Unrelenting Innovation: How to Create a Culture for Market Dominance (J-B Warren Bennis Series) by Gerard J. Tellis

Author:Gerard J. Tellis
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-12-04T14:00:00+00:00

Fairness of Incentives

Recently in the United States, the federal government has encouraged states throughout the country through strong incentives to conduct standardized tests on math and science. Federal funding for education has been offered to encourage adoption of such tests and improve quality of education for low-performing schools. However, one school district found that its incentive system caused its teachers to cheat on the test that had multiple-choice answers.22 Teachers could cheat in several ways. A teacher could write the answers to the test on the blackboard during the exam. Other teachers could prepare students for the questions on the test if they had early access to the test. Still others could erase the incorrect answers and replace them with correct answers on their students' answer sheets. The corrections were probably done once the exam was over, the children had left, and the teachers had time before they had to turn in the papers.

Why did the teachers cheat? Aside from the moral issue of integrity, teachers probably cheated because the incentives were strong but they lacked the means of meeting targets in the short term. Teachers whose students did badly on the tests were likely to be sanctioned. If the entire school did badly, federal funding could be withheld for the school. Moreover, the school could fire low-performing teachers. But if students did well on the tests the teacher would likely be lauded and promoted. In the short term, some teachers may have been unable to improve students' performance on the tests due to weak students, limited resources, limited time, or their own limited abilities. Under pressure to perform, teachers may have cheated to avoid penalties and gain rewards for themselves and their schools.

The cheating was detected by studying unusual answer patterns and correlations among students in a given classroom, strange patterns within any one student's answers, and a comparison of how the students performed on the tests the year before and after the alleged cheating. The school district also conducted mock tests and had students retake the test under close monitoring. The intent was to see if students did as well on the test the second time, when no chance for cheating was allowed. The school district found that students whose answer sheets were initially determined to have been modified by errant teachers did not do as well on the tests the second time around. After making allowances for general differences in student performance, the school confronted the teachers and eventually fired those who had cheated.

This example shows the harm of strong penalties for failure coupled with difficult conditions for compliance: a system in which participants do not have a fair chance to meet goals within the time and recourse constraints. What could have been done? The incentive system could have emphasized rewards for improvement over penalties for failure, it could have been coupled with adequate training for low-performing teachers or students, and it could have set performance standards that were relative to the starting point of the teachers and the students.

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