I watched the whole thing and not ONCE did he look down at them apples!!!! It's the first place that caught my eye :grin:
****ing Matt Damon's got a lot to learn: ---- Matt Damon is not a genius. He just plays one in the movies. At last week’s “Save Our Teachers” rally in Washington (“save them” from what — the private sector?) Damon announced that incentives — like bonuses for good performance or ending tenure for bad ones — don’t work for teachers. “You think job insecurity makes people work hard?” he asked a reporter from Reason magazine incredulously. “That’s like saying a teacher is going to get lazy when she has tenure.” “A teacher wants to teach,” Damon insisted. “Why else would you take a sh*@#y salary and really long hours and do that job unless you really loved to do it?” Sorry, Matt, but if I were your math teacher back at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, I’d have to give you an F. Wrong on theory and fact. First the data — starting with Matt’s myth that teachers work for a shi— . . . er, “less-than-adequate” salary. According to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the average Boston teacher earned around $80,000 last year. That was the average. And that doesn’t include the generous health care or pension benefits, which would equal $100,000 in the private sector. All for just 180 days of work. Nationally, the average teacher salary is significantly lower — $53,000. But a teacher still earns more by herself (and about 75 percent of K-12 teachers are women) than the household income of the average American family. Once again, with summers and holidays off. That fact is important because when you break down what teachers earn per hour, the average teacher is better paid ($30.52) than the average computer programmer ($21.27) or architect ($27.71). So Damon is wrong on the numbers. And his theory is even worse. Modern economic theory is based on the premise of incentives. Damon’s position that incentives don’t affect behavior puts him in the fiscal Flat Earth Society. He’s the equivalent of an economic creationist. Of course people work harder if they believe it will pay off. Naturally people slack off otherwise. Nobody denies this is true of cabbies, car salesmen or newspaper columnists — why wouldn’t it be true of teachers? Oh, that’s right: “Teachers want to teach.” They’re above worldly concerns like pay and job security. Which some teachers are. But isn’t it likely that others have more materialistic motivations? Like the fact that it’s a great way for underachievers to prosper? “Slackers wanting to earn the country’s easiest college major, should major in education,” reports Lynn O’Shaughnessy of CBS’s Moneywatch. “It’s easy to get ‘A’s’ if you’re an education major.” Which is good news for education majors who, according to O’Shaughnessy, “enter college with the lowest average SAT scores.” So if you’re a “slacker” who wants to earn more than your brother the accountant, the public schools have got a deal for you! And once you’re in, you’re in. If you’ve seen “Waiting for Superman,” you know that while one of every 57 doctors loses his license and one out of 97 lawyers gets disbarred, just one out of 1,000 teachers gets fired from big-city school systems for performance issues. Damon wants us to believe this all-but-guaranteed lifetime employment has no impact on performance? Nobody’s a good enough actor to sell that.
Article is wrong on both of its core points: This is sketchy and is based on how you determine a teacher's hours. Sure, they get summers off. They also don't work only the time that they are at school. This is also inaccurate. Theory suggests that incentives affect a *perfectly rational* person. But in reality, people aren't perfectly rational. And as many behavioral economics studies show, people aren't driven by making the best economic decisions. For example, it's been shown that in reality, huge bonuses tend to *decrease* overall performance in non-mechanical jobs by creating additional stress. For anyone interested in the subject, Predictably Irrational is a great book on the topic. But the overall premise is that we tend to make bad policy quite often simply because we make policy based on the idea of pure rationalty despite all evidence to the contrary.
The article isn't arguing that people are "perfectly rational," only that incentives matter to a good extent. We aren't talking about huge bonuses, just about rewarding and promoting the better teachers and weeding out the bad ones. It's amazing this is so controversial.
Oh I agree with that - certainly higher pay generates better teachers, etc. But it's also overstated. There are lots of scenarios where it's been shown that less incentive produces better overall performance. And many people are motivated for reasons other than financial benefits. So Matt Damon's point that he doesn't act "better" because he gets paid more or that teachers motivations are more complex than the reporter suggested are valid. An example is teaching to the test. The idea was that if we test people, teachers will be more motivated to teach the basic material and we'd have improved overall performance. But what we really got is a bunch of teaching to the test, and I'd argue, worse overall performance by both students and teachers. The incentive of rewarding teachers whose students did well on the test may actually have a negative impact on their performance.
Also, the article claims this: Damon’s position that incentives don’t affect behavior puts him in the fiscal Flat Earth Society. He’s the equivalent of an economic creationist. That's my problem with it. Damon didn't suggest anything of the sort. He suggested that the incentives are not all financial - for example, love of the job. The real-world evidence of performance that we see tends to fit that model that there's far more than financial rewards or threats of losing jobs that drives behavior.
Agreed - the reporter was trying to make a silly political point, and Matt Damon was trying to slap her down. Neither was really based on sound economics, I don't think.
Doesn't that prove that incentives motivate teachers though? It may not create the best results, but if the teachers are teaching to the test in order to get the reward for their students doing well on the test, then the reward is motivating the teacher.
On this point, it also depends on how you look at their pay. The $53,000 averages also count overtime like summer school, which many teachers use to supplement their income, so saying that teachers get paid that much for "180 days of work" is a lie. Of course, Fox doesn't report it that way, so I expect the usual suspects will ignore reality yet again. (this doesn't even begin to get into the fact that teachers are more highly educated than the "average worker" whose salary is, surprise surprise, lower than that of a college graduate)
I don't know about demonizing teachers, but they are just people. Many, I'm sure, are in the job because they love to teach. But just like everyone else, incentives drive decisions. I know teachers that truly feel "called" to be teachers. I also know teachers that do it because it is an easy degree to get and is about as rock solid as an employment opportunity as you can get in most places. They don't feel "called" to teach, they do it because it pays the bills and they get lots of time off. I feel pulled to the camp that doesn't really feel bad about teacher pay. I know plenty of educated people that work all year, get 2 weeks of vacation, work plenty of overtime, and make about the same, if perhaps slightly more. The fact that a college educated professional is called to work outside some of their normal hours (grading papers, extracurricular stuff, etc) is disinginuous. MOST professionals work many hours outside normal office hours. Just because teachers might work 10% more than their "office hours" isn't anything implying they should be paid more, most college educted professionals do this as well, but they do it on top of a full year of work, but 75% of a years of work (with Spring Break, Christmas, and tons of holidays) thrown in. A job that pays $45,000 - $50,000, offers good health insurance and usually a pension (and in some cases a savings plan on top) for a job that comes with "personal" days, sick days, a full summer off, every holiday off, 2 weeks at Christmas, and a full week in the Spring is pretty darn good, actually. The fact that they have to mix in some 45-50 hour weeks in and work a few days on their summer break isn't all that bad. A lot of accountants with a masters and a CPA make $50,000 a year, get 10 holidays and 10 vacation days AND work 80-100 hour weeks during a busy season.
