I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty. Parents who earn less usually don't have time to help kids with their school work, or don't understand the school work, or don't know how to study or teach children. Sure, there's exceptions to this everywhere, but that's the general pattern.
Incidentally, Louisiana has/had a program called TOPs that covers in-state tuition for students that get over a 3.something GPA. Who benefits the most from it? Kids whose families make above the median income in the state.
I don't think giving X dollars to the families with the top ranking students would change society overnight.
True, but the arrow of causality is not from "poverty" to "low test scores".
Children of poor (and sometimes illiterate) Chinese immigrants did and do quite well!
(The word is “Culture”)
Thanks for specifying which c word you meant, as the only one in the post you replied to was Chinese.
African-American communities could be a lot better off if they had been able to take advantage of the same veterans benefits programs that white veterans were able to take advantage of, if they had been able to get home loans on the same terms that white counterparts were able to, if Black professionals had been able find work outside of Black operated businesses, and so on.
But yeah, Black people are real lazy if you just ignore hundreds of years of history. Black people ain't lazy, they just don't have the same opportunities as everyone else because when they walk into an interview with a white manager, there's a real good chance that manager is thinking something like, "In theory, African-American communities could be much better off with some drastic changes in culture".
> I remember reading about certain African-American immigrants being focused on education and doing fairly well
From the Harvard Business Review: "In the United States, where 13.7% of the population is foreign-born, immigrants represent 20.2% of the self-employed workforce and 25% of startup founders". So, this pattern shows up for immigrant communities in general, it is not evidence that Africans off the boat from Africa have a different culture that makes them more likely to succeed than their American counterparts that have lived in America for generations.
The idea that a historically disenfranchised group is unsuccessful due to certain "cultural values" does not hold water. It's just a way to ignore history, and in turn ignore and excuse existing biases.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/baltimorecityma...
How did the Chinese immigrants become so prosperous so quickly if not for their cultural values around hard work and education? It's not as if there was affirmative action for them at the time because they were disenfranchised or something.
Education matters. Black immigrants (from Africa, the Caribbeans, etc.) are doing pretty well. There may be some subconscious biases in hiring, but it's not significant.
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-ethnicity/2022/01/20/a-grow...
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-ethnicity/2022/01/20/househ...
I'm not ignoring history. I recognize that African-Americans have been heavily disenfranchised and discriminated against. I'm trying to find a way forward from here. If African-Americans achieve similar educational attainment, I think it's fair to say that we'll be on the path to achieving equality. As they become more successful, fewer people will have undue stereotypes about them. Now the problem becomes initiating the process of betterment. The government should pitch in, but that will do little good without a change in culture. Plants can't grow without light, even if there's plenty of water and nutrients.
> Black immigrants (from Africa, the Caribbeans, etc.) are doing pretty well.
You keep attributing immigrant success rates to "cultural values" when they should be attributed to the self-selection process of emigration.
If it is as you say, that a sample of immigrants is representative of their native population and their "cultural values", then you should see comparable poverty rates and earning rates in immigrants' native populations, adjusted for local economies. You do not see that. Immigrants tend to be more enterprising and hardworking, otherwise they would not undergo the immense challenge of immigration in the first place. This whole idea is as absurd as saying that American expats in Berlin or Paris are a representative sample of Americans, and their ability to thrive in another country is reflective of uniquely American "cultural values".
> Immigrants tend to be more enterprising and hardworking
Yeah. So have the African-American populace at large match that.
> This whole idea is as absurd as saying that American expats in Berlin or Paris are a representative sample of Americans, and their ability to thrive in another country is reflective of uniquely American "cultural values".
I don't know what the financial situation of those expats are and how hard it is to live in Berlin or Paris, but if it is difficult then hard work is necessary, no? Whether that would be American cultural values is trickier to answer because of the diversity here.
Listen, if you honestly thought that saying half the stuff you said was right, then I don't know where to start. Imagine landing an interview for a job that will significantly effect where you can afford to live, what you can provide for your kids, and your ability to retire. Now imagine that your hiring manager is making value judgements about you personally, that are based on unfounded opinions he has about how your "culture", and you're passed over for a candidate that comes from a "culture" that he holds in higher regard. This is a real life scenario for millions of Americans, every single day.
Here:
Result I'm looking for: Decent baseline of financial stability among African-Americans
Objective: Get educational attainment and good employment up
Major factors I think are necessary (for relatively quick results, anyways):
- culture shifts towards focusing on education
- government funds public schools in terms of materials, transportation, teachers, etc.
