Pay for Performance
by rrusczyk, Mar 4, 2009, 7:43 PM
Here's a New York Times article on paying for grades. I think this issue is very deeply tied to my musings earlier about "what's the point of education". (It's also tied to the issue of whether or not you really can impact people's natural work ethic. I'm agnostic on this right now.) I do think these sorts of incentive systems should be empirically judged. There are all sorts of essentially unfounded theories one could use to support or oppose pay-for-performance in school, but I think it is at heart a question that can only be judged empirically. However, this judging has to be performed by someone without a vested interest in the result, and without a predisposition to one side or the other of the issue. Good luck finding such a person. I suspect many of the studies of these types of issues are rife with biases that reflect the investigators' inclinations. Even more complicating, I suspect that a thorough study of these systems will find that they are good for some general classes of students and bad for others, and the ultimate distinction of whether the approach is "good" or "bad" will really depend on what groups of students are valued most by the person making the distinction.
February 2012
January 2012