It's not that giving or seeking recognition are wholly bad, but when they are the whole point, it's probably bad. We don't require everyone go to school because it sucks and we want to make sure everyone had the same bad experience we had. We do it in hopes that they can find a lifelong love of learning, which can manifest itself in a variety of ways. School and achievement in school should have intrinsic benefits; if it doesn't, it will often be a waste. This isn't to say that rewarding excellence is a bad thing - it's just a bad thing when it's the only thing.
Talking about why we perceive some "carrot-and-stick" incentives to be more like bribery, political scientist Michael Sandel says we suspect the material motive "crowds out other, better motives." This is what I'm talking about: crowding out better motives for achievement. There are all kinds of studies that show how swinging this balance too strongly towards incentives, especially material or financial incentives, will make everything temporary. Think about the myriad programs that pay kids for doing well in school:
In a broad-ranging, multi-million dollar experiment on this subject, almost no positive effects were observed. In programs that ranged from:
-Paying fourth graders $25 and seventh graders $50 for scoring well on standardized tests in NYC.
-Paying middle schoolers for attendance, behavior, and timely work in Washington DC. It was possible to earn $100 every two weeks. Average student took home $532.85.
-Paid ninth graders in Chicago $50 per A, $35 per B, $20 per C. One kid won just under $2,000.
-Paid second graders $2 for each book they read using quizzes to ensure honesty.
At the end, the researchers had almost zero positive effects to report. And trust me, when you've been entrusted to design a study that costs this much money, you feel pressure to spin it positively. There wasn't much positive to say. The first three cities listed above had no near-zero effects and nothing that reached statistical significance. In Dallas, they observed a modest but statistically significant effect on those who could speak English and a just as significant negative impact on non-native speakers.
In wondering why things turned out this way, the researchers had this to say:
In other words, the promise of future reward is a good motivator (they noted LOTS of enthusiasm for the prospect of making money) but bad at producing results.
Here's another, targeted more specifically at teachers. Your students do better than expected, you get bonuses. BIG bonuses. In a highly impoverished, majority-minority district in Nashville, teachers could earn between $5000-$15000 for ranking highly in what's called "value-added" scores; basically, it compares the students' year-to-year changes on standardized tests in the past to the change with the teacher in question (statewide changes are incorporated to rule out potential external factors relating to test design or issues affecting huge swaths of people). Just for participating, each teacher was given $750 each year they ran the program. They also looked at two other programs that used smaller bonuses and different motivation models.
They found that these bonuses had no statistically significant effect on:
-hours worked
-collegiality with co-workers
-teaching practices
-actual test scores
The researchers' suggestion:
In this monograph, 3 years and $50 million in school-based incentives in NYC produced the following results:
-no effects on student achievement in any grade level
-no effects on school progress report scores that focused on the educational environment rather than scores
-in the vast majority of districts, educators preferred and voted for equal bonuses to all faculty rather than differentiating by classroom
-it did not affect educator practices, morale, or motivation
Here's an example where financial incentives work and the reason why they worked is absolutely key. In Texas, they've been running an incentive program for students to score well on AP exams. It has worked in a lot of different ways - scores are up on AP tests and SATs, more people are participating in the AP program, and more people are going to and graduating from college. This is in comparison to similar schools that haven't implemented these programs.
This is exemplified by the fact that increasing the financial incentive had no effect on outcomes. Nobody is acting like an economic rational chooser, but rather the incentive became secondary. The reason the program worked is because the schools responded by changing the norms. Going after achievement became cool. One commentator said about this study and the program said "the money had an expressive effect" instead of an instrumental one. They quote a student who says the money "was a great extra." They basically forgot there was money involved because nobody focused on it.
Think of that experiment alongside others like this one and this one that demonstrate how putting troubled students in great schools vastly increases their achievement in myriad ways, from scores to future earnings. Nobody was adding a special incentive, they just were in a culture where the normal thing to do was learn.
Here's another walk of life where incentives backfire - health. Take smoking. There have been apparently successful programs that pay people to quit smoking. But...the most optimistic study found that 90% of those who took incentives and quit were back to smoking within 6 months of the end of the incentives. In this case, the incentives do better than nothing, but still...not very much. This meta-study found no long-term beneficial effect in incentivizing weight loss. Per usual, even when a benefit is observed, it goes away as soon as the incentives do.
Anyway, you get the point I'm trying to make. We send kids to school trying to help them become the best people they can be. Some will head into the real world of employment, where there are lots of incentives. Of course, we also know from research that "incentive" usually turns to "status quo" after not very long. So, unless we can promise people ever-increasing incentives in the world of work, we have to equip them to intrinsically enjoy life. And not just enjoy life, but improve themselves and their communities for that same, intrinsic benefit. You can see in the example of teachers that they had become so conditioned to the intrinsic benefits of their work that not even relatively large financial incentives could change the way they did things.
You can imagine all kinds of professions and life paths where you just can't expect a carrot and stick - your choice is to be sad and do everything out of obligation, or you can do it just for the joy of doing it and enjoy whatever else comes along as a side benefit. If you focus academic achievement on incentives, even if it works at all during the formal education, we have likely completely eroded the students' relationship with learning to the extent that they'll never do it voluntarily.
Why did I write such a long post? There weren't any incentives - heck, Soxtalk isn't even one of those message boards with karma or reputation points. I just like to learn, help others learn, and talk about things that matter in as substantive a manner as I can. So I'm not too worried about how this school recognizes their achievers. They deserve recognition in some way, certainly. But I'm more worried about whether they've been bestowed the attitude that the recognition was the only reason for doing it.
