Sandra Mathison critiqued the “bribes for tests” strategies in US schools a couple of years back in Z Magazine where she wrote:
It remains common nonsense that extrinsic rewards lead to internal motivation. Indeed much research has demonstrated the deleterious effects of extrinsic rewards on motivation. Over the years, psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan have repeatedly demonstrated this and recently their work points to the likelihood that using state tests for motivational purposes will likely lead to poorer education overall.
Now, unfortunately, it looks like the bribes for test strategy is gaining some serious traction in New York City as the Mayor Bloomberg and the school chancellor Joel Klein are considering a plan that would pay students cash for high scores on standardized tests.
Follow
The idea that we pay students cash for high scores on tests is a pathetic and desperate effort to try to maintain high stakes testing and central government accountability; a system that is putting a stanglehold on educational reform and does not have a viable future. Historians will remember the accountability era as the most ill-advised plan for eduational reform in the history of education. Most signficantly, the whole system is based upon policy that is political wishful thinking rather than existing educational research. Sandra’s point that we have plenty of research that suggests this practice is useless illustrates the ongoing problem of educational policy that is made with complete disregard for the expertise and experience of teachers. Education policy makers who fail to hear the warnings of experts like Mathison, do so at their peril.
I am beginning to see the bribes for tests as an integral part of the dumbing down of schooling, the perverse slight of hand that suggests the quality of education will go up with higher test scores when indeed the higher test scores are more associated with the creation of compliant citizens and workers. If the schools can eliminate every trace of learning for its own sake, or for beauty, or for joy then the appeal of minimum wages and governments controlled by elites become naturalized.
What an unsavory stew this educational reform.