When Good Incentives Go Bad

How do we get people to do their best work?

If your paycheck tied directly to your results, would you work harder? Sounds logical. When people talk about improving education, one answer keeps coming up: link teachers’ salaries to student test scores. Reward the good ones, pressure the bad ones. Simple.

I believed this until I reread Freakonomics. The chapter about Chicago public schools changed my mind.

The economists dug through mountains of data like detectives. What they found was disturbing. When these high-stakes incentives kicked in, some teachers didn’t become better educators. They cheated. Changed student answers after the test ended.

That raises the real question: why does a reasonable plan twist into its opposite?

The problems run deep. Teachers start teaching to the test instead of actually teaching. Why spend time on critical thinking when you could drill practice questions? Education becomes about gaming numbers, not learning.

Then there’s the competition. Teachers stop sharing ideas because they’re fighting for the same bonus pool. The colleague who used to help you plan lessons becomes a threat to your income. That kind of tension kills the collaboration that actually makes teachers better.

What bothers me most is what disappears. Character development. Resilience. How to handle failure. These things matter, but they don’t show up on standardized tests. So when only test scores count, who’s teaching students how to be decent humans?

This isn’t just about teachers. It’s about what happens when we try to measure work that resists simple metrics. The best parts of education can’t be captured in a score. Pretending they can creates exactly the problems we’re trying to solve.