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Kids Score 40 Percent Higher When They Get Paid For Grades
A large number of schools participating in a pay-for-grades program have seen test scores in reading and math go up by almost 40 percentage points. The Sparks program will pay seventh-graders up to $500 and fourth-graders as much as $250 for good performance on 10 assessment tests. About two-thirds of the 59 schools in the program improved their scores by margins above the citywide average. "It's an ego booster in terms of self-worth. When they get the checks, there's that competitiveness -- 'Oh, I'm going to get more money than you next time' -- so it's something that excites them," said Rose Marie Mills, principal at MS 343 in Mott Haven. Critics, who are unaware that most college students don't become liberal arts majors, argue that paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone.
From TFA:
About two-thirds of the 59 high-poverty schools in the Sparks program -- which pays seventh-graders up to $500 and fourth-graders as much as $250 for their performance on a total of 10 assessments -- improved their scores since last year's state tests by margins above the citywide average.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
When some kids were getting paid for grades ($5 for a B, $10 for an A when I was a kid). My parents refused. They would tell me that it was expected of me to get good grades, and I didn't deserve a reward for doing what I was supposed to be doing anyways.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Right or Wrong my nieces grades have started to climb as soon as I started a "Grade Bounty". It has brought focus, and there is more motivation other than just Mom hounding her. I am slowing ratcheting up the bar, sort of got her hooked as a freshman in High School and going to make Sophomore bar a little higher and so on. Far as I am concerned money well spent. Cracked me up when she asked Mom if I was really Uncle was really going to pay up...I said you get the grades...I will pay up.
Much like the heavily fantasized notion of an idyllic suburban 50's culture, the ultra-PC "everybody wins" culture never really existed. It's a nice bogeyman, though, for people who want to drone about how much better their upbringning was than everyone else's. The worst it ever really culminated in was "participant"-style rewards like ribbons and whatnot. And it's a moot point now anyway since 90% of school time is devoted to drilling kids with standardized testing preparation.
A movement did take foot in public schools in the the early and mid 90s that emphasized self-esteem as a major factor in success, and it makes sense. If you feel bad about yourself to the point of pathology you're probably not going to strive for anything better. You can quibble about the effectiveness of specific attempts to rectify these situations, or the value in taking emphasis and public resources away from students with healthier attitudes to try and help moody kids, but stop trying to create a false history just so you have something to point a finger at in lieu of any specific concerns or solutions.
My wife has been teaching for 2 decades now and has seen every half-baked trend come and go as administrators bounce from one artificial one-size-fits-all solution to another. There's been one thing that's been consistent through it all, and one thing only: loudmouth parents who won't shut up and let schools teach. The majority of overprotectiveness and excuse-making for failure doesn't come from the schools at all, especially not now that we have NCLB and even stricter state mandates that practically demand that children be hammered mercilessly with bullet points regardless of their performance.
The majority of feel-good nonsense and excuse for repeated or consistent failure emanates from, and has always emanated from, parents.
I wonder though if there is a intrinsic motivation in the first place. At least in the school system that I grew up in (VA public schools), the standardized tests are pushed so hard that it feels like you are being force fed information with no benefit to you. Even classes in subject that I enjoyed were difficult because there was no time for extra activities or experiments, it was all memorization and repetition. I think the way schools are setup today in the US (or at least in Virgina) removes any form of intrinsic reward what so ever because of how stressful and draining the experience is.
Is $250-500/student worth it for the improvements obtained? That's not too hard to answer. Find an alternative score-improvement technique and compare the per-pupil costs.
(For a sense of scale, the per pupil cost of a full year's education in nearby Pennsylvania averages ~$10,700. This program would add ~5% to the cost of an education, though only if every student maxed it out.)
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
You forgot to subtract the amount of that debt which is owed to US citizens. In other words, our "average" citizen may owe $37,255 via the collective government obligation, but that "average" citizen also holds most of that liability in US government bonds, either individually or collectively via Social Security trust/etc.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
...an acceptable substitute for parental supervision and interest into what their children are learning. The latchkey, Playstation generation needs to be bribed to actually educate themselves because frankly their parents couldn't be bothered. Absolutely pathetic if you ask me. Children 50 years ago would die if they saw how easy kids have it today.
