Rethinking Compliance, Modernizing Motivation

Educators, politicians, and regular citizens all want the same basic thing for America’s students: high academic achievement. Teachers, of course, need to perform at a high level in order to make this a reality. These goals are indisputably the right ones. However, the directives we follow in order to pursue these goals are vestiges of a bygone era. In the last 150 years, both the people and the circumstances surrounding public education have altered drastically. Yet, the American education system still functions on one main premise—compliance. From the organization of the school day to the way we measure students’ academic performance (and increasingly the performance of their teachers)—namely standardized tests—the compliance mentality dominates the American school system. But what if compliance and its attending, often punitive, incentive structures aren’t helping us reach our goals?

A new report from the National Research Council (along with several other recent reports) makes a compelling argument for why high stakes testing does not have the promised positive effects on teaching and learning. For one thing, the report avers, tests do not give an adequate picture of student performance because they do not account for out-of-school factors. For another, test-based incentives for teachers may reward teachers to “teach to the test,” sacrificing breadth in the curriculum, and in some cases, depth even in the tested subjects. Test results, therefore, are superficial at best and detrimental to the practice of teaching and the process of learning at worst.

As author Daniel Pink skillfully argues in his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, the old-fashioned carrot-and-stick mentality of getting people to do things is woefully out of date. This system, which Pink calls “Motivation 1.0,” is at odds with what much of the research says really motivates people. Pink says that real motivation stems from “autonomy, mastery, and purpose,” which are not as closely tied to money and other carrots as one might assume. Our school system relies on “external” motivators like high stakes testing that discourage real motivation in favor of getting students and teachers alike to fall into line. Falling into line might have been the goal of school way back when the public education system was founded, back when the world was very different and most Americans grew up to work in factories. But I do not need to tell you that is no longer the case. We need to get in touch with our 21st goals for our 21st workforce and separate them from the methods we long used to measure our progress. We need to think deeply and creatively about what better drivers we can use to propel students and teachers to achieve.