When exams are part of a rigged system, financial rewards can work
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Version 0 of 1. Payment by results: three little words that strike dread into the hearts of public sector workers, heralding as they do the monetisation of social cooperation among humans in the guise of “market reforms”. The wreckage of such policies is all around us. Market reforms have been driving down wages and security for decades now, and driving up profits, creating complex troubles and difficulties that only a burgeoning public sector can even hope to solve. Yet try telling a neoliberal that the only thing money can solve is poverty. She’ll tell you, rather counterintuitively, that poverty is the only thing money can’t solve. Go figure. However, a modest experiment drives a coach and horses through such ideological fences. Research conducted in Britain and the US has found that giving financial incentives to economically disadvantaged pupils does wonders for GCSE results. Carrying with it echoes of the last Labour administration’s educational maintenance allowance, which went in the coalition’s first bonfire of the sanities, the idea is pretty similar, but more motivation based. It’s payment by results, with children as its targets. But don’t let that put you off. An experiment involving 10,600 pupils has found that offering cash incentives of up to £80 per half-term improves the results of underachievers by up to 10%. Progress is most marked in maths and science. For some, such blatant marketisation of the classroom will be anathema. Children and schools are already driven far too narrowly by the idea that education is something you do to further your career prospects. Why, oh, why can’t education be promoted as a joy and a pleasure in itself, a way of helping children understand their own strengths and their own potential? The answer? Such ideals are wonderfully desirable. But they can work only when the classroom is surrounded on all sides by a society that is keen to model itself on the needs and desires of decent people, not the needs and desires of “wealth creators”. Schools, I’m afraid, really do have to prepare young people for the world in which they will live. And this world gets nastier, pushier, more selfish and more cut-throat by the day, despite the best efforts of millions. The awful truth is that idealism doesn’t have much of a place in the classroom because it doesn’t have much of a place in the screwed-up mainstream. People who cling to the idea that the classroom is currently free of financial incentives are kidding themselves anyway. Currently, those incentives are subtle and indirect, built into what used to be called “the rat race” but is now called “the aspirational society”. Anyone from a background secure enough to allow them a chance to look at the world can see from an early age that poverty is ugly and scary, hard work for next to no pay, something to be feared. You’re no longer being a sucker for the dream of joining the people who look down on you: you’re being pragmatic Those who are already in that position? They’re the people with least to gain by looking. They’re the people most desperate to tell themselves that the middle-class rubberneckers are contemptible in their distaste (which they are). Making an effort to get out from the bottom of the heap? Why try, why advertise your hope, when you can see that the system is rigged against you? The fear of failure becomes terrifying. Acceptance is the last stage of grief. Why not cut to the chase? Underachievement at school is an intractable problem, because for many children it’s a coping technique to maintain a modicum of emotional resilience, a way of resisting a foul competition in which losers are punished mercilessly by winners, no matter how big a head start they had. What if you’re not trying at school, being attentive in class, engaging, because you know you first have to be an underachiever to be rewarded, and there’s cold, hard cash, or tokens that will get you cool things at the end of it? You’re no longer being a sucker for the weird, abstract dream of joining the people who look down on you: you’re being pragmatic. You’re making your life better in just a few weeks. And you can always say you got your top grades for the money. No need for anyone to know that maybe there’s a smidgen of abstract joy and pleasure there too. The flaw in the argument is that those who really try but end up disappointed will be punished by life just as hard as if they’d never even bothered. But how can education change that, when Etonians believe that without five good GCSEs including English and maths, a human being deserves only the tiny scraps the market wants to give? The one thing the Tories never stop teaching us is that the very best education doesn’t provide you with empathy and insight. |