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Should Kids Be Bribed To Do Well In School?
theodp writes "Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. did something education researchers almost never do: he ran a randomized experiment in hundreds of classrooms in Chicago, Dallas, Washington, and New York to help answer a controversial question: Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School? He used mostly private money to pay 18,000 kids a total of $6.3 million and brought in a team of researchers to help him analyze the effects. He got death threats, but he carried on. His findings? If incentives are designed wisely, it appears, payments can indeed boost kids' performance as much as or more than many other reforms you've heard about before — and for a fraction of the cost."
It's how we motivate adults at work so why not kids in school?
If it turns out to be a better use of resources and we turn out students who do better in school then it can't be all bad.
An even better question: who the hell sent this guy death threats?!
pay them not to get pregnant! pit greed vs. breed.
In Soviet Russia, bribes school YOU!
*ducks and runs from thread*
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
It teaches them the way the real world works. Do adults do their jobs because "they are supposed to" or "out of the kindness of their own hearts." The real world pays you for the work you perform, why preclude children from that, just because we can.
If it works and it is more cost effective then other types of reform, then more power to them.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
Not bribed, PAID. Being paid is the only reason most adults do anything hard. It doesn't fucking matter if it "loses touch with what education should be" - all that matters is RESULTS. If it improves the children's grades more than other incentives of the same costs, it should be done.
While I generally feel the government shouldn't be in charge of raising our kids, they ARE in charge of educating them (if your kids go to public school).
Also, unlike so many other government programs and tax breaks, this actually helps out poor families more than rich families. If little Delray can make money by studying, he's less likely to go "hang" with a bad crowd and steal money. He even has a chance to help provide himself with a better life now AND later.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
http://outcampaign.org/
Blatantly behaviorist. Extrinsic motivators are easily extinguished. We need to find and nurture intrinsic motivators. Unfortunately, this is hard, and the educational establishment is looking for easy solutions. Go read "Punished by Rewards" by Alphie Kohn
If done right, this might not be a bad idea. The traditional education system in the US has changed a lot in the past 50+ years:
Adding another carrot to the arsenal can't be too bad, given all the problems students face now.
Our current education system is failing. Its very evident by looking at any national ranking charts that compare countries. We need to do something before things crash. And believe me, when it crashes it will affect YOU. Crime, the economy, poverty, health care. What wouldn't be fair would be you reaping the benefits of education without paying for it. Public education (yes, even the crappy system we have now) helps EVERYONE, those without children, those with children in private school, the elderly who's children have already finished school, EVERYONE.
The experiments so far indicate that paying students for results improves only the results paid for. Pay for attendance, you get attendance. Pay for grades on quizzes, you get grades on quizzes. End of year scores don't improve much, if at all. And when the money stops, so does the improvement.
You might want to read the article. It states quite clearly that paying kids for books read increased standardized test scores on reading and that these were long term gains
Do adults do their jobs because "they are supposed to" or "out of the kindness of their own hearts."
I do my job because I love it.
I've been offered more money (sometimes *much* more) to do something else. Each time, I turned it down.
The word, “bribe,” has two very different common meanings.
The first is a payment to somebody to do something illicit. It might or might not be something the person objects to doing, but it is something against the rules. A border agent might or might not think smoking pot is a good idea, but if you pay him to look the other way while you drive your “plant tissue samples” across the border, that’s a bribe.
The second, and the usage implied here, is a payment to somebody to do something they don’t want to do but which isn’t illicit. It’s especially applied to things that most people think the person should want to do without compensation but, for whatever reason, the person isn’t interested. If you offer to pay your spouse to fold the laundry, that’s often considered a bribe.
But, clearly, almost all paid work falls into the second category. While the work I do isn’t objectionable and pays well, there’s simply no way I’d do it unless you paid me (and paid me well). There are other things I’d rather do for money, but they don’t pay as well. And there are still other things I do and would do that either don’t pay or that I have to pay to do.
So, unless you think your boss is bribing you to go to work, or unless you’d happily give up your paycheck but still continue at your job, it is most hypocritical to call what’s described in this article a bribe. You might wish that students would put in maximum effort even if they don’t get a cash reward, but your boss wishes the exact same thing of you.
