台灣教育的劊子手
上個星期，筆者有幸參加一家電視台座談「從放牛班談起」，其中女主持人說：「這十年教改弄得如此差勁，影響了我們好多夫妻的感情，我認為台灣是全世界最會因子女的教育而父母吵架的國度，是不是你們教育工作者該扛起這種重責大任？」她的話代表許多家長的心聲，乍聽之下，似乎家長都沒錯，十年來教改的慘敗全歸因學校。但真是如此嗎？
本人就事論事，舉了一個美國新總統歐巴馬關心子女教育的例子。記得去年六月中，那時我正在美國long stay時期，報載某一天，歐巴馬的競選活動突然告停，因為他們夫妻倆準備飛往加州，參加那十一歲的大女兒的足球比賽（只是夏令營的某一活動而已）。看到這則新聞，我真的很驚訝。而歐巴馬的突然改變競選行程並沒受到指責，反而拉高不少百分比的民意支持度。
最近有人高唱「第二次教改」，教育又重新被端到檯面上剖視。明明老師、校長和坊間教育專家大聲疾呼：「把每一個孩子拉上來」、「孩子功課要減壓」、「不要只當直升機父母」、「不可巧立名目偷設資優班」、「放學後與周休二日讓孩子自主」…。但最後都是做不到的口號。大家漸漸覺悟到，教改長年以來，真正錯綜複雜的癥結居然是家長。那是躲在孩子後面的怪獸，橫阻在老師校長前面的劊子手。
「天下無不是的父母」這句話早已該顛覆，完全不適用於這個新穎的時代，因為很多問題的孩童，背後居然長期站著一個黑影，干擾教學的行動─無時無刻在做錯誤的示範，一步步將台灣的教育逼入死角。君不見台灣已有一萬六千家的安親班和補習班（未立案的還不算），依照人口比率，準是全世界最高的，平均「一校養七家」。接近放學之際，各補習班安親班派出一大堆人手前往學校領軍排隊，浩浩蕩蕩的像大軍壓境的帶往他們的基地，這豈不是世界第八大奇景。
台灣的教育主導權已改由安親班掌握，家長迷信補習班，在經濟蕭條的時代還寧可多花錢去報名加課，一個願打，一個願挨。而且，沒有人敢說他們的不對，一萬六千家也不可能同時倒閉，而家長不放心由學校來主導，何況，很多連鎖企業和地方民意代表正是這些安親班補習班的背後老闆，他們的心態哪會希望台灣的教育步入正軌？他們往往腦中只有一個定論：「教育即考試」、「教學即分數」。
其實美國開放教育的優勢，譬如：美國讓孩子在每個階段的成長都有重點，都有學習主題，也都有精彩的回憶。很多人訝異「為何美國中小學每天都那麼早放學？」他們的兩段放學（中午一點五十和下午二點三十），學校就全部淨空（高二、高三也不例外）。
美國孩子在校學習時間那麼短，為何不會比較笨？我想真正的答案，就是他們的教育都不曾被家長和外來的補習班主導及破壞。
是時候了，台灣的家長必須要覺醒，台灣的父母必須接受「再教育」，此時國人必須回歸下面幾個問題：到底教育是什麼？難道人生只為考試和分 數？主動學習和上進的動機千萬不可消失，而溫水煮青蛙的折磨，是否是導致台灣孩子的生存鬥志蕩然無存的主因？更重要的，無限的Ｋ書和補習是否會讓孩子長期 疲乏，全都聚在「大悶鍋」和「壓力鍋」內，如此下去，台灣的教育還有救嗎？
教育孩子本是天經地義的責任，不能推託，更不能寄望坊間的安親班、補習班，而且沒那麼困難。我認為台灣的教育是你們「家長」自己把它搞砸的。奉勸家長們回頭是岸。
（作者為國小退休教師，北縣教改協會顧問）
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Rewards for Students Under a Microscope
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For decades, psychologists have warned against giving children prizes or money for their performance in school. “Extrinsic” rewards, they say — a stuffed animal for a 4-year-old who learns her alphabet, cash for a good report card in middle or high school — can undermine the joy of learning for its own sake and can even lead to cheating.
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But many economists and businesspeople disagree, and their views often prevail in the educational marketplace. Reward programs that pay students are under way in many cities. In some places, students can bring home hundreds of dollars for, say, taking an Advanced Placement course and scoring well on the exam.
Whether such efforts work or backfire “continues to be a raging debate,” said Barbara A. Marinak, an assistant professor of education at Penn State, who opposes using prizes as incentives. Among parents, the issue often stirs intense discussion. And in public education, a new focus on school reform has led researchers on both sides of the debate to intensify efforts to gather data that may provide insights on when and if rewards work.
“We have to get beyond our biases,” said Roland Fryer, an economist at Harvard University who is designing and testing several reward programs. “Fortunately, the scientific method allows us to get to most of those biases and let the data do the talking.”
What is clear is that reward programs are proliferating, especially in high-poverty areas. In New York City and Dallas, high school students are paid for doing well on Advanced Placement tests. In New York, the payouts come from an education reform group called Rewarding Achievement (Reach for short), financed by the Pershing Square Foundation, a charity founded by the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. The Dallas program is run by Advanced Placement Strategies, a Texas nonprofit group whose chairman is the philanthropist Peter O’Donnell.
Another experiment was started last fall in 14 public schools in Washington that are distributing checks for good grades, attendance and behavior. That program, Capital Gains, is being financed by a partnership with SunTrust Bank, Borders and Ed Labs at Harvard, which is run by Dr. Fryer. Another program by Ed Labs is getting started in Chicago.
