Rewards
Why are we still using rewards for behavior in schools, when so much research shows the harms of such programs?
Earlier this week, FCCPS included this message in their daily e-mail:
Henderson Middle School - Bark Bucks for Positive Behavior
Henderson Middle School has its very own school store and only accepts one kind of currency – "Bark Bucks." Henderson students can earn Bark Bucks by being respectful, being responsible, and being safe. In previous years, Bark Bucks were actual pieces of paper that were often lost in backpacks and lockers. This year, teachers and staff can award Bark Bucks by scanning a student's unique QR code using an app on their phone. The rewards system keeps track of all "deposits" and "withdraws." Students can buy anything from an eraser (5 Bark Bucks) to an umbrella (75 Bark Bucks). The most popular items seem to be the water bottle stickers, sticky hands, and poppers this year. Megan Roth, 8th-grade science teacher, and Najla Muhammad keep the store running every week. If you get a Henderson water bottle or a rubber chicken as a gift this holiday season, know that your student earned you that gift by being respectful, responsible, and safe.
It is so disheartening to me to see a Falls Church school operating under assumptions about human behavior and motivation that have been discredited by decades of research. Alfie Kohn’s book, Punished By Rewards, was published all the way back in 1993. He included loads of studies that showed giving rewards for behavior, while it may increase those behaviors in the short term, while rewards are being given, has a long term effect of lowering interest and enjoyment of those behaviors in the long term. So if you want to manipulate kids into ”respectful behavior” (however that gets defined…), with rewards, you will lower their intrinsic enjoyment in those same behaviors and therefore reduce them long-term.
Not only is interest in the rewarded behaviors lowered, interest is heightened in the rewards. So great, we can get kids to be even more interested in money and stuff, in a society already flooded with billions of dollars worth of the most sophisticated propaganda ever devised to get the same damaging results!1. It’s hard enough already to preserve prosocial values in the face of corporate propaganda without the schools capitulating to those same harmful values (even if unconsciously).
It also sends a bad message to give rewards for behaviors that we ought to expect as a given - it makes our expectations of students appear very low. And it means the rewards typically go to kids who have been in trouble, as their NOT causing trouble gets noticed, while the already well-behaved kids’ behavior gets taken for granted. Not that the already well-behaved kids need rewards, but the quiet, cooperative kids end up feeling punished by not getting the goodies and praise getting doled out (and the kids getting rewarded often feel manipulated and singled out in a condescending way by being praised for simply behaving like everyone else).
Another (of many possible) problems with such schemes is that it inevitably becomes about compliance with authority, rather than real respect or responsibility, which take independent thought. What gets rewarded is doing what one is told without questioning it, even when a community with mutual respect ought to have room for questioning, if it is trying to teach citizens in a democracy rather than subjects of an authoritarian society. Ironically, by rewarding students for being “respectful”, we’re treating them like dogs given a treat for obeying - not exactly respectful of the students as individuals with agency and dignity!
Building a community of mutual respect and concern is harder than manipulating people with rewards to be obedient. But deepening relationships of trust allow for such a better environment for learning than one where a bunch of people are competing for goodies. I’m not shocked, but disappointed to see Falls Church Schools still willing to brag about doing this to their students.
I’m not sure if it’s because of ignorance of the research or in spite of knowing it, that such practices persist. It could be either, or some combination. Paolo Freire, the Brazilian scholar and author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed said
Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
I had this quote on my classroom wall for many years to remind myself to try to achieve the second goal, because the first is so strongly structured into most schools as institutions. In Falls Church City Schools, and in many teacher training programs, behaviorist reward systems continue to be pushed, demonstrating that the first view in Freiere’s quote predominates, in spite of lip service often given to the second. There seems to be a conflict between teaching students to be independent-minded, critically-thinking citizens in a democracy with preparing them to be passive consumers and obedient workers in a more authoritarian society. It’s pretty clear which side prevails in most schools as they’re structured now.
I used to joke that the Pizza Hut reading program should be reversed if we cared about not harming kids enjoyment of reading. The program gave free pizzas for reading some number of books, lowering kids focus on the books and getting them to love pizza as a prize. So why not make books the prize for eating a certain number of pizzas?