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Like subprime mortgages, for-profit colleges are a scam driven by payment of commissions to sales staff known as recruiters. The payment of commissions to high-pressure salespeople is so central to the scam that the umbrella trade group for for-profits, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU), has sued the federal government to overturn its ban on incentive pay. It cannot be stated strongly enough: for-profit colleges could not engage in the ongoing exploitation of students and theft of federal money without the direct cooperation and assistance of the federal government in what can only be termed an immoral economy. The same forces that demonize everything government does or attempts to do are busy feeding from the government trough. The hypocrisy is untenable, the federal subsidies unfathomable and the lack of criminal prosecution unconscionable. For-profit colleges are a kickback scheme where politicians enact favorable legislation and regulations that allow for-profit colleges to maintain access to student loans and grant money. The for-profit colleges then "give" a small cut of the federal money back to the politicians to enact favorable legislation.

A Cincinnati high school's recent program to pay students to attend class and to follow school rules is another example. It's the latest in a series of unfortunate efforts to use bribery to force students to learn. Application of these kinds of incentives has been proven time and time again to produce the "Sorcerer's Apprentice Effect." Listen to Professor Edward Deci, widely considered the most respected researcher in the field of motivation

"Forget about schools trying to build communities where adults and children work together, help one another, and respect differences among themselves. Cash incentives for students and teachers, Sandel argues, is market reasoning that damages their mission to build healthy, engaged citizens. I agree."

While numerous recent authors have studied the effects of school accountability systems on student test performance and school "gaming" of accountability incentives, there has been little attention paid to substantive changes in instructional policies and practices resulting from school accountability. The lack of research is primarily due to the unavailability of appropriate data to carry out such an analysis. This paper brings to bear new evidence from a remarkable five-year survey conducted of a census of public schools in Florida, coupled with detailed administrative data on student performance. We show that schools facing accountability pressure changed their instructional practices in meaningful ways. In addition, we present medium-run evidence of the effects of school accountability on student test scores, and find that a significant portion of these test score gains can likely be attributed to the changes in school policies and practices that we uncover in our surveys.

When the National Research Council published the results of a decade-long study on the effects of standardized testing on student learning this summer, critics who have long opposed the use of exams as a teaching incentive rejoiced. But Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University economist who is influential in education research, now says the "told you so" knee-jerk reaction was unwarranted: In an article released Monday by Harvard University's journal Education Next, Hanushek argues that the report misrepresents its own findings, unjustifiably amplifying the perspective of those who don't believe in testing. His article has even caused some authors of the NRC report to express concerns with its conclusions.

Nearly every D.C. teacher offered the chance to forego some of their classroom evaluations chose to do so, under a new incentive program for top teachers. D.C. Public Schools introduced a pilot program in the fall that allows teachers rated "highly effective" on their Impact evaluations for the past two years to skip three of their five classroom observations if they perform well on the first two

A recent Times article, "Motivating Students With Cash-for-Grades Incentive," looks at efforts around the world to pay students for academic achievement.

Clearly our emphasis on testing and the consequent narrowing of the curriculum contributes to the problem.  School have, as George Wood of the Forum for Education and Democracy notes, "a perverse incentive to allow or encourage students to leave" especially if they are likely to be low scorers on the tests by which schools are evaluated.  Anyone who doubts this need merely look at the track record of Texas during the Governorship of George W. Bush, when its claimed remarkable improvements in state test scores later became the basis of the perversely named legislation No Child Left Behind.  In Texas, sometimes students were held back in 9th grade multiple times because the state tests were given in 10th.  After a second holding back students might be encouraged to leave, hiding the dropout rate by listing the child as having gone to an alternative educational program because s/he said s/he might eventually get a GED.  Or after being held back once, the child would be told s/he had made so much progress s/he was being skipped directly to 11th, and thus not tested.  Rod Paige became U. S. Secretary of Education, after being honored as supposedly the best Superintendent in the nation by a professional organization, largely on claims of more than a 90% graduation rate in Houston schools, at a time when only around 40% of those who entered in 7th grade graduated on time with their cohort.  Those forced out or held back and then skipped were heavily from poor families that were African-American or Hispanic.

