I was offered the chance to look at the Nashville merit-pay study in advance, under embargoed conditions, but my life has been crazy and I thought it was unfair to accept the offer unless I was fairly sure I could spend the time to read and blog about it in depth. So, in lieu of careful analysis, you get an adage: this is one study, and no matter how well-designed, it's one study. If you doubt me, read or reread Jeff Henig.
Having put that caution out there, I'm wondering when people are going to frame these types of projects within the relative cost-effectiveness of the three main methods of intervening in education: pouring in resources, setting protocols, and providing incentives. The question is not really whether one approach is always better but when and where each is appropriate. For some reason, discussion of Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto never took off in education circles. But that's the logical alternative to relying on incentives for everything: a protocol.
Short example: the back to sleep campaign to reduce sudden infant death syndrome. When a social marketing campaign developed in 1994 to persuade parents to stop putting infants on their stomachs for sleeping, the idea of paying parents to do the right thing, or even keeping their kids alive, would never have occurred to the people running it. Instead, they figured out how to get parents to remember one simple thing: put your child on her or his back or side for a nap. Positioning a sleeping baby is a simple act,* and teaching is not. But maybe we should remember the broader question as a matter of strategy.
Oh, and a suggestion for the cash-strapped state of Tennessee: you can now loan yourself out to all sorts of social-science research projects, since you will henceforth be known in education as the state with two well-designed experiments with policy implications. Tennessee: the Grand Ol' Opry and a bunch of kids you can experiment on. On second thought, maybe that's not a great state motto. Stick with Agriculture and Commerce.
* Parents of newborns, feel free to criticize me on this point, but my youngest is 15, and I never remember his waking up after I put him down. Not once. He was a perfect baby, as was my daughter. And my memory is infallible on this point.
Do any ed studies on incentives (whether pay or otherwise) begin with a review of Dan Ariely’s work to see if their basic assumptions on human motivation are well-founded?
In terms of lay-oriented books, Ariely’s stuff is less relevant than Daniel Pink’s Drive. But that’s a journalistic account of one part of the literature.