and they had no effect on student standardized test scores.
Bacon’s bottom line: If you want to improve performance by motivating teacher to intensify their individual effort, you need to make the bonuses big enough to matter. Spreading around the bonuses to everyone in the school is plain idiocy if you don’t have a clear alternative model you’re coaxing them to buy into. Just handing out money and hoping for the best doesn’t work.