Cheaply Nudging towards Better Incentives in Public Education
Back to school.
Those 3 dreaded words that mark the end of summer for millions of students and teachers alike. The end of rest, relaxation and fun.
Meanwhile, for school designers and school management teams, the busiest time of the year draws to close as the best laid plans for what will hopefully be an exciting new school year have been formulated and are ready to launch. Staff rosters are set, student recruitment is finished, hardware and infrastructure upgrades done, building refreshes with new paint and freshly waxed floors are complete.
But the core of these summer efforts, the “tip of the spear” or bulls-eye of school design, whether a brand new school, existing school or school turnaround/transformation rests on a single word: motivation.
How do we motivate students and teachers alike for their highest and best performance for this upcoming school year?
Friend and fellow social entrepreneur Sharath Jeevan, Founder & CEO of STIR Education, a teacher-led movement to improve children’s learning in developing countries, has been looking at research covering 12,000 teachers they are working with in India and Uganda. Jeevan says in the Stanford Social Innovation Review this month, “Teacher motivation is fragile and nuanced; education systems need to move beyond blunt ‘carrots and sticks’.” STIR has found that simply allowing space and time for teachers to meet across classrooms and schools and to share their own ideas and best practices with each other, teachers reclaim a sense of moral purpose and status in their work.
On the student side, the New York Times recently reported on some behavioral research performed by two Harvard graduate students who wanted to study the effect of college students’ persistence in school by conducting randomized trials by sending a group of students encouraging notes via texts to their mobile phones. 68% of the college freshmen that received the texts went on to their sophomore compared to 54% who did not.
The same NYT article talks about a school in LA in conjunction with Columbia University that sent personalized text messages to middle and high school students’ parents when they did not complete their homework. The texts informed parents on specific problems that needed to be completed. Homework completion rose 25% and test scores and grades followed.
Most remarkable about these subtle nudges is their cost or lack thereof. The texting program averaged approximately $5/student. Double-digit gains in college retention, homework completion and teacher retention for about what we spend on a fast meal. Nationally we spend millions and millions of dollars on much larger, much more sophisticated incentive measures (teacher incentives for recruitment and performance pay, student counselors, social works and after school programs, etc.).
Perhaps grand visions, large incentives and high stake accountability measures while well intentioned and significant in cost and scale, may fail to achieve the grand nature of their ambitions because of the very grandeur in which they are presented and portrayed. Small, subtle nudges that gently remind students, parents and teachers of who they are, what they are responsible for and encourage them to take action themselves may in fact be more powerful that the large instruments of carrots and sticks our education industry is famous for.