The point is it makes them worse students. Take 10 kids who got paid to study in grade 7 and 10 kids who didn't get paid to study in grade 7. Put them in the same class, say a high school class. Group A has no intrinsic motivation because they're not being paid anymore and fails out.
Unless you want to keep this scheme going all the way a long (pay them for grade 8, grade 9, grade 10, grade 11, grade 12, 1st year, 2nd year, 3rd year, 4th year, master's, ...) which sounds rather costly, you're going to hit a point where the kids who used to get paid all of a sudden can't deal. That's what the overjustification effect says: you're paying them to be bad students.
After teaching in Cairo, Egypt for a year at a private school, I found out the value of an American Education.
$10,000 a year.
That's how much the richest of the richest in Cairo were willing to pay so that their kids could get an American education.
It's sad to know that we have to pay our kids to go to school now. We're teaching our children that their education has no value, which is so egregiously incorrect.
as long as they learn something
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Bull Hockey.
The "Secret" to raising smart kids is to instill in them a work ethic. I don't see how this is any different. Providing incentive to work harder at a task and achieve results, rather than simply stumble into them due to your 'natural talent' is pretty much the default story of how people become successful.
Your arguement seems to boil down to "convincing kids to work harder is bad because kids who work harder will look better than kids who don't". Of course kids who work harder are going to come off better, that's sort of the point. Given the rest of your comment is a rambling complaint against people who test well but can't perform, I don't exactly understand how you could possibly bitch about a method which actually convinces the children to perform well so you can accurately test them at their real performance level rather than at their "I could give a shit, why should I care what my score is." level.
And even without corruption it isn't as if a grade actually reflects how well the material was learned. Grades reflect all sorts of things that have nothing to do with education, like dedication and the ability to brown nose the teacher. Teachers reward those who repeat what the book rather than those who demonstrate actual understanding of the material.
In many schools they remove credit from students grades for frequent absence, frequent tardiness, or as a result of in school suspension. Those things have no impact on whether the student understands the material taught but school funding is determined largely by attendance metrics. Any student who fully understands the material taught in a class, at any level of education from K to Masters should receive an A in the class if the purpose of a class is for students to learn the material and the grade is a measure of how well they have learned it.
... after all, if there's no money in it, why do it?
Unchecked capitalism is the way our whole society should
be run. All those little old ladies of the future had better have
$5 bills spare to make sure they get help crossing the street.
I remember, quite vividly, a story from grade school. I was 8.
Me: "Some of my friends are getting money for good grades."
Mom: "And?"
Me: "Can I get paid for my grades?"
Mom: "No."
Me: "Why?"
Mom: "Because your dad and I *expect* you to get good grades."
I thought it was not particularly fair. Not necessarily that I wasn't getting paid, but that others were when I was doing (in many cases) more work and achieving more. I said such... actually, it came out as, "If I'm doing what they're doing, why do they get what I don't?" and was told that "life isn't fair, but we're not going to bribe you to do something that you should be doing anyway."
In hindsight, I'm quite glad that they didn't. I ended up much better for it. I also think I did better overall than most of the kids who were paid. My goals were sold to me as long term from the get go. I needed to do well in school, not because I'd get some reward in 3 months, but because if I wanted to do what I want for the remainder of my life, I'd have to work to get there. It forced me to look years down the road right away. Plus, when I didn't grasp that (the idea of planning 10 years in the future when I was 8 was a pretty big thing to get my head around) they were more than happy to help me with that.
This sort of program feeds into feelings of entitlement, and to the feeling that an action requires an immediate reward. Immediate success rises, but when these kids get out of school, how are they going to react when they don't immediately get what they feel like they deserve? I have a feeling that it'll be an unhappy awakening.
