This teacher has an amusing twist on the idea of paying students for attendance and test scores: Fine students who waste instructional time.
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Tag Archive for 'incentives'
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has little patience for those opposed to the controversial practice of paying inner city children for good grades in school.
“There are a lot of poor kids. Some of them have nothing. Some don’t even have parents.They’re lucky to get Christmas gifts. They’re lucky they get a hug once in a while. They get it at school. They’re lucky they have ever a dollar or any coins in their pocket,” he said.
“You live in a different world. You don’t see children like this. That reward is really exciting for them. They’ve never ever had anyone. They’ve never seen a $10 or $20 bill. What they’re really trying to express to them is, `You’re doing well and, the better off you do commensurate with your education, your salary goes up. If you drop out of school, your salary will never [go up]. It’s just an idea of celebrating their academic performance and hard work.”
Over a quarter million privately raised dollars were distributed to 1,650 Chicago kids last week in the City’s ”Green for Grades” program, prompting Daley’s comments.
In India, Diane Ravitch notes on Forbes.com, students compete for admission into “cram schools,” paying up to $1,500 to prepare for exams that might get them into India’s highly regarded technology colleges. This puts in sharp relief the increasingly common strategy trying to persuade students to care about school with everything from cash rewards to New York’s planned “Game High School.”
Interesting, isn’t it, that while students in other countries are paying $1,500 a year for the chance to learn more, many American students will be paid that same amount just to do what they ought to be doing in their own self-interest? Does the future belong to those who struggle to better themselves, make sacrifices to do so and work hard? Or to those who must be cajoled and bribed to learn anything at all?
To be fair, to use the most ambitious students and families in India and elsewhere as an exercise in contrast is probably a bit unfair. There are no shortage of strivers in the U.S., the give-me-Harvard-or-give-me-death parents, for example, who push their kids into competitive schools and line up hot and cold running tutors in a bid for achievement or prestige. And no doubt, there must be indifferent and unmotivated studentsin India. Still, Diane’s larger point about what we stand for–and what we won’t stand for–is compelling.
The child that needs extrinsic motivation to act in his or her own best interest is at a decided long-term disadvantage to the kid who sees education as a means to an end. I suspect when the final analysis is in, pay for play will be to education what aspirin is to health care–something to mask the symptom rather than treat the disease.
OK, class, let’s review…
1. Paying school kids to improve their standardized tests with everything from cell phone minutes to cold, hard cash is good.
2. Paying bonuses to teachers whose students do well on standardized tests is also good.
3. Paying college students to retake the SATs and improve the school’s rankings is very, very…bad?
Baylor University finds itself in the crosshairs over their decision to offer incoming freshmen a $300 credit at the campus bookstore to retake the SAT. Students who raised their scores by 50 points or more received $1,000 a year in merit scholarship aid. Faculty at the school are criticizing the policy as “academically dishonest.” Although no one is saying so directly, it’s widely assumed Baylor’s goal is to move up the annual U.S. News college rankings by having the frosh retake the test and report the higher scores.
I’m shocked, shocked! I’ve said many times in this space that I’m agnostic on the whole miasma of incentives. As a pragmatist, I’m willing to consider any legitimate means to improve student achievement, even I find the idea of bribing children to act in their own best interests a bit revolting. But let’s not delude ourselves that incentives, whether internal or external, do not subvert intrinsic motivation and invite widespread gaming of the system. Incentives are by definition gaming the system. What Baylor has done is at worst a few degrees lower down the inevitable slippery slope. I’ve seen plenty of elementary school students fail miserably on standardized tests, retake the test after a few desultory weeks in summer school and suddenly they’re on grade level. Now that’s shocking.
“I’m just astounded that rankings would drive policy to such an extent,” Philip A. Ballinger, the director of admissions at the University of Washington in Seattle tells the Times. “It’s just rotten all around. It’s just like all of a sudden people removed their brains and went to Mars.”
He was referring to the Baylor scandal.
In a two-week trial of a cash incentive program for students at a Washington middle school attendance and punctuality have improved. Grades have not. The Washington Post’s Bill Turque takes a look inside a school that is aggressively implementing the controversial concept.
The Northwest Washington school’s 307 students are among the roughly 3,000 middle-schoolers eligible to earn as much as $100 every two weeks — to a maximum of $1,500 for the academic year — for showing up on time, not disrupting class and getting high grades. Students have been buzzing about the pilot program, called Capital Gains, since they learned in late August that their school had been selected.
The program, as you might have guessed, is the brainchild of incentives guru Roland Fryer. Every two weeks, students are evaluated on 10-point scales according to a series of performance indicators. “All schools in the program are required to review behavior and attendance, which means showing up on time for every class,” the Post reports. “Individual schools can choose other criteria, including grades, homework, class participation and adherence to the dress code. Each point is worth $2.”
For the first two pay periods, beginning Oct. 17, checks will be distributed by school staff. Later, they will be deposited directly into student-owned savings accounts at SunTrust Bank. Students will be able to access the money with or without their parents, and no one can withdraw money without the child, officials said.
Last week, it was announced the Fryer will lead a new education research center at Harvard University, which will monitor efforts to close achievement gaps. Incentive programs, not surprisingly, will be the first idea under Fryer’s shiny new $44 million microscope.
Update: I’m still agnostic on incentives, but a reader at Eduwonkette nicely summarizes the ick factor that many educators feel about it. “The soul-crushing aspect of Fryer’s theoretical framework is that it lets the curriculum and the teacher and the school entirely off the hook,” observes Citizen X. ”It’s a much more cynical view on students living in poverty. They don’t care, they are only motivated by material objects that they don’t have, they have to be bribed into “learning” (or at least learning to get a better score on a bubble sheet).”
