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I was watching TED 2009 this morning as I mass transited my way to work, and I discovered this gem from the conference: Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation.

If you have 15 minutes or so to spare from your day, the video is well worth the time. Dan Pink is an engaging speaker and the information he presents  uproots the long accepted belief that motivation using cash incentives works.  It doesn’t.

To summarize: The ideas on motivation that held true during the process oriented do-as-you-are-told methodology of the industrial era, no longer holds true in an age where mechanical processes (manufacturing, inventory management, etc) are being delegated to machines, and creativity and outside-the-box thinking drive the economy. Believe it or not, using money as the primary tool for motivation is counter-productive when you are trying to encourage creativity.

When linear thinking is necessary, money still works. But when you need to think laterally, productivity drops as the monetary reward goes up, i.e. we get less creative so it takes longer to solve the problem.

The solution to  encouraging creative thinking and increasing productivity is not money, it is the freedom to act. The best way to encourage creativity is to stop treating employees like a dog you can train and start acknowledging that they are independent agents capable of much more than you give them credit for. As employees, it is important for us to believe that what we do or what we are trying to do has some sort of intrinsic value.

Now Dan Pink was speaking from a business perspective, but this idea got me thinking. What about education, both from a student’s perspective and a teacher’s perspective?

From a student’s perspective, grades would look a lot like monetary incentives. The higher you score on this test, the more you participate in class, or the more homework you complete… the higher a reward (grade) you get. We are trapping our children in the same do-as-your-told processes that has dominated business for so long. And in doing so we do them a grave disservice.

Those standardized tests that we as a world have put so much emphasis on as the way to measure our ‘ability’ are a perfect example of what is wrong with our education system. Those tests claim to measure intelligence, but all they really measure is how well you can take a test. Walk into any Princeton, Kaplan, or any other test prep center and they teach you the same thing. They teach you how to recognize patterns and types of questions. In essence they teach you how to game the system. And to compound the problem, these test prep course cost a lot of money, so in most cases it is only the wealthy that can take full advantage of this service.

So now what of the teachers? A few weeks ago, Obama suggested implementing a pay-for-performance plan for teachers, where seniority and tenure are de-emphasized as the means for determining pay and merit is elevated. One of the problems with this, as I wrote in my last post, is that merit is a difficult quality to categorize and measure. And if we set our standards for merit wrong, we could easily do more harm than good.

In that post, I didn’t explain what I meant by that, because, to be honest, I didn’t really know how. To me it just seemed intuitive. But listening to Dan Park brought me back to that problem. And now I think I can explain what I meant.

If we measure merit based on how well a student performs in our current system of education, then we are only going to end up magnifying the problems that exist in the system. More focus on grades and standardized tests will result in more subject oriented and do-as-you-are-told teaching. We get more of the same when what we need is a change.

To make a pay-for-performance plan work, we need to first change the system so that we de-emphasize grades and test scores and grant teachers more freedom on how to teach, so that teachers can focus on instilling in our children that which is really important: a life long love for learning.

There is no easy solution to this problem, but the acknowledging and acting on the ideas that Dan Pink presents and others like him argue are the first steps toward solving this problem.

This is an interesting article from the Stimulist on what is wrong with education. Keep in mind this article is completely anecdotal, but it still remains a compelling read. I have quoted some of the more intriguing passages below.

What is interesting about this article is that it seems to supports what Obama is proposing to do about teacher pay… perhaps not directly but some of the authors complaints would be addressed by the proposed de-emphasis on tenure and seniority, and a stronger emphasis on merit. The question that this raises of course is “How do you effectively measure merit?” And of course the consequences could be tragic if the answer to that question is not carefully thought out. But that is a conversation for another time and place. First we must identify the problem, and the argument below is a compelling one. Enjoy.

It’s easy to blame inner-city kids for the problems with inner-city schools. They come from dysfunctional homes, people tell themselves, have careless parents and bad attitudes. They are doomed from the start. But the children I see starting kindergarten at my school in the South Bronx are just as bright and inquisitive as the ones at the elite private school a few blocks away. The problem isn’t the kids. The system is the problem.

Understaffed, disorganized, and chaotic, most inner-city schools are obstacle courses only the most resilient student can overcome.

I offer this viewpoint as a newly “excessed” teacher, which means that due to budget cuts and an antiquated seniority system, I have essentially been let go by my school. In my three years of teaching, I have helped non-readers in September to become chapter book-readers in May, and only three of my 72 students have ever failed either the state math or language arts exams. I am the kind of teacher who gives up her lunch period to provide extra help to students, stays late to talk to parents, and walks into the school each morning with a smile. Next year, I will be replaced by a “veteran teacher” who has been pushing papers for the past four years, is outwardly upset about being “forced back into the classroom,” and has a reputation for skirting responsibility (i.e., failing to tutor students who she has been assigned to tutor).

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Who loses there? Well, good teachers are out of a job. But far more important, the students become lame ducks, stuck in a school with teachers who don’t want to be there and in a system that doesn’t think they’re worth as much as the ones up the block.

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The problem is systemic. The problem is fixable. And our kids deserve a solution.

Check out The Stimulist for the full article

Asia is not the answer to our educational woes. I said it before when Obama started talking about the Korean model of education as one to imitate and now I have found others much more distinguished than myself saying the same thing in no other than Foreign Policy magazine’s article “Think Again: Asia’s Rise”.

Clay Burrell at the Change.org blog pointed the relevant passage  out first, which I have placed below. (Bolding courtesy of Clay Burrell)

Asia is pouring money into higher education. But Asian universities will not become the world’s leading centers of learning and research anytime soon. None of the world’s top 10 universities is located in Asia, and only the University of Tokyo ranks among the world’s top 20. In the last 30 years, only eight Asians, seven of them Japanese, have won a Nobel Prize in the sciences. The region’s hierarchical culture, centralized bureaucracy, weak private universities, and emphasis on rote learning and test-taking will continue to hobble its efforts to clone the United States’ finest research institutions.

Even Asia’s much-touted numerical advantage is less than it seems. China supposedly graduates 600,000 engineering majors each year, India another 350,000. The United States trails with only 70,000 engineering graduates annually. Although these numbers suggest an Asian edge in generating brainpower, they are thoroughly misleading. Half of China’s engineering graduates and two thirds of India’s have associate degrees. Once quality is factored in, Asia’s lead disappears altogether. A much-cited 2005 McKinsey Global Institute study reports that human resource managers in multinational companies consider only 10 percent of Chinese engineers and 25 percent of Indian engineers as even “employable,” compared with 81 percent of American engineers.