- reduce college tuition somehow
- race-blind hiring/whatever policies
I'm just trying to justify why I think the culture is important. There is evidence that culture is important. Furthermore, I'm saying that there's currently a lack of that education-focused culture and that's why e.g. Baltimore isn't doing too great even with all the funding.
So you should at most have an issue with
- culture shift necessary (which embodies "current culture not working")
I don't see where your evidence that culture isn't an important factor here is. Also, I'm not here to talk about historic grievances and bias and all that. I'm trying to discuss a way out, not bemoan the current circumstances or hope the world magically changes overnight.
That is abundantly clear. Here it is in a nutshell: *if* you accept that "culture is important," *then* you cannot have "race-blind hiring/whatever policies," *because* you have already accepted that one culture values hard work more than another culture.
When you reject that "culture is important," then you can hire individuals based on their merits, instead of the opinions you have about their culture. Making decisions about individuals based on opinions you have about their culture is the definition of racism.
It's a bit like telling prisoners they can all leave if they'd just try harder, meanwhile the outside world has been pouring concrete around the outside for decades.
If there was some magical way to change the culture of many African-American communities instantly, and if the government bolstered schools, healthcare, and whatnot, that would really be something. I don't think all that money will be very effective if the culture isn't changed, though. And affirmative action is too late, too little in the education journey.
I recognize this is like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill right now, but that's the only feasible way out that I see.
Money talks.
There are worse problems to have!
We started giving him a quarter of a lego minecraft set every time he read two pages of text - either in English or Finnish - then we had to move to a bunch of bricks every time he read a full chapter.
The surge in his effort, and abilities, was almost frighteningly quick.
(Here in Finland kids can go to daycare from 1 year old, and start in pre-school when they're six. School-proper starts at seven.)
One personal anecdote of mine is a school friend who announced that he was never going to read a book again after finishing school (with good grades). For him, reading books was not a thing he loved, just a means to an end.
https://www.weareteachers.com/understanding-intrinsic-vs-ext...
For example, they say: As educators, we have heard a lot about the downside of extrinsic motivation. Studies have shown that extrinsic motivation produces only short-term effects, at best. One study out of Princeton University goes so far as to say, “External incentives are weak reinforcers in the short run, and negative reinforcers in the long run.”
That study? https://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/RES2003.pdf It's an economic model of how idealized humans might work! It literally says nothing about real humans or children.
The second piece of evidence comes from the founder of this website excelatlife.com A website by a psychologist who treats anxiety and depression, and "Dr. Frank's strong interest in Eastern philosophies and Buddhist psychology has led her to train in various forms of Tai Chi/Qi Gong as well as other mindfulness methods for over 15 years. She is a third degree black belt in American Kenpo and continues her involvement in martial arts at the Martial Arts Center." She knows about as much about childhood education as you do.
Maybe your statement is right, but your evidence is non-evidence.
The economics paper is trying to reconcile the economics orthodoxy of "incentives matter" with the experimental evidence (that it references from across decades) that incentives can in some cases hurt.
It's intro is a decent survey of the issue, and has the meta benefit that economists if they could prove this effect didn't happen would be happy to prove that. Instead they are trying to adjust their model to account for it.
> Kohn (1993) surveys the results from a variety of programmes aimed at getting people to lose weight, stop smoking, or wear seat belts, either offering or not offering rewards. Consistently, individ- uals in “reward” treatments showed better compliance at the beginning, but worse compliance in the long run than those in the “no-reward” or “untreated controls” groups. Taken together, these many findings indicate a limited impact of rewards on “engagement” (current activity) and a negative one on “re-engagement” (persistence).
> A related body of work transposes these ideas from the educational setting to the workplace. In well-known contributions, Etzioni (1971) argues that workers find control of their behaviour via incentives “alienating” and “dehumanizing”, and Deci and Ryan (1985) devote a chapter of their book to a criticism of the use of performance-contingent rewards in the work setting.2
> And, without condemning contingent compensation, Baron and Kreps (1999, p. 99) conclude that: There is no doubt that the benefits of [piece-rate systems or pay-for-performance incentive devices] can be considerably compromised when the systems undermine workers’ intrinsic motivation.