Roland Fryer is poised to become one of the most influential people in education research, leading a $44 million dollar effort to test the efficacy of various educational theories. The New York Times reports the Harvard economist has quit his job as New York City’s “chief equality officer” to run the Educational Innovation Laboratory. Funded largely by Eli Broad, the effort “is intended to infuse education with the data-driven approach that is common in science and business.”
“If the doctor said to you, ‘You have a cold; here are three pills my buddy in Charlotte uses and he says they work,’ you would run out and find another doctor,” Dr. Fryer tells the Times. “Somehow, in education, that approach is O.K.”
Those who have followed his work will not be surprised to learn the first idea to be put under the microscope are incentive programs that reward students for good grades and passing standardized tests, an idea closely associated with Fryer in New York City.
Merit pay is back in the news. For kids, that is, not teachers. Washington, DC’s Michelle Rhee is the latest to float the idea of paying 12-year-olds to act in their own best interest. Fordham’s Liam Julian thinks it’s a bad idea, preferring the stick to the carrot. But he makes the emotionally satisfying argument:
It is expected that students will complete assignments and work hard; it is legally demanded that they come to school. When these obligatory activities are rewarded with cash, what was once mundane becomes exceptional. Standards of right behavior take a prima facie tumble. The student who shunned class is paid to be there, which makes a mockery of the rules, and the pupil who already came to school on time now receives money for it and learns the false lesson that punctuality and conscientiousness are extraordinary and noteworthy.
I’m not immune to this line of moral hazard reasoning, although I remain agnostic and willing to consider any reasonable idea to boost performance. Still, I have a hard time arguing incentives are bad when I know darned well that there are affluent kids who are routinely bribed — er, rewarded — for good report cards with everything from a ten dollar bill to a new car in the driveway. Add the fact that many inner city families have learned not to expect much from their education, and it becomes hard to ask them to take our good word for it that education is its own reward.
Greg Foster nails it at Pajamas Media. “Admit it,” he writes, “you don’t care about whether it works nearly as much as you care about whether it’s just inherently wrong. This policy is the sort of thing people respond to purely by visceral reaction.” He then goes on to explain why it’s not wrong.
Joanne Jacobs, as usual, is the voice of reason: “If foundations want to fund pay-for-performance schemes,” she writes, ”I suggest they put the money into college (or job training) scholarship funds for hard-working students. Connect doing tomorrow’s homework with a brighter future down the road.”
A reader of this blog has come up with an intriguing idea for a Core Knowledge-based afterschool center that uses incentives to motivate reluctant learners–and an unusual funding source. She’s put her proposal on a website called ideablob.com, and is in the running for a grant, based on users voting for her plan in an open competition. Think American Idol meets The Apprentice–one idea every month win $10,000 in seed money
Carol Glenn, a 22-year old African American who graduated from Cornell University describes her afterschool center, known as “Bronze, Inc.,” in her business plan:
Bronze is a place for students (particularly older students) to hang out after school. Students are expected to come in and learn something new each day. They will be given assignments that have a point value, and expected to earn a minimum number of points each day. This prevents students from moving on without learning the things they need to. Once the assigned period for study ends and students have met their daily quotas, they will be able to use their points to play video games, watch movies, play indoor miniature golf, use computers, or just grab a hot meal in a cafe (Think Dave & Busters meets the freedom of a college campus). This provides incentives that are more immediate than college or a good job in the future, but not so immediate that they crowd out academic rigor.
Black and Latino students frequently face the possibility of being ostracized for doing well academically. Bronze helps fix this by creating a large cohort of students who value education, preventing these minority high achievers from having to choose between getting good grades and having a social life. Finally, Bronze hopes to make systemic change by seeking out the best academic programs (like Core Knowledge and Direct Instruction), repeatedly proving they work, and then explaining these practices to parents and leaders in the community. Instead of parents simply advocating for “better schools” or “better teachers,” they will have clear objectives and results with which to approach school boards and politicians. Since these students will still be a part of the mainstream system, instead of placed in separate charter schools, the results of parental involvement will likely be seen across districts where Bronze operates.
Vote to support Carol’s idea here.
Rewarding students for high performance has been discussed here and elsewhere, now a pending California bill would authorize and encourage school districts to provide nonmonetary incentives to middle and high school students.
“What we’re really looking at is recognition and motivation and incentive to achieve,” Sen. Elaine Alquist, a Santa Clara Democrat who proposed the measure, tells the Sacramento Bee. Not everyone agrees. “At some point, students need to be taught that every good deed does not require reward,” said Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.
I’m a pragmatist. I favor whatever works. But there will always be something that rubs me the wrong way about having to reward people for acting in their own self-interest.
Update: The Gradebook, a really good edublog by the St. Petersburg Times’ Jeffrey Solochek, has more on this, including similar proposals in Florida and New York.
Student incentives seem to boost reading scores, according to a newly released piece of research. Critics have described plans to give cash, electronic gear or other rewards as bribery, but the study of charter school incentive programs from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes finds “reward systems are found to have stable and consistent positive impacts for student learning in reading. The effect holds across grades and across network and non-network charter schools.”
“It’s not a silver bullet, but for very little investment, you seem to get a pretty consistent bump,” Margaret E. Raymond, the study’s author, said in an interview with Education Week.
Read a summary of the findings here. The full report, “Paying for A’s” is here.
The success of incentives will get all the ink, but this finding caught my eye: “Schools in which there is continuous or near-continuous assessment of student conduct produce larger gains in reading than schools that have reward systems.”
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