Because throwing money at a problem doesn't automatically solve it. With all the bitching and moaning you hear about how much money wealthy suburban schools have to spend, study after study has shown that a long- or short-term influx of cash into a lousy school doesn't improve results. Ditto for transplanting students from lousy schools to wealthy schools - the students just don't improve that much. Money isn't the problem here, it is culture.
First of all, I can only type so much before I need to get back to work, so referring a reader to an article on Wikipedia will likely cover far more ground.
But sure, I'll bite:
If a child receives a reward from a family member, that person will be able to "bend the rules" at any point, because there's no actual contract. They could gradually provide diminishing returns, and/or decide that grades on a certain subject are worth more "starting right now" (because, for example, the student is great in math, but bad in literature, so the priority shifts to increasing the literature grade).
On the other hand, an institution is implementing a mechanism. That same institution is providing the behavior pattern that will be reinforced. No matter how many rule subsets that institution applies, it will always have to be uniform, so the children could, in effect, "game the system". For example, if getting your grade from a D to a B provides a higher incentive than increasing a grade from a C to an A, then the kids will do the math. It's an objective mechanism, which, if modified, will be modified uniformly. You won't give different students different rewards for the same exact achievement. This becomes a static, objective reinforcement mechanism which *does not exist in the real world*. When they encounter real-world motivation systems, the rules will suddenly change, and they'll have to battle their now-ingrained expectations.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
That depends if you think that knowledge gained is the only purpose of school and I think you would be hard pressed to make such an argument.
If you're trying to produce people who can work together and be productive members of society then it makes sense to dock people that not followed rules which directly relate to that. In-class suspensions for disruptive behavior makes a lot of sense to me in this regard although I don't consider hugging in the hallway to be disruptive.
Much of the business world involves finding constructive tasks to perform when you are bored out of your skull so it makes sense that school would discourage disruptive behavior even if the student proves that he understand the materials being taught.
Do I think schools should be this way? I don't know, society has a way of filtering out people that are destructive or at least finding creative ways to embrace the destructive nature of particular individuals. I don't think students should be robots but I also think disrupting a class is unacceptable so I guess I like it but would favor relaxing many rules that were only enacted because a few people were uncomfortable with the setting such as the banning of hugging.
While this might be a motivation thing, there is another point to be made: Kids that are getting money for grades are less likely to need to get jobs to buy all the junk they want. After school jobs might be good experience, but I suspect that focusing more on education might be better.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
When I first started home schooling my son, I went into a 'home school store' where they were giving a little seminar on how to legally home school. After it was over, the owner of the store came over and talked to me. I had flagged her as a wacko when she tried to convince me that the school system was specifically designed to do exactly what you describe. Since then, those that have tried to convince me that home schooling is a bad idea, almost always end up falling back on the whole "but kids need to 'socialized' to fit into society" line of reasoning. It's a little creepy how the general public whole heartily agrees with the "wackos".
Before I answer I have to say that we're getting into specifics which blurs the macro effect: applying these types of mechanical conditions to children, especially small children, will embed patterns into their minds that will be difficult to out-grow. You can grow out of "in bed by 10pm", but giving you material compensation for what you should realize is inherently for your benefit (education), will make you stop want to practice "educating yourself" once that compensation is gone.
To your question: Kids won't get fired from school. They aren't effected by the economy in this program. If a child does well they will continue to get paid, which is a parody compared to the real world. They don't have to seek promotion, they keep traveling though a linear path (think 1950s-style employment). They don't have to "find a job at another school". But most importantly, the environment is artificial. The difference is between real life, and a game.
What happens when that child grows up and the reward system becomes chaotic? You can be a hard, studious worker, and still get laid off. You have to develop communication and social skills to get a job and keep it. In an artificial environment, they just need the grades, and they can completely ignore their surroundings.
And one last "perk": imagine a child from a poor family. Suddenly attention is placed on the child to earn income at an extremely early age in order to provide for their family. When placed in a situation like that, where they might need to get good grades in order to feed and clothe their siblings, what's the difference between that and child labor?
