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Comment by ordersofmag | Hacker News Reader

Can you offer any evidence or reasoning as to why I should believe this? It would seem to assert that somehow student success/failure currently sits entirely in the hands of teachers: they know what is needed and could do it if only they were marginally more motivated. I'm not a teacher myself but have been involved in the system my entire life and this doesn't ring true at all. Even if it were possible it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling. Which seems to run counter to the goals of public education.

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It works everywhere in the private sector.

Having a base salary plus incentive pay for meeting objective goals is commonplace. Companies wouldn't do that if it didn't work. In my own company, Zortech, the staff was paid a base rate plus a cut of the gross sales for the month.

> it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling

Actually the reverse would happen. The best students would automatically attain grade level performance, and likely exceed it. They'll already get the bonus for those students without any effort. The gold is in getting the underachievers to achieve.

It... really doesn't.

Sales is a great example.

In companies where bonuses are based on, say, revenue booked per quarter, salesmen play all kinds of games to jack that number up as far as it can go, regardless of the collateral damage. Piss off the engineers by promising the impossible? Who cares, I closed that McScully deal. Sold a customer a product that won't actually solve their problem? Cha-ching, bonus time!

Now, when you figure out how to tie sales bonuses to positive outcomes... that's a different story. Then the incentives match the actual goals.

But that's really hard to do. Outcomes can take years to measure, if they are measurable at all.

Hence why you end up with all kinds of really screwed-up corporate behavior. It's not because people or corporations are evil -- they just take the shortest path to the win, even if that's not really the road you wanted them on.

Companies fix it or they go out of business. I've seen them tweaking it.

That only applies to small companies.

Schools are equivalent to large companies, and large companies can screw the proverbial six ways from Sunday for years before it hurts their bottom line, for any number of reasons.

Many Americans seem to have this mental disease whereby they think every problem can be solved with more money.

This problem can't be.

Large companies still have plenty of incentive pay.

Currently, teachers have zero incentive to get results. I bet you'll see results that follow incentives. Of course it won't be perfect - but I bet it'll be much better than the current disaster.

People like money. Especially the people who say they aren't motivated by money :-)

I work for a large company notorious for shooting itself in the foot because someone’s personal incentives to ship a shiny new thing and get promoted causes long-term repetitional harm as older things get abandoned. We pay for performance too, and quite well at that :)

Have you thought out the perverse incentives your pay scheme would create?

Like teachers giving answers to students because higher grades / more passing means more money...

Have a third party do the testing.

While that might (or might not) mitigate one perverse incentive, there are lots more. It's important for policy proposals to take unintended consequences into account. What others can you foresee and how would you mitigate them?

What will be their incentive? Bonuses for the number of tests graded?

You really need to see more of the actual economy, because this is embarrassingly naive.

You have another comment somewhere here saying that 80% of companies close within 5 years. You may be making the other sides point...

I suspect the problem is how you can reasonably write a general spec for that which doesn't systematically doom some teachers, especially during the bootstrap phase (arguably quite a few years).

In an ideal world, our perfectly spherical students would enter the classroom "at grade level" and ready to proceed to the next level.

But what happens if you inherit a class of students that's barely above "remedial"-- starting one or two grades back on day 1-- what's the right metric for success? Getting all the way up to "at grade level" is probably unrealistic, but should we expect them to make up 1.25 grades per year, or 1.75? Or are we in a "we started back, and are going to beat them by going slower" mentality, and even getting 0.75 grade per year would be a win?

Conversely, if you're at a magnet school, you may be taking in students already a few grades above the norm on day one of class. There are kids who can absolute bury the needle on a standardized test-- "12th grade equivalent" at 5th or 6th grade. You could simply babysit them all year and still clear the bar.

I also expect there's a huge amount of dealing with Karen parents too-- I suspect an firm hand in holding back underachieving students could result in parental backlash. Too many parents would rather see the kid tossed out the moment he turns 18, even if they haven't gotten them career or independent-life ready.

> But what happens if you inherit a class of students that's barely above "remedial"-- starting one or two grades back on day 1-- what's the right metric for success? Getting all the way up to "at grade level" is probably unrealistic, but should we expect them to make up 1.25 grades per year, or 1.75?

Well, obviously, they've been making less than 1.0 grades per year so far; you'd expect them to keep going at that rate, not to suddenly double their rate.

but it doesn’t really work in the private sector. MBOs are common for US companies and to this day i’ve got teams across other departments that haven’t met MBO at 100% for years but the higher management seems it okay. the minimum work is still done but the full goals are never realized and these departments are just stuck in a rut. but, who cares? the minimum work is done, the progress numbers still go up, just we don’t have the ideal end result, just an acceptable one.

teachers already run the line of barely enough compensation to make it worthwhile except for those who are inclined towards teaching.

teachers are expected to do too much and there are too many goals imo for the position. whether we want it to be the case or not there is a huge social and mental health aspect to their jobs, and the standards look to be wildly inconsistent even within the same city as to what a successful education means.

like would you want to put a ton of effort in on a project knowing that the very next quarter you’re going to have to basically change the entire stack you’re working with and have a completely different set of regulations and project goals? and on top of it all, you need to get your team to even take the project seriously? and to make it even more fun a bunch of your teams’ families and friends are telling the world that the language you picked is awful and evil and are trying to regulate it out of use?

how much would you want for conditions like that every single project?

