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Paying kids to learn

August 22, 2007 on 8:06 am

My column today discusses the idea of providing kids with economic incentive to stay in school and improve their grades.

Roland Fryer, a young Harvard University professor who studies racial inequality in American schools, has been arguing that school systems should provide cash incentives to students to improve their grades and stay in school.

New York has bitten on the idea. As has Tucson. The USA Today editorial board has endorsed investigating such a policy further.

At first glance, even second glance, this seems like a terrible idea. Motives to learn should be pure and intrinsic. And if learning for the sake of learning doesn’t click, the correlation between education and income ought to be sufficient motivation. Won’t paying for grades inevitably lead to kids demanding money for, say, taking out the garbage?

Perhaps. But a careful look at the new pay plans suggests that in the right circumstances, they’re not so crazy after all.

Such experimentation with monetary enticement has not yet been tested in a controlled environment, so there is no way of knowing if it would work, but there is a movement afoot to find out. As I note in my column, there are plenty of people who find the idea morally repulsive. Not I.

The question, I suppose, can be framed in a different way. Are we more concerned with outcome or process? What if students lack “intrinsic motivation”? Isn’t the most important thing keeping them in school? Perhaps a love of learning will kick in later. Isn’t it at least worth a small-scale experiment to see?

4 Comments »

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  1. I’m a sophmore in high school, and believe me, if they implemented this in my school I’m sure grades would surge upward!

    Comment by Alex Katz — August 22, 2007 #

  2. NO! Kids should not given a gift of money by the education system to get good grades! What ever happened to the concept that education is a privilege? The valued gift that is being given to the child is the availability of the school, the teachers, the books; etc., and this should be impressed upon the child. The child should not be taught to revere money in this manner. The child should be taught honor, self respect, and a desire to contribute to our free society.

    Comment by garmet — August 22, 2007 #

  3. Wow, we’ve really become addicted to instant gratification, haven’t we? So much for the notion of “stay in school, you’ll have a crack at something better than a minimum wage job at Taco Bell.” Where’s the instantaneous feedback loop for that? Nope, our society (not just kids) speaks the language of instant cold, hard cash.

    The only thing left to develop now is a pill with all that knowledge, or some way of downloading it into your brain (anyone wanna learn Kung Fu?)

    Comment by Ian B — August 23, 2007 #

  4. Ok, full confession. My folks bribed us to go to school. Perfect attendance for the year got us $5. This was back in the 50’s and 60’s so five dollars was worth a little more than it is now.

    Did it work? In a word, yes.

    Let’s put it a different way. We challenge the school system to improve scores on standardized tests. Some even call for rewarding the teachers if the scores go up. Why not reward the students? They are the ones taking the tests.

    The reason delayed gratification doesn’t work so well for little kids is that they are kids. Tell your six year old he’ll grow up working at Taco Bell if he doesn’t learn to read. That’ll work well. He’ll be working when he is three times as old as he is now. That’s eternity, not delayed.

    Comment by MarkD — August 24, 2007 #

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