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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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!
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.