Performance reviews aren't always based on "objective goals" and it'd be bad if they were, because almost anyone outside of sales could game them. Typically it's a kind of stack ranking based on how you performed relative to peers, where relative means in the vague opinion of your management tree.

Public teacher unions are adamantly against subjective reviews, which is why I suggested an objective mechanism.

> in the vague opinion of your management tree

I know it's popular to believe that management has no idea who the real performers are. But every office I've worked in, everyone knew who the good performers were and who the deadwood was. Including the managers.

It's also true that every person I've talked to who had been laid off was sure he was unfairly targeted. Even the ones who'd come to work strung out on coke.

Let's apply this to bankers, too. They must give a checking account to anybody who shows up, and their pay can be based on how much money is in those checking accounts at the end of the fiscal year.

a teacher's job is to teach their students. a "banker" (at the sort of bank where you might open a checking account) isn't expected to grow your checking account for you. you're supposed to do that, and the bank is supposed to hold it safely. I don't understand the comparison you are trying to make.

> because almost anyone outside of sales could game them

Perhaps you haven't worked in sales? My experience of sales meetings was that most of the meeting was taken up with discussions of how to optimise commission. The sales manager was totally in on the game; after all, he got a skim of his salesmen's commissions.

In no other environment have I seen people so obsessed with juking the stats.

Even sales manipulates them -- giving away way too much to lock in a longer deal this quarter because it makes this quarter's numbers look better had been a problem at places I've worked.

It doesn't really work in the private sector though; it leads to destructive and short-sighted juking of the relevant metrics.

Companies wouldn't use it pervasively if it didn't work.

Pervasiveness seems to be more a function of whatever the latest workplace fad is rather than based on underlying assessments of how well it works. I've heard upper management outright say things like they're mandating return-to-office simply because everybody else is doing it.

WFH is the fad. Work In Office and pay for performance has been around since the Dawn of Man.

It's only recently that more than 50% of humans even live in an urban area (the home base of offices).

Most of human history has seen the bulk of humans living in rural areas within all manner of labor exchange schemes.

"Modern Capitalism" was founded with "work from home" as a significant factor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work

    Since the phrase 'piece work' first appears in writing around the year 1549, it is likely that at about this time, the master craftsmen of the guild system began to assign their apprentices work on pieces which could be performed at home, rather than within the master's workshop.

Did you not have any history classes in your early schooling?

I bet piece work was paid for the piece, i.e. results, not time in the seat.

I never wrote that all work was done in the office, sheesh. Besides, any organized labor project is going to need the labor on site. Piece work can only be done if no coordination or teamwork is needed.

> the master craftsmen of the guild system began to assign their apprentices work on pieces which could be performed at home

Sounds like speculation to me. Where are those apprentices going to get the tools? Is he just going to carry the anvil home with him? How about the forge? Even hand tools have historically been pretty costly items, up until just a few years ago.

> Did you not have any history classes in your early schooling?

Not much history is taught in public schools - not my fault. But I have a cite for you:

"Chapter 2 examines the material and religious foundations of capitalism that were laid down during the so-called Dark Ages."

  -- The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark, pg. xiv

Capitalism is a heluva lot older than 1549.

> Capitalism is a heluva lot older than 1549.

Huh? No, it's not. The first step may be learning what "capitalism" means. It's a specific economic system that developed in early modernity. It's not some "natural state of man" any more than feudalism was before it.

I provided a cite. Maybe have a look at it.

The opinions of Rodney Stark are neither unkown, uncontested, nor definitive.

At best they are niche and contraversial (admittedly it's the phrase "revolutionary and controversial" that most commonly appears on his book reviews).

I spoke of modern capitalism which is a well understood term, as acknowledged by bandrami.

If you wish to speculate on undocumented pre history then it's reasonable to assume that work from home predates first documentation and goes back as far in time as large works with small parts existed.

I've read Stark, and he goes way out in front of the actual documents we have. The high middle ages contained elements of a market economy that eventually developed into mercantilism and thence capitalism, which is very different from your claim that capitalism is a lot older than 1549. (You also seem to be conflating mercantilism and capitalism, incidentally, but either way the result is the same.)

This is laughably optimistic.

There are plenty of things companies do, pretty pervasively, that have been proven both scientifically and empirically to be detrimental.

I'm interested in hearing about your success running a company scientifically.

Ah, yes; because no one is allowed to disagree with you about something they haven't personally done.

Lol

> Having a base salary plus incentive pay for meeting objective goals is commonplace. Companies wouldn't do that if it didn't work.

Management methods are full of cargo cult "science".

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