Who speaks for public education? Policy-makers, who set change in motion with mandates and incentives designed to get them re-elected? School leaders, who find themselves administering policy "solutions" that actually get in the way of what leaders believe is best for the school community they're leading? Teachers, whose autonomy, professional judgment and organizations are denigrated daily? Parents, who are deeply invested in educational outcomes, but seldom asked for their perspectives on core issues of teaching, learning and decision-making? Or --do we get our impressions about public schools from the media?

At the risk of bloggy immolation, I'm going to jump into the boiling water of ongoing debates over President Obama's few words on higher education in the 2012 State of the Union Address, wherein he said nothing of Pell Grant awards and yet talked about constructing new policies to make it easier to afford college, especially ones attempting to give institutions incentives to slow down tuition hikes. While I define neoliberalism here in fairly bold strokes, focusing on market rhetoric, public disinvestment, and inconsistencies between rhetoric and reality, this is a tentative judgment for someone who is not an intellectual historian. I am well aware that many terms of political economy are fuzzy or malleable, and my understanding of neoliberalism as a post-WW2 construct is tentative. Yet the term has some core uses in understanding how people talk about and use talk about markets.

More than half the states have now been excused from important conditions of the No Child Left Behind education law. They've been allowed to create new measures of how much students have improved and how well they are prepared for college or careers, and to assess teacher performance on that basis. Teachers will be evaluated in part on how well their students perform on standardized tests. One study, though, found that some state plans could weaken accountability. How can we measure achievement of students, teachers and schools in a way that is fair and accurate, and doesn't provide incentives for obsessive testing, and cheating? Contributors include: Leonie Haimson, Pedro Noguera, Michael Petrilli, Marcus Winters, Rishawn Biddle, Julia Fox, Kevin Carey, Patrick Bassett, and Sandra Stotsky

As student learning is the primary goal of teaching, it seems like common sense to evaluate teachers based on how much their students gain on state standardized tests. Indeed, many states have adopted this idea in response to federal incentives tied to much-needed funding. However, previous experience is not promising. Recently evaluated experiments in Tennessee and New York did not improve achievement when teachers were evaluated and rewarded based on student test scores. In the District of Columbia, contrary to expectations, reading scores on national tests dropped and achievement gaps grew after a new test-based teacher-evaluation system was installed. In Portugal, a study of test-based merit pay attributed score declines to the negative effects of teacher competition, leading to less collaboration and sharing of knowledge. I was once bullish on the idea of using "value-added methods" for assessing teacher effectiveness. I have since realized that these measures, while valuable for large-scale studies, are seriously flawed for evaluating individual teachers, and that rigorous, ongoing assessment by teaching experts serves everyone better. Indeed, reviews by the National Research Council, the RAND Corp., and the Educational Testing Service have all concluded that value-added estimates of teacher effectiveness should not be used to make high-stakes decisions about teachers. Why?

But we principals, too, are part of the problem. Not because we have promoted the use of bad data to rate teachers, but because we may have allowed our attention to stray from our chief job of promoting professional growth, training staff, documenting teacher performance, creating community and defining what quality teaching and learning look like in our schools. Newly necessary distractions like marketing and fund-raising and data analysis may have seemed more important than getting into classrooms and working with teachers on how to plan lessons and ask questions. But if we let our attention waiver from those things which we know should be our primary focus, if we asked "How can we help students earn more credits?" instead of "How can we help students learn more?" then some of the distrust we see driving this new agreement is our fault, even if we believe that is what the school system and the general public wanted us to do. We may have felt less incentive to concentrate on the quality of classroom instruction in our schools because we are rated on other things, but we know our jobs. If we chose to focus on tasks outside of instruction, it makes sense that the void such a choice created was filled by psychometricians.