> Kreps (1997) reports his uneasiness when teaching human resources management and discussing the impact of incentive devices in a way that is somewhat foreign to standard economic theory. And indeed, recent experimental evidence on the use of performance- contingent wages or fines confirms that explicit incentives sometimes result in worse compliance than incomplete labour contracts (Fehr and Falk (1999), Fehr and Schmidt (2000), Gneezy and Rustichini (2000a)). Relatedly, Gneezy and Rustichini (2000b) find that offering monetary incentives to subjects for answering questions taken from an IQ test strictly decreases their performance, unless the “piece rate” is raised to a high enough level. In the policy domain, Frey and Oberholzer-Gee (1997) surveyed citizens in Swiss cantons where the government was considering locating a nuclear waste repository; they found that the fraction supporting siting of the facility in their community fell by half when public compensation was offered.
To be clear, originally you said "extrinsic motivation can negatively impact intrinsic motivation". "Incentives can hurt" is a totally different statement; but I assume you still mean the original.
A short digression. As a scientist I think we should teach critical reading skills when it comes to science. This study has a bunch of things going against it:
1. It is published in an economics venue. This means the reviewers were economists, not psychologists. They had no clue about rewards, children, etc. They are experts in evaluating the model, not in what you want to know about, which is the part about humans.
2. You are relying on something in the paper that isn't the key contribution. You're relying on a short survey in the intro. No reviewer carefully read this and proposed updates. And even if they did, they were not the deciding factor in acceptance. Even if the intro was one-sided and mostly junk, if the model was amazing, the paper would be published. Papers are not evaluated based on their intros.
3. The paper is almost 25 years old, surveying material that is more than 25 years old. Science changes. A lot. The conclusions here could be totally different from the conclusions in a paper today because we have so much more evidence, higher quality studies, and better conceptual frameworks.
4. The authors have a particular goal: they want to show that there's a conflict between internal and external goals. This taints everything. They don't want to present an even-handed review, they literally want to make their case to a reader. I'm not saying this in some "conspiracy" sense. When I write a paper I want to argue my view, and put my view's worldview at the center, because I want to win people over.
All of this means that you should not be reading this paper in this way. It's the wrong paper, from the wrong time, with the wrong thesis, and you're looking in the wrong section.
We can do better!
Here is a review from 2020. https://msofc.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2020-Intrinsic-...
Let's compare with the points above.
1. It is published in Contemporary Educational Psychology. You can bet the reviewers here know the material, know the latest studies on child learning, etc.
2. The key contribution of the paper is a survey. This is what they are being evaluated for. You missed a paper? Nope, your survey is bad we don't accept you. You didn't fairly represent what that paper said, we don't accept you. etc. The paper is being evaluated by what you are looking for.
3. The survey is fairly current, 4-5 years is ok. You would expect a survey every that many years, or at least once per decade or so.
4. The authors might have biases, but not in this paper. This paper's goal is to present the state of the art. And reviewers aren't looking at the paper based on how well did their argue their point, they're looking at it based on how well they represented the state of the art.
All of this means that this paper should be read to find what you want to know. It's the right kind of paper, from the right time, with the idea of looking at the field and answering these kinds of questions, and we're looking in the main body of the paper.
Now, let's turn to the paper itself.
What it says is that extrinsic motivation is no longer seen as so alien from intrinsic motivation. That in the past 20 years there's a new framework that talks about internalizing extrinsic motivation.
https://al-kindipublisher.com/index.php/jeltal/article/downl...
The story is the same if you look at the paper above on language learning. The two types of motivation are not seen as opposites anymore.
You can keep reading by looking for "survey intrinsic extrinsic motivation teaching" and you'll find many more post 2020 papers. They all say the same thing. The field has changed. The two aren't opposites. Both are useful.
The summary on Wikipedia suggests that there was some arguments about whether this effect was real or not but the consensus is currently that it is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory#Deb...
> Through the debate, consensus seems to have emerged that crowding out reliably occurs if the following conditions are met:[33][dubious – discuss]
> * Rewards are offered in the context of pre-existing intrinsic motivation (e.g. in a pro-social setting or for interesting tasks).[34]
> * Rewards are known in advance and expected.[35]
> * Rewards are tangible.[36]
A kid is working a decades long project to figure out how he wants to spend his life and do the work to make that happen.
Imagine facing that and being told you have to do something you aren’t interested in doing without a clear concept of why it even matters… and without really any say in the matter anyway.
I don’t know if I would have the tenacity to tackle a twenty year project partially against my will and I don’t have to worry about developing socially, growing physically, etc.
Pay the damn kids, I say.
If performance had come with a financial bonus, I'd guess 90% of the recipients wouldn't notice any difference in their lives/outcomes. Maybe even a higher percentage than that.