Charters, Incentives, Performance

A few days ago, USA Today editorialized Charter school experiment a success: Our view

Critics — whether district superintendents or teachers' unions or school boards or a traveling band of academic doubters — snipe at the newcomers, arguing that they're siphoning students and money from traditional public schools.
But as evidence from the 20-year-old charter experiment mounts, the snipers are in need of a new argument. There's little doubt left that top-performing charters have introduced new educational models that have already achieved startling results in even the most difficult circumstances.

And they talk quite a bit about the Knowledge Is Power Program

a KIPP school typically provides 60 percent more time in school than a regular public school.[12] By extending school days, requiring attendance on Saturdays, offering extra curricular activities, and adding three extra weeks of school in July, students have more educational opportunities. ...
Each middle school student receives a paycheck at the end of the week of KIPP dollars they have earned based on academic merit, conduct, and overall behavior.
At the end of the school year, KIPP students have the privilege of attending a week long field trip.
In June 2010, Mathematica Policy Research produced the first findings[16] from a multi-year evaluation of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)

Using a matched comparison group design, results show that for the vast majority of KIPP schools in the evaluation, impacts on students’ state assessment scores in math and reading are positive, statistically significant, and educationally substantial.

I believe what they say, and I can see a value to KIPP and similar high-intensity charters as providing a somewhat better factory school, one which will outdo our really bad urban schools; it also serves as a vehicle for self-selection, which is both good and bad. It is possible that similar schools could work in a suburban or rural context, matched against really-not-that-bad-at-all schools like HCS. I've become sceptical, however, about the incentives we're using -- grades, academic awards, KIPP dollars, disciplinary action. These certainly can and do lead to enhanced performance on some kinds of tests, but I'm afraid these are precisely the kinds of tests that ought to be becoming obsolete: tests for the ability to shut up and sit down and follow orders. Here's a discussion (with video) of the kind of research I mean: How Monetary Rewards Can Demotivate Creative Works | Techdirt

once people have a base level of money that makes them comfortable, using monetary incentives to get them to do creative work fails. Not just fails, but leads to worse performance.

When I think about this kind of research in the context of school reform, it seems to me that we as a nation have been heading in one of the wrong directions for a while now, and that the KIPP-style charter is a better dinosaur. The flexibility of charters may be necessary for finding better answers, but it also makes even worse answers available. I'll post soon about experiments in other directions.
Or then again, maybe not.