The head of one of the city's largest charter school networks is calling on state charter authorizers to reject a law that requires charter schools to serve a larger share of high-needs students. The law, Success Academy Charter Schools CEO Eva Moskowitz wrote in a letter to authorizers this month, creates "perverse incentives" for charter schools to "over-identify" students in high-needs categories, an effect that she said would do more harm than good for children.

"During the 2010, 2011, and 2012 legislative sessions, a combination of federal policy incentives and newly elected governors and legislative majorities in many states following the 2010 elections sparked a wave of legislation addressing teacher effectiveness. More than 20 states passed legislation designed to address educator effectiveness by mandating annual evaluations based in part on student learning and linking evaluation results to key personnel decisions, including tenure, reductions in force, dismissal of underperforming teachers, and retention. In many cases states passed multiple laws, with later laws building on previous legislation, and also promulgated regulations to implement legislation. A few states acted through regulation only. In an effort to help policymakers, educators, and the public better understand how this flurry of legislative activity shifted the landscape on teacher effectiveness issues-both nationally and at the state level-Bellwether Education Partners analyzed recent teacher effectiveness legislation, regulation, and supporting policy documents from 21 states that took major legislative or regulatory action on teacher effectiveness in the past three years. This analysis builds on a previous analysis of teacher effectiveness legislation in five states that Bellwether published in 2011. Our expanded analysis includes nearly all states that took major legislative action on teacher effectiveness over the past three years."

Over the past decade I have served as a mentor teacher to more than a dozen beginning teachers in the challenging schools of Oakland. Most of them have been interns, fresh out of college, with just a few weeks of summer training, and a "bag of tricks" that they were given by their only slightly more experienced trainers. They are trained to focus on the data. Start testing early, and make sure the students understand how important those scores are. Set BIG goals, such as that 80% of your students will score well. Track progress using big graphs on the wall with each student's name or number. Develop reward systems to manage behavior. Step into one of these classrooms, and you will find elaborate systems that are designed to "incent" good behavior, and impose costs on bad. You may even find a whole economy, complete with currency - the "behavior bucks," handed out in $100 bills prepared on the school photocopier.

"The last thing I will do is refuse to take your test," said an angry 15-year old to a math teacher who's a friend of mine in Georgia. "I just wanted to teach him to balance his checkbook, something he would use in the real world," she said, "but the school system made me sit there and watch him sullenly refuse to write on the 'high stakes' standardized test for the two days before his 16th birthday when he would quit school. This is not teaching."

The challenge of designing effective performance measurement and incentives is a general one in economic settings where behavior and outcomes are not easily observable. These issues are particularly prominent in education where, over the last two decades, test-based accountability systems for schools and students have proliferated. In this study, we present evidence that the design and decentralized, school-based grading of New York's high-stakes Regents Examinations have led to pervasive manipulation of student test scores that are just below performance thresholds. Specifically, we document statistically significant discontinuities in the distributions of subject-specific Regent scores that align with the cut scores used to determine both student eligibility to graduate and school accountability. Our results suggest that roughly 3 to 5 percent of the exam scores that qualified for a high-school diploma actually had performance below the state requirements. Moreover, we find that the rates of test manipulation in NYC were roughly twice as high as those in the entire state. We estimate that roughly 6 to 10 percent of NYC students who scored above the passing threshold for a Regents Diploma actually had scores below the state requirement.

In recent years there seems to have been a surge in academic dishonesty across many high schools (a lot of it has been showing up in the last few weeks). No doubt this can be explained in part by 1) increased vigilance and reporting, 2) greater pressure on students to succeed, and 3) the communicable nature of dishonest behavior (when people see others do something, whether it's tweaking a resume or parking illegally, they're more likely to do the same). But, I also think that a fourth, and significant, cause in this worrisome trend has to do with the way we measure and reward teachers.