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Comment by mikebenfield | Hacker News Reader

This is a remarkably bad idea. No, the differences between students will definitely not “average out” at this scale. And how do you expect to handle poorly performing schools as a whole? Do you not expect the quality of teachers there to just plummet?

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Paying people for results works very, very well in the private sector. Why wouldn't it work in the public sector?

> the differences between students will definitely not “average out” at this scale

Of course it will. Assigning kids at random will produce an average over time.

> how do you expect to handle poorly performing schools as a whole?

The teachers in that poorly performing school will have a powerful incentive to do better.

> Do you not expect the quality of teachers there to just plummet?

I expect if you dangle $20-30000 if they do better, they'll do better. Monetary incentives work.

And in businesses that pay commissions, the people who are good at getting those commissions (i.e. they're good at their job) want to be there. They're not satisfied with just a salary. High commissions attract the best.

The problem with saying that teachers will have an incentive to make a bad school better is that they can not hope to compensate for massive socioeconomic differences. If you pay solely on absolute results, all the good teachers are going to go to schools with favourable intake profiles, which are likely to be strongly correlated with house prices. This would be a further driver of inequality. There would have to be a realistic scaling factor, looking at improvement, perhaps, rather than absolute results.

The current system is an abject failure. Time for some old ideas that work, like paying for results achieved.

Yes, it’s clearly not working in some regards. Your basic suggestion, however, is also unrealistic - a school in isolation can not make up for all the problems of an area. Similarly, a brilliant teacher can only do so much. If they can move to a better area and bank their bonus for much less stress, they will do just that, leaving a failing area, and its children, with even worse provision. Frankly, there’s no straightforward solution. Better pay is probably part of it, but it’s a far more complex issue and one that has to be considered as part of a wider programme of improvement.

“Paying people for results works very, very well in the private sector.”

Can you provide evidence of this? CEO compensation is a terrible model that encourages short term tricks like stock buybacks, front-loading revenue, and other tricks to garner short term performance. As for rank and file employees, measuring results is difficult … just like in schools.

Every company that has salesmen paid on commission.

> measuring results is difficult

And the better job of that a company does, the more profitable it becomes. Companies have a very strong monetary incentive to do an effective job of that.

> CEO compensation is a terrible model

Is it? Executive bonuses etc. at Boeing crashed along with the MAX crashes.

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