Every year sees some new educational idea advance as the answer to our school ills. This year is no exception. The Office of Economic Opportunity is spending millions of dollars on "performance contracting." There are many versions of the plan, but the basic idea is that a private company ( or, as in two instances, a teacher organization) contracts to teach math, reading or some other subject under the provision that the company will be paid only for each student who makes a specified amount of progress within a given period of time. Such a contract might give the company $100 for each student who makes one year of progress in reading within one semester. In effect, the company states: "We guarantee that each child will make this progress or your money back."
In spite of the favorable publicity which this program, like so many other educational novelties, has been receiving, and in spite of the support it has been given by the Nixon administration, the program should be abandoned for a number of reasons.
First: Certain fields of human endeavor are so complex that to guarantee performance in these fields is, on the face of it, to engage in deception. Medicine, as an art, is far better developed than the art of teaching, yet no doctor is so sure of himself that he would guarantee a cure even in the case of a simple ailment. Similarly, a lawyer may inform his client that his chances are very good, but he can never guarantee success. It is tragic that what the government would condemn and prevent as quackery in medicine and law, it is willing to promote and finance in education under the name of "performance contracting."
Second: Performance contracting, by its very nature, has involved overselling a grossly undeveloped educational technology. Most contractors rely heavily on programmed instruction or computer assisted instruction. All recent studies have concluded that none of these techniques is really ready for widespread application. (The best recent study is contained in the book, "Run Computer Run," by AC. Gettinger and Serna Marks.) Teaching machines should be experimented with and developed, but parents whose children participate in such programs should not be misled. They have a right to be informed that their children are being asked to help develop a machine and not that the undeveloped machine now has the answer to the students' problems.
Third: Performance contracts have not adequately taken into account the possible unanticipated consequences of the special motivation used. Most programs motivate students by giving them green stamps, transistor radios, TV sets and other prizes. (Teachers are also given prizes.) Such practices should not, of course, be rejected out of hand. After all, parents, too, offer their children material rewards and gifts for jobs well done. But, what happens when Johnny leaves his reading class (where he wins big prizes) and enters his math class the next hour? How does he look upon the math teacher, the music teacher, the science teacher who have no prizes to give? Will the prizes, while helping in the learning of reading, create learning problems during the rest of the day? We don't know the answers to these questions, but they are questions which must be raised in any educationally responsible program.
Fourth: The program, originally sold as an "experiment," is not experimental. Experiments require adequate controls. Such controls are lacking in performance contracts. Also, it is in the nature of an experiment that the results are unknown in advance. But this is not true here. Top government officials, educators and public relations men proclaim almost at the very start of performance contract programs that there is no doubt about the results. It would appear that performance contracting, like other "educational experiments," is doomed to succeed.
Instant Solutions Are No Answer
The problem of poor pupil achievement is a very real one. It must and can be met, but not with instant solutions. American industry, which has yet to find a way to provide decent phone service, safe cars, and failure-free power, is unlikely to come up with a quick cure for our school problems.
In the final analysis, performance contracting cannot be viewed as merely another misguided idea. It is part of a basic political strategy of the Nixon administration. As pressure from parents, teachers and citizens mounts for greater federal aid to education, the administration is seeking to lower the pressure by creating a kind of educational super-market in which, as a substitute for federal money, local school boards are invited to buy commercial educational programs, with the privilege of switching to Brand Y if they don't like Brand X. The Nixon administration hopes that by offering consumer choice in education it can divest itself of its responsibilities for providing adequate school funds. We must not allow this to happen.