Failure as a Motivating Factor in Improving Educational Performance or... In Praise of the “C” Word

   In 1991, Mary Sherry wrote an article for Newsweek magazine citing the poor results of our educational system. She blamed this poor outcome on the lack of motivation on the students' part to attempt to succeed, if failure is only a remote possibility. She cited policies which  promote  and even graduate students regardless of their performance or mastery of the subject material.  In all these things, she is absolutely correct. There are, however, three groups of actors in this drama, not two.  There are the parents, the educational system, and the students.  Ms. Sherry, correctly , identified the ability of the teacher (as a representative of the educational system) to fail the student as a motivating factor to increase the student's level of performance.  The meaningful ability of the parent to fail the educational system, in the form of a wider range of educational choices for their children,  would motivate the educational system  to improve its level of performance.
   A parent's role in the educational system is analogous to that of the consumer in a marketplace.  When the supplier provides a good or service which do not meet the demands of the consumer, that consumer is generally free to seek that good or service elsewhere, and therefore not benefit that supplier through trade.  With the current American educational system, this is not the case.  Not only is the consumption of the service (primary education) mandatory,  the consumer has no meaningful way not to support those schools which do not satisfy their demands. Public schools are generally assigned by district and any tax breaks available to parents who choose private schools are much less valuable than the amount spent on students remaining within the unsatisfactory school. If the parents had the direct choice to take the funding which went to their child's education, from school A to school B, then school A would have an increased incentive to satisfy the demands of the parents, and improve the quality of the education. 
   The increased ability of the parent to choose which schools get funding automatically, and more efficiently, allocates the resources spent on the student's education.  This is accomplished in three ways. The parents, not politicians, will be the judge of the quality of their child's education.  Those schools with successful strategies will automatically get funding and those schools with failing strategies will automatically have their funding cut. This competition for the resources controlled by the consumer will improve the overall quality of education, as the bad schools are closed.
   In 2004, congress enacted legislation, establishing the “DC Opportunity Scholarship Program”.  This is a voucher  program, designed to allow parents more choice in which schools their children attend, by putting some of the choices about funds which normally go to public schools, into those parents' hands.  By all accounts, this program was a success. The number of vouchers was limited by random draw of applicants, which is unfortunate, but this produced three classes of students for data analysis. There were students who got vouchers, those who applied, but did not get vouchers, and those who did not apply.  In 2010, Business Wire magazine published the results of a DOE study of this program, and its peripheral effects.  The article quoted the study, saying, “Using a scholarship [voucher] increased the graduation rate by 21 percentage points.”  This is not the difference between the students who got the vouchers and those who did not apply.  This is the difference between those who applied and won, and those who applied and did not win vouchers. Not only did the students do better, The amount of the voucher was less than half  the amount of funds spent on the average  DCPS student. The article goes on, stating, ”A stunning 28 percent of D.C. public schools made definitive efforts to improve as a direct result of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the report revealed.”  The introduction of choice, and therefore meaningful competition, increased the efficiency of providing an education and improved the average quality of the available educational choices.


Ms. Sherry's article was correct, as far as it went, but it did not go far enough in assigning culpability, and identifying all the incentives present in a primary student's education.  The parent should be the primary decision maker, not the school, or a politician, when it comes to their child's education.  Such models have been tried, and have yielded better results than the current system.  Finally, the possibility of failure is only meaningful if you have the choice of methods by which to succeed.





Connelly, Mark. The Sundance Writer: A Rhetoric, Reader, Handbook. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2009. Print.
“D.C. School Voucher Program Boosts Graduation Rates, Students from Failing Schools Benefit.” Business Wire 22 June 2010. General OneFile. Web. 15 Nov. 2011.