Whether or not paying students is an effective end economical method of turning them into honorable and effective citizens is a valid topic of discussion, but such payments are most emphatically not bribes.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
'as a taxpayer, i don't think it's fair that i'm already paying for your child's education,...'
You're not; you are paying back the cost of your education. That is being invested in the education of the current students, who will, in turn, pay it back.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Studies show that adding pay to a task decreases the internal perceived motivation for that same task. Actors conclud, subconsciously, that money is why they did it. Hence they are less likely in the future to do it unless they are paid again. Perilous to do this with the pursuit of knowledge.
Of course in a typical public school, there are already serious problems with busywork versus genuine pursuit of understanding. In that context, payment might be the right thing to do, because as others have noted, payment is indeed what humans expect in exchange for busy work.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
You can't choose your parents, that's why civillised countries provide free education for children, free (or subsidised) medical care and a small amount of money for food and clothes if the families are very poor.
Parents have a great responsibility to their children, but as we all know, many irresponsible and incapable people have children.
Stick Men
A job is better than prison which is the closest analog to the current school system.
Students are expected to work extremely hard for an extremely long time with no short term payoff(indeed with short term penalties) and the only possible payoff being far enough off that the time could be measured in significant fractions of their entire lifespan so far.
Some kids manage this.
Many don't and that's a failing of the system and not just the individual.
it was for me.
And thus the entire problem with trying to inject rational and evidence based thinking into the system is summed up perfectly.
The people who do well are the people who succeed in the current system.
The people people who succeeded in the current system no matter how poor the current system is believe that only they and people like them ever *should* succeed or do well.
and so we see clouds of vitriol like the above.
what the hell?
This program is an evidence based experiment.
That's not ignorance.
Ignorance is throwing round rhetoric about how you think the world should and shouldn't be based on nothing but your own self importance.
What?! You mean we can stop worshiping people that can hit/catch/throw balls? We should stop caring about far removed people who are famous for pretending to be other people? What a mad idea! Next you'll be telling us that war kills people, there is no god, and men watch porn. It'll lead to mass chaos!
Yes, I'm a proud Ahmurkin
SSC
the long term effects of paying children money for marks in school is not clear, and in many ways seemingly dangerous.
The compensation is deferred, but we already do pay students to do well in school. I had a full ride plus in college; that was a direct result of doing well in high school. I am a physician now, and the very good income I make is only available to people who did very well in school. "Study hard and you'll get a scholarship to college and a good job afterward" may be a lot more indirect than "Here's some cash, kid" but it pretty much only tested whether I was able to handle delayed gratification - otherwise it was very much paying me for doing well in school. This proposes to push that payment scheme down to kids who can't do decades-long delayed gratification, i.e. most of them., in order to improve their outcomes from education.
You don't like how your taxes are spent?
Welcome to society, where everyone doesn't like a program or two that their tax money funds.
You mad
What? Providing for my kids and sending them to school is the same as slavery? Just in case you did not notice, most slaves were not sent to school during the day, but to work. School benefits the child, not the parent.
Slavery is a horrible institution that is rightfully banned. It irks me when people compare working for wages or going to school to slavery.
Anarchists never rule
For the last year and a half of undergrad I had a job working at the local television station. For $5 an hour (about 1.5x minimum wage, pretty good at the time) 40 hours a week - I was doing pretty good for myself. The position essentially boiled down to watching TV 8 hours a day (it was a little more technical than that, but the technical part became second nature and I was basically watching TV 8 hours each day.)
When I graduated and got a 'real job' and went off into the real world ... I stopped watching TV. Nobody was paying me to watch TV, so why would I watch TV for free? Seemed stupid to me for people to watch television for hours at a time, for free.
Envision the practical applications of this theory - paying someone briefly for undesirable behavior, then stop paying them - they won't do that any more.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Jocks have always been a PITA for everyone that was *not* at Jock themselves. That said however, Jocks are nothing more than geeks of the human body.
Funny that computer geeks have no problem programming and performing other advanced mental tasks, yet inflict serious damage and neglect the health of their own body. Try using those brains to drop the weight and improve your cardio. If the Jocks can do it, no reason you can't too.
Life is not for the lazy.