Incentives in the Classroom

In a recent TED Talk, Bill Gates talks about the importance of great teachers in shaping leaders. He discusses the incredible variability in quality between teachers and ultimately suggests that a new model needs to be adopted to encourage the professional development of teachers. With his business acumen and demonstrated success in the corporate world, he suggests tools that he is no doubt familiar with:

1) Employing better technology with the video monitoring of classrooms, both for the benefit of surveillance as well as for the benefit of distribution and study.
2) Smarter incentives for teachers.

I really don't like any of these two suggestions. Truth be told, I dislike them with some kind of intensity. The great teachers I've had in my life have always emphasized their respective decisions to become teachers as not being motivated by money. What happens in a classroom is a special thing that exists outside the logic of business operations. That for me is the big picture argument against both 1) and 2).

In theory, video monitoring promises great returns. How else could I have access to all the great lectures distributed for free on TED.com? But TED Talks are a peculiar case. They are lectures and not discussions. Invariably, they are not interactive with the audience. Great teachers respond to the different personalities of different classrooms spontaneously and organically. Great teachers engage the unique interests and backgrounds of their students. Videos do none of these things. Yes, videos can play a role in the dissemination of information, but great teachers do far more than engage in a one-way flow of information from teacher to student. A recorded lecture commodifies a lesson plan. I cannot be inspired by a commodity. In a video, I would never have experienced the palpable passion that Mr. Maggio demonstrated for literature. Any move towards the commodification of education goes against everything that I have learned both as a teacher and as a student.

As for its other purported purpose, surveillance, video monitoring seems to wage a silent war against accountability and trust. The trust and mutual respect in a successful classroom cannot be legislated from the outside. It has to be built from within the classroom, from the ground up. In my opinion, video monitoring would undermine teacher efforts on this moral dimension.

What about smarter incentives? For one thing, incentives require measurements. If teachers are incentivized by the measurable amount in which their students' scores improve on some standardized test, then teachers will begin to teach to the test. There are so many problems with this that I don't even know where to begin. So I won't.

Barry Schwarz says in his excellent talk that we have thus far responded to the financial crisis by trying to improve the regulatory environment and devise smarter incentives. Regulations and incentives are important, but they neglect, according to Barry Schwarz, practical wisdom. The exercise of practical wisdom takes place independently of regulations and incentives. In fact, Schwarz cites a psychological study that demonstrates how the presence of financial incentives can undermine basic goodwill and the exercise of moral wisdom. Interesting stuff. People should behave ethically because it is the right thing to do and not in order to receive some monetary reward.

Bill Gates' suggestions about how we can improve teacher quality are efforts to improve the efficiency of regulations and incentives. Something important is missing. I agree that great teachers should be rewarded and paid handsomely. The service done by great teachers is truly immeasurable. But treating education in a business manner undermines what education is all about.

Nicholas Negroponte, in his talk about One Laptop per Child, discusses his decision to make his organization nonprofit. He says one of the greatest advantages of being nonprofit is that you can attract the best people in the world. Why? Because the people that you attract by being nonprofit are attracted by the merits of the project at hand. Because people who are the absolute best at what they do are seldom motivated by money alone. In my mind, what goes for the nonprofit world goes for what happens in the classroom as well.