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
While I may have a low opinion of home-schooling I don't think it is wrong, with the right parents it can give a kid a great education but there's no falling back on the "kids need to be socialized" argument. It is a valid concern with home schooling and often does result in adults that are not well adjusted. That doesn't mean its impossible for a home schooled child to be well adjusted as there are plenty of success stories out there as evidence. Sports and other out of school social engagements have often been used with great success to supplement the lack of peer interaction. Of course there are plenty of failures so you can't fault people for being skeptical.
Both methods have their problems, if a parent understands their responsibility then more power to them as there is a chance they could do a better job. A friend of mine back home was home-schooled by his wacko religious fanatical mother and it didn't turn out so well even though he was a smart kid. After a few years of rebelling and getting away from his mother he has evened out quite a bit even though he is still a bit awkward.
Of course I went through public school and still ended up awkward until a few years of college and work life straightened me out which is why I don't have a problem with home schooling in general as neither method guarantees any result.
As I said. The home school "wackos" and the public school "general public" describe the public school systems goals to be the same thing. Unfortunately academic education is not it.
I had to read your post a few times, mostly because I have such a hard time relating to it. You are implying either directly or indirectly that you coast or have coasted in school because there's no money in it. Also, it seems to be that you inherently find no value in education.
Well, I agree almost 100% with him.
I coasted in school because I hated it. I kicked ass on tests, but once I hit high school, I pretty much stopped doing homework. I graduated, barely, after failing one required class twice and passing an "alternate" version of that class the third time.
It's not that I found no inherent value in education. I spent plenty of time at home learning and practicing things that I cared about, and that's why I now have a well-paying job that I enjoy.
The problem was that the "education" offered at school was, with a few exceptions, wholly uninteresting. I didn't, and still don't, see any inherent value in answering several pages of questions about the plot of Watership Down, or memorizing the list of Indian tribes that lived in this region centuries ago. I saw no inherent value in getting high grades at the end of the quarter, either, so I didn't.
Of all the memories I have, none of the really good ones are about money. All of them are about something I worked hard over a period of time and felt proud of either the accomplishment or the praise of others, sometimes both. I remember skating backwards for the first time. I remember getting my dad to come to one of my shows. An odd memory I have is working hard for my dad one summer doing dreadful work in the hot summer sun, but it was for the purpose of helping him build the house our family lived in.
Do you have any fond memories of doing things that serve no greater purpose and end up being useless to you in the future? Digging holes just to fill them back in, perhaps? Spending all day counting the grains of sand in a jar, only to find that the person who asked already has the answer and doesn't care anyway?
Because that's what school felt like most of the time. I have plenty of fond memories of accomplishing things that I worked hard at, but none of them were school projects.
And in fact, the best memories I have of schoolwork are for the work I got the lowest grades on: the anti-prohibition essay that resulted in me being the only kid to fail DARE, the essay on Fahrenheit 451 that focused on an incidental bit of technology rather than the philosophical issues the teacher wanted me to write about, the epilogue to The Grapes of Wrath in which I imitated Steinbeck's style and expressed my dislike for that tedious novel.
However, I have found that the less tangible rewards (time is a big one for me now) are far more rewarding.
I agree, time is a great reward. That's why I chose to use my time for things I cared about instead of wasting it on meaningless schoolwork.
Money is a great incentive for higher grades, and if scoring higher is the goal, then paying kids for schoolwork is the way to achieve it. But I think that's the wrong goal. Grades don't matter. We don't gain anything by convincing kids to work harder at meaningless tasks that provide no real benefit for them or anyone else.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
You gave us the answer already. If a child is properly socially adjusted, he or she will immediately shun those peers who don't help the group in some way, and those peers will either learn to adjust or they will be left behind. Society is all about group function, and a classroom ought to be a reflection of that. The issue is that instead of allowing children to partake in a society inside the classroom the same way they would outside it and to punish each other for transgressions, we have raised the THINK OF THE CHILDREN banner to protect the outliers and denied the classroom society its ability to function normally. Then we put a harried, poorly educated single adult in front of the class and expect that adult to moderate everything in order to produce the same social outcomes that the class would naturally grow into on its own (with guidance, of course - and with proper modeling from the outside world. One more great reason to go on field trips and community service outings is to widen the range of social experiences a child has!).
