I’ve rearranged the sequence of Slekar’s points.

• Don’t wait for superman. You already have super teachers. Support them!
• Accountability is code for blame.
• NCLB is a system designed to “prove” that public schools are failures.
• Participation in a system designed to “prove” that public schools are failing is unethical and I would hope offensive to anybody’s religious values.
• My son is not a data point to be used by politicians and talking heads to “prove” that public schools are failing.
• The boycott of NCLB is in support of public schools.
• NCLB narrows the curriculum. This is bad because a rich curriculum supports learning.
• The tests have sucked the life out of teaching and learning,
• The system doesn’t measure what it says it does.
• Tests weren’t designed to evaluate teachers.
• Where are the experts?
• A College dropout like Bill Gates and a second rate basketball player like Arne Duncan in charge of education policy, really?
• The new reformers need to spend an extended amount of time in schools.
• High stakes testing seems to only be able to predict socioeconomic level.
• Control for poverty and our scores beat international scores.
• Read Valerie Strauss, Diane Ravitch, Anthony Cody, and Alfie Kohn.
• Research, evidence, research, evidence.
• Finland.
• Punitive systems do not work.
• NCLB is a failure. Achievement gap remains.
• We love our public schools. They are the bedrock of democracy in this country.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-d-slekar/how-to-boycott-nclb-in-90_b_843972.html

Wikipedia defines the term as:

A perverse incentive is an incentive  that has an unintended and undesirable effect, that is against the interest of the incentive makers. Perverse incentives by definition produce negative unintended consequences.

Most recently, I’ve used the term to describe the bizarre incentives created under the “No Child Left Behind” law (and the current “Race to the Top” program).  The problem here is that the intent of the law is to improve public education, but because the law focuses on a very narrow range of “easily-testable” subjects, it actually degrades public education.  Since the law “grades” schools and teachers based solely on standardized math and reading test scores, it creates a strong incentive to focus on the “tested aspects” of those two subjects, to the exclusion of all other curriculum.  The result is an increase in standardized test scores, but declines in performance under all other measures of educational quality or outcomes.

In the context of the “mortgage meltdown,” the employees of banks and mortgage brokerage firms were evaluated exclusively on the number or dollar value of mortgages issued, not on quality or any reasonable estimate of the financial results in “the long term” (at one time, we’d think that “the long term” meant the lifetime of the mortgages, but within the financial industry the term was reinterpreted to mean a period of ten years, then five years, then three years, and finally “a few quarters”).   Reckless agents who “played the game” (by issuing “no-doc” or “liar loans,” or even by fraudulently altering mortgage-application documents) earned huge fees (which they were never asked to repay, even after the federal government bailed out the industry). Many of their more ethical and honest colleagues earned less — or were fired for their “poor performance” and their unwillingness to join the “team effort.”

Of course, I’ve also encountered many perverse incentives in the “internet industry,” dating back to the reckless days when companies that had never earned any revenue (much less any profit) were rewarded with initial public offerings (IPOs) in which the company was was valued at billions of dollars.  Since investors were looking only for “the next new thing,” without considering any aspects of the company’s financial prospects, executives at internet firms abandoned “profit” or “revenue” as meaningful benchmarks, and instead looked toward other measures, such as “traffic” or “adviews,” sometimes assigning absurd values (for example, using valuations of $3 to $10 per “visitor” on a site whose traffic generated no income). Of course, if “visitors” were assigned a value of $10 each by Wall Street, then it seemed logical to spend millions of dollars to attract new visitors, even if the “new visitors” acquired for $5 each were very different from the earlier visitors to the site.  (In the end, many firms found that they couldn’t generate revenue to justify a value of even one cent per visitor.)

Historically, advertising agencies charged fees based on a percentage of the dollar amount spent on the advertising which the agencies bought.  If the agency could persuade the client to spend more on advertising, the agency’s fees increased, even if the advertising didn’t increase the client’s sales or profits.  Even after technology existed to monitor and evaluate the performance of internet advertising, many advertising agencies have continued to command fees based primarily on “amount spent,” providing no incentive to improve the effectiveness of advertising — nor even to seek out efficient ways to monitor performance.

I always resist “perverse incentives.” In the late 90′s, I refused to work for clients who succumbed to “perverse incentives,” and in the past decade, I’ve refused to work for clients who won’t set up systems to evaluate the performance of their advertising.  When I worked as a high-school teacher (briefly), I sought to teach what students needed to learn, without focusing exclusively on the subjects they’d be “tested on,” and I feel some regret about the classroom time that I spent preparing my sophomore students for the “High School Exit Exam.”  And I now realize that my unwillingness to accept “perverse incentives” was a big factor in my career decisions as an attorney.

Evaluating “performance” is usually a very complex and difficult task.  Too often, we seek shortcuts by focusing on a subset of the work being evaluated, and based on a subset of outcomes that are “easy to measure,” even if we all agree that the result doesn’t fairly consider all of the aspects of the work (nor even the aspects of the work we consider most important).

We create (or accept) the perverse incentives that create the perverse outcomes we detest.

I bought this book after reading Dave Ellison’s column in the Daily Review on Monday.  Ellison’s column about the book and its author led me to post a blog entry.  Ellison wrote (in part) that Ravitch’s “wrenching transformation” from supporter to opponent (of high-stakes-testing and school choice) was based on data, and certainly Ravitch does offer up some helpful data to support her conclusion that various “school reform” strategies have failed to produce improvements in education.  But there’s really nothing new here, and I don’t expect this book to “convert” anyone who previously disagreed with Ravitch’s views (which are clearly very similar to Dave Ellison’s views and my own views).

In fact, I didn’t really perceive a “wrenching transformation” by the author; perhaps the transformation was so complete that she wasn’t able to clearly articulate her earlier views.  While reading the book, I felt that Ms. Ravitch’s earlier support of particular school reforms was not very strong, and she mostly “went along” with the views of others on the topics of high-stakes testing, school choice, and business-like management of schools.  Her real passion seems to be curriculum and instruction, and her “transformation” seems mostly to be a realization that popular reform movements (specifically, evaluating teachers primarily based on student test scores) had ruined or eliminated the curriculum that matters so much to her.

Throughout the book, Ravitch repeats and recycles many of the same facts, analysis, and conclusions, over and over, again and again. Of course, it makes sense to “remind” or “refresh” readers when making a new connection to earlier material in a text, but that’s not the problem. Instead, each chapter appears to be written to stand alone.  (At times, I even wondered if the book was simply a collection of columns or essays that she’d written over the past year or two, but I can’t find any support for this theory.)  Perhaps Ravitch recognizes that many readers won’t have time to read the entire book, and thus she wants each chapter to be meaningful and “complete,” even if read in isolation from the rest of the book.  (In fact, a number of logical and rhetorical contradictions are apparent when reading the entire book.)

I must stress: I agree with nearly all the ideas and arguments in Ravitch’s book.  And she makes many very strong arguments (but unfortunately, without much persuasive evidence or data).  My frustration comes not just from the painful amount of repetition, but from frustration that Ravitch’s arguments simply don’t seem likely to persuade anyone who doesn’t already share her views.

In the end, I simply found myself wishing for a much shorter, better-organized summary of the ideas discussed in this book.