Other systems are about stuff more than money, and most are not evaluated scientifically. At 80 tutoring centers in eight states run by Score! Educational Centers, a national for-profit company run by Kaplan Inc., students are encouraged to rack up points for good work and redeem them for prizes like jump-ropes.
An increasing number of online educational games entice children to keep playing by giving them online currency to buy, say, virtual pets. And around the country, elementary school children get tokens to redeem at gift shops in schools when they behave well.
In the cash programs being studied, economists compare the academic performance of groups of students who are paid and students who are not. Results from the first year of the A.P. program in New York showed that test scores were flat but that more students were taking the tests, said Edward Rodriguez, the program’s executive director.
In Dallas, where teachers are also paid for students’ high A.P. scores, students who are rewarded score higher on the SAT and enroll in college at a higher rate than those who are not, according to Kirabo Jackson, an assistant professor of economics at Cornell who has written about the program for the journal Education Next.
Still, many psychologists warn that early data can be deceiving. Research suggests that rewards may work in the short term but have damaging effects in the long term.
One of the first such studies was published in 1971 by Edward L. Deci, a psychologist at the University of Rochester, who reported that once the incentives stopped coming, students showed less interest in the task at hand than those who received no reward.
This kind of psychological research was popularized by the writer Alfie Kohn, whose 1993 book “Punished by Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise and Other Bribes” is still often cited by educators and parents. Mr. Kohn says he sees “social amnesia” in the renewed interest in incentive programs.
“If we’re using gimmicks like rewards to try to improve achievement without regard to how they affect kids’ desire to learn,” he said, “we kill the goose that laid the golden egg.”
Dr. Marinak, of Penn State, and Linda B. Gambrell, a professor of education at Clemson University, published a study last year in the journal Literacy Research and Instruction showing that rewarding third graders with so-called tokens, like toys and candy, diminished the time they spent reading.
“A number of the kids who received tokens didn’t even return to reading at all,” Dr. Marinak said.
Why does motivation seem to fall away? Some researchers theorize that even at an early age, children can sense that someone is trying to control their behavior. Their reaction is to resist. “One of the central questions is to consider how children think about this,” said Mark R. Lepper, a psychologist at Stanford whose 1973 study of 50 preschool-age children came to a conclusion similar to Dr. Deci’s. “Are they saying, ‘Oh, I see, they are just bribing me’?”
More than 100 academic studies have explored how and when rewards work on people of all ages, and researchers have offered competing analyses of what the studies, taken together, really mean.
Judith Cameron, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Alberta, found positive traits in some types of reward systems. But in keeping with the work of other psychologists, her studies show that some students, once reward systems are over, will choose not to do the activity if the system provides subpar performers with a smaller prize than the reward for achievers.
Many cash-based programs being tested today, however, are designed to do just that. Dr. Deci asks educators to consider the effect of monetary rewards on students with learning disabilities. When they go home with a smaller payout while seeing other students receive checks for $500, Dr. Deci said, they may feel unfairly punished and even less excited to go to school.
“There are suggestions of students making in the thousands of dollars,” he said. “The stress of that, for kids from homes with no money, I frankly think it’s unconscionable.”
Economists, on the other hand, argue that with students who are failing, everything should be tried, including rewards. While students may be simply attracted by financial incentives at first, couldn’t that evolve into a love of learning?
“They may work a little harder and may find that they aren’t so bad at it,” said Dr. Jackson, of Cornell. “And they may learn study methods that last over time.”
In examining rewards, the trick is untangling the impact of the monetary prizes from the impact of other factors, like the strength of teaching or the growing recognition among educators of the importance of A.P. tests. Dr. Jackson said his latest analyses, not yet published, would seek to answer the questions.
He also pointed out that with children in elementary school, who typically show more motivation to learn than teenagers do, the outcomes may be different.
Questions about how rewards are administered, to whom and at what age are likely to drive future research. Can incentives — praise, grades, pizza parties, cash — be added up to show that the more, the better? Or will some of them detract from the whole?
Dr. Deci says school systems are trying to lump incentives together as if they had a simple additive effect. He emphasizes that there is a difference between being motivated by something tangible and being motivated by something that is felt or sensed. “We’ve taken motivation and put it in categories,” Dr. Deci said of his fellow psychologists. “Economics is 40 years behind with respect to that.”
Some researchers suggest tweaking reward systems to cause less harm. Dr. Lepper says that the more arbitrary the reward — like giving bubble gum for passing a test — the more likely it is to backfire. Dr. Gambrell, of Clemson, posits a “proximity hypothesis,” holding that rewards related to the activity — like getting to read more books if one book is read successfully — are less harmful. And Dr. Deci and Richard M. Ryan report that praise — which some consider a verbal reward — does not have a negative effect.
In fact, praise itself has categories. Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, has found problems with praise that labels a child as having a particular quality (“You’re so smart”), while praise for actions (“You’re working hard”) is more motivating.
Psychologists have also found that it helps to isolate differences in how children perceive tasks. Are they highly interested in what they are doing? Or does it feel like drudgery? “The same reward system might have a different effect on those two types of students,” Dr. Lepper said. The higher the interest, he said, the more harmful the reward.
Meanwhile, Dr. Fryer of Ed Labs urges patience in awaiting the economists’ take on reward systems. He wants to look at what happens over many years by tracking subjects after incentives end and trying to discern whether the incentives have an impact on high school graduation rates.
With the money being used to pay for the incentive programs and research, “every dollar has value,” he said. “We either get social science or social change, and we need both.”
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