Now, I don't advocate leaving kids behind just because they don't "fit in". I think everyone needs to have some place to fit... but if a child is having issues in a regular classroom it'd be nice if there were more alternatives than special education or juvenile detention centers. I've known kids who in 4th or 5th grade, having come from working-class homes, decided that they wanted to continue the blue-collar tradition. It's not a great choice but it would make a lot more sense to help the kid understand that by sending them out to apprentice themselves for a year with a tradesman or trade school (and maybe they will like it - and there's nothing wrong with training more plumbers and mechanics!) than it does to do what we currently do: "It's school! You NEED it! You'll never get by in the outside world with a 5th grade education, so shut up and do your homework!"
Education is the cornerstone of democracy and it's fantastic that we are setting our bar "high" (yeah, right) for our most precious resource - our future leaders. However, not everyone can be president. Why not encourage trade work and usable skills to help kids realize why reading and math are necessary, instead of pretending they're useless as long as they're students? As a side effect, I'm pretty sure kids who are proud of what they're doing in school ALSO get better grades, plus gain better understanding... and you don't have to bribe anyone!
Warning: Lame personal anecdote about getting paid for grades below.
When I was in Second Grade my grandfather started a tradition where he would give me $20 and put $20 into an account as a small college fund for a Good Report card (His idea of good was all at least Half A's with nothing lower than a B...except Penmanship. I think I got straight C's in Penmanship.)
Obviously $20 in hand and $20 a decade from then was never enough that I worked for good grades for the lone purpose of getting that money. I think it was more of a "My grandfather must really be proud of me to be giving me money!"
I got a C one quarter in 4th grade English. I was so ashamed that I avoided my grandfather for days. He sat me down, talked to me about why I got that C, talked to me about the importance of good grades, and said "What if I told you that I was still going to give you the money?" I thought it over for a second or two as I was startled that he'd suggest that before telling him "I would say take it back because I didn't earn it." He wasn't really going to give it to me, he just wanted to see what I would say.
By middle school/high school he continued the tradition and I was handing the twenty dollars right back to him to put into my college fund. I think between the report card money, the money I would put in here and there, and interest (5% on savings was not uncommon back then) I had a bit over $2000 in that account when I went to college. (My grandfather was deceased for 2 years by then). It was at that time that I truly appreciated what he did for me because I REALLY needed that money when it came time to go to school.
What happens when the kids performance becomes an important contribution to family income? Then the kid actually can't score well on a subject and ? What happens when a kid hits the news for being beaten by a parent for not scoring well? What happens when kids cheat to score higher? What happens when its easier to mug the kid who did well then to be the kid that did well? Its a piss poor solution to complex problem.
Because blue collar work, "working with your hands", is shunned and looked down at. You're getting dirty. You're using your body and not your brain. I'm fairly sure, even here you will find quite a few people who consider people who learn a trade "too dumb to do something smart".
And salaries reflect that. Unjustified, if you ask me. I tried my hand at a few "blue collar" part time jobs while getting my degree. Money is always welcome, but this money was hard earned. Not to mention that I am unable to put stones on top of each other in a way that they stay that way.
Now, I'd be lying if I said I'm unhappy that my "brainy" work of programming and IT administration is better paid than plumbing and bricklaying. Hey, even I am a little selfish. I just don't understand it. If you'd ask me what's harder, it's a no brainer. On one hand pushing a few buttons on a keyboard, on the other lugging around a few 100 pounds of cement and bricks...
And if you ask me what's more important... well, try to live in a well secured server...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Work that will be replaced by robots in 10-20 years (I'm not saying construction sites will be 100% robotic, there will be 5-10 employees on site but they won't be moving bricks around) should be looked down on, so people don't accidentally dedicate their lives to it.