Reverse Keynesianism

Keynes once quipped "when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Yglesias engages in a bit of reverse Keynesiansim in his steadfast defense of using market-based reforms on problems that have nothing to do with the market. Unlike the profit and loss calculations that drive Olive Garden, continuing to improve our educational systems requires thinking about in non-economic ways. The other day, Yglesias remarked that

Linda Pearlstein summarizes a pretty good new controlled study from Vanderbilt University that tested the idea that offering teachers bonuses of up to $15,000 could improve student outcomes. The results—nope

Leaving aside how well situated Yglesias is to judge the goodness of the survey, he seems, at least partially to accept that the study has made claims about merit pay and incentives untenable. For example, he insist that  he

 never really liked the term “merit pay” or the rhetoric around it. The right way to think about teacher compensation, I think, is this. You could have a system in which all teachers are paid the same amount. But we don’t have that system. Instead we have a system where veteran teachers are paid much more than novice teachers, and teachers with master’s degrees are paid more than teachers without master’s degrees. We could switch this to a system where teachers whose kids do much worse than average on value-added measures get fired , and teachers whose kids to much better than average get paid more than average teachers.

Value added?  Does he mean improved on some outcome assessment measures that acurately capture how much students are learning and how well teachers are teaching?  But lets be clear here, his ideal system is not "merit pay" or punishing "bad" teachers it is, rather, paying good teachers more and firing bad teachers, which is like totally different, somehow. Because he is, at least dimly, aware that the system he just described is identical to merit pay and incentive systems, he has to deny that paying "better" teachers more while firing "bad" teachers might be creating

an “incentive” as simply [a means] to ensure that the best teachers aren’t tempted to leave the profession while the worst teachers are encouraged to do so.

Because

[i]f you want to do something through a bonus/incentive mechanism, what would make sense is to offer teachers extra money to take on challenging assignments in high poverty schools.

See?  Paying more and punishing more aren't merit based incentive systems, which don't work, but rather incentives are things that reward risk taking.

Later that same day, Yglesias trys to rename merit pay incentive systems when he explains that

for my part when I talk about differentiated compensation for teachers, this is what I have in mind. Yes, reduce barriers to getting rid of teachers who do much worse than average. But also offer the best performers substantially more money than teachers currently get. That means the best teachers will keep teaching and also that a wider range of people will consider teaching as a possible career choice.

See, offering good teachers an incentive through higher pay is wholly different that offering teachers incentives through bonuses.  And, I'm sure, that the attempt to "reduce barriers" will in no way require weakening teacher's unions.

If the facts change and your proposed solution remains the same, you might be an ideologue .