The essential paradigm behind much of the school discipline practiced in the United States today—and certainly behind the zero-tolerance, suspension-heavy approach that has dominated since the 1990s—is behaviorism. The basic idea behind the behaviorist approach to education is that humans respond to incentives and reinforcement. If we get positive reinforcement for a certain behavior, we’re more likely to do more of it; if we get negative reinforcement, we’re more likely to do less. This paradigm is so dominant in American education that it often goes without saying. In most schools, the first few weeks of the school year are dedicated to discussions of class rules: incentives and disincentives, rewards and punishments, stickers and pizza parties, detentions and suspensions. And in many classrooms, that discussion continues more or less daily throughout the school year.
Clearly, on some level, behaviorism works. People, including children, respond well to behavioral cues, at least in the short term. But researchers are increasingly coming to understand that there are limits to the effectiveness of rewards and punishments in education, and that for young people whose neurological and psychological development has been shaped by intense stress, straightforward reward systems are often especially ineffective.
Roland Fryer, a celebrated young professor of economics at Harvard University, has spent the past decade testing out a variety of incentive schemes in experiments with public school students in Houston, New York, Chicago, and other American cities that have school systems with high poverty rates. Fryer has paid parents for attending parent-teacher conferences, students for reading books, and teachers for raising their students’ test scores. He has given kids cell phones to inspire them to study harder. Altogether, he has handed out millions of dollars in rewards and prizes. As a body of work, Fryer’s incentive studies have marked one of the biggest and most thorough educational experiments in American history.
And yet, in almost every case, the effect of Fryer’s incentive programs has been zero. In New York City, between 2007 and 2010, Fryer oversaw and evaluated a program jointly administered by the city’s education department and its teachers’ union that distributed $75 million in cash incentives to teachers in some of the city’s most low-performing schools. Fryer’s conclusion after four years? “I find no evidence that teacher incentives increase student performance, attendance, or graduation, nor do I find any evidence that the incentives change student or teacher behavior. If anything, teacher incentives may decrease student achievement, especially in larger schools.”
Between 2007 and 2009, Fryer distributed a total of $9.4 million in cash incentives to 27,000 students in Chicago, Dallas, and New York City, incentivizing book reading in Dallas, test scores in New York, and course grades in Chicago. Again, nothing. “The results from our incentive experiments are surprising,” Fryer reported. “The impact of financial incentives on student achievement is statistically 0 in each city.” Finally, in Houston in 2010–11, he gave cash incentives to fifth-grade students in 25 low-performing public schools, as well as to the parents and teachers of those students, with the intent of increasing the time they spent on math homework and improving their scores on standardized math tests. Although the students did perform the tasks necessary to get paid, their math test scores, at the end of seven months, hadn’t changed at all, on average. And their reading scores actually went down.
In the Houston study, when there was some minimal improvement in test scores, it was only among the highest-achieving students, not the low achievers. A similar divide appears in other incentive studies as well. Jonathan Guryan, an economist at Northwestern University, conducted an experiment in which students were incentivized to read books over the summer, in the hopes of improving their reading comprehension. The more books students read that summer, the more money they received. Students did read a few more books in response to the incentives, but their comprehension scores on average did not budge. And as with the high achievers in Houston, in Guryan’s study it was the students with the highest motivation who showed some (small) signs of improvement. The poorly motivated, recalcitrant students who were the real target of the intervention didn’t benefit at all.