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Will paying kids to go to school and do their best work?
Filed Under Dealing With Stress, Graphic Organizers, The way I see it
It was with some interest that I read this recently
“Desperate for ways to ratchet up test scores and close the achievement gap separating white and minority students, school officials from Tucson to Boston are paying kids who put up good numbers. The District joined the list this fall, launching a one-year study of 3,300 middle schoolers who can earn up to $100 every two weeks for good grades, behavior and attendance. On Oct. 17, the first payday for the Capital Gains program, students collected an average of $43″.
Paying kids to go to school? My students have told me many times that their attendance would improve, and they would work harder if they got paid to come to school and work. I counter by saying that some adults who get paid to work miss work and don’t necessarily do a good job at work. So it seems to me getting paid to do something doesn’t always motivate people to do it. Of course at a job, you’d eventually get fired if you were a slacker and missed work too often. At school, we over look all kinds of things to keep kids in school until they graduate.
I really don’t know for sure if paying students to attend school will work in the long run. although, given what my students tell me, I think it might. Of course, there’s lots of opposition to the idea. Some people say that the extra money that the rewards cost should be put into the system to improve it so that these kids will do well. Let me tell you, lots of money has been put into the system to try to help these kids, but as far as I’m concerned, the jury is still out. Other people say that paying kids to do well at school will kill intrinsic motivation- when the goodies are gone so will the motivation.
Well, maybe and maybe not. I’ve written here before about how I believe that you can get students to be self motivated if you observe what their needs are and then create opportunities in class for those kids to meet their needs. Many of my students come from homes where there is little or no extra money for things like cell phones, mp3 players, computer games etc. Kids who don’t have these things definitely feel left out and get really discouraged about life and school because not having those things makes them feel like losers.
If we want these “at-risk” kids to stay in school and graduate, then maybe we need to make it possible for them to meet their needs for cool stuff. I don’t know. We’ve put money into lots of other programs like credit recovery and credit rescue, and it doesn’t seem to make that much difference for some kids in the long run. Maybe the possibility of earning prepaid cellphones, mp3 players and gift certificates will motivate kids to do their best. After all, adults are sometimes motivated to do their best by offering incentives. Kids are probably no different. Maybe there are lots of corporate sponsors out there that could help make this happen, and it wouldn’t cost the school system much if anything. Who knows unless we ask.
What does the research say about all this? What makes these reward programs work?
Researchers say the commitment of all adults is essential to student reward programs. A Stanford University study of 186 charter schools with incentives showed a “consistent impact” averaging four percentile points on reading scores. The report, released in May, said the stronger and more enthusiastic the staff and parents, the larger the gain.
That looks promising. But adults have to buy into the reward program for it to work or it won’t. I haven’t really done any research on the topic. I’m just going by what my students tell me. Roland G. Fryer Jr., a Harvard economist, who has been involved in setting up these types of incentive programs in New York and Chicago allows, “This is not a silver bullet,” … “But it’s better than sitting around and doing nothing.” Do you think! It’s not hard to agree with him. We need to do something creative, something different.
There are some questions though. How will students who don’t need the cash or cool incentives to motivate them to do well at school react? I know that there’s some resentment about students who have learning disabilities getting extra time for exams and being able to use review notes during them. I can just imagine the reaction if some students could get rewards for doing well while others couldn’t. I really don’t know how you’d get around that problem. What do you think? Can a rewards program be made to work and seem fair?
Photo thanks to Rick Audet
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18 Responses to “Will paying kids to go to school and do their best work?”
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I’m not a fan of paying students because I don’t think it will work. It’s not like students are not getting good grades because they don’t want to…same with merit pay for teachers. It’s not like if only teachers got a bonus their students would do better. Every teacher wants their students to learn they just don’t always know how to make that happen. In addition, I think it hurts motivation in the long term. What happens in college where you’re not paid to learn, in fact you pay someone else?
Mathew,
Thanks for your comment and the links to the other articles. The comments are especially interesting.
Mathew,
I’ve just thought of something that I forgot when I wrote the article. In a way here in Ontario, we do pay some kids to go to school.
Kids who are over 16 and on their own get student welfare. The benefit will only continue if the student continues to attend school and do well.
The idea being that if society helps kids finish school, they will be able to contribute more to society than if they dropped out.
Elona,
One thing that you wrote jumped out at me –
“I know that there’s some resentment about students who have learning disabilities getting extra time for exams and being able to use review notes during them.”
Please understand that kids with LDs would love to be able to complete schoolwork as easily as their peers. But despite all their best efforts, they can not. Help your students understand what fair is (as defined by Rick Lavoie) – “Fair doesn’t mean giving everyone the same, fair means giving everyone what they need.”
(And in my school, if all kids needed extra time, I would give it to them. Or, shorten my tests or quizzes. The point is to help each student demonstrate what they know. Let’s give them sufficient time to demonstrate that and not penalize them if they need additional time).
Karen,
I agree with you. I’d forgotten the Rick Lavoie quote. Thanks for reminding me. I understand the challenges kids with LD’s face. I see it everyday in my Learning Strategies class where I teach these students strategies that will help them be as successful as they can be. Students with learning disabilities have to work harder and smarter. That’s a fact.
Elona,
The example of student welfare sounds more like grants for grants for college…it’s not quite paying students to do well but it is setting up a condition that students stay in school. I think that makes sense.
Mathew,
The student welfare I’m talking about is not for college kids. It’s for kids in grade 10 and up. It pays for the necessities of life so that kids can stay in school.
It seems that we already have the kids convinced that “making good grades” will lead to higher paychecks in the future. It’s the only reason they give for even going to school anymore (“So I can go to college and get a good job.”) That’s not working. Why would paying them directly be any better? The immediacy? As soon as the novelty wore off, so would the results. We have smart, able kids leaving school in droves, not because they don’t recognize the financial benefits of having a diploma, but because they see it as being irrelevant to their lives, and they’re sick of wasting their time doing things that don’t serve a purpose.
All children want to know. Has it ever occured to us to ask why a six year old loves their studies but a sixteen year old loathes them?
I often ask my students, “If I wanted you guys to read a book so badly that I was willing to pay you for it, what have I just taught you is valuable?” The honest reply that I never fail to get from them is, “You’d be teaching us that money is the valuable thing, and that books aren’t worth much unless we get something for reading them.”
Children require content presented in a literary format, filled with good ideas instead of just facts, and to be treated as persons, not as animals to be manipulated with positive or negative conditioning.
Stephen,
Thanks for you comment. Recently it seems the more things change the more things stay the same. Why is that? I’d like to know.
Interesting question. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that, while circumstances have certainly changed (and are changing more rapidly as time goes on), people are fundamentally the same. We want our lives to mean something. We want our children to be good people and to outlive us. You know…
I don’t think that the ways that people learn is all that different, either. We’ve simply become so overburdened with details that we’ve forgotten to ask questions like, “How does the mind develop?” or “What does it mean to be an educated person?” Even simple questions of method, like “Where did this antagonism between teachers and students come from?” seem to elude us.
Once more people start asking those questions honestly, I think we’ll find our way back. But it won’t be politicians and bureaucrats that do it for us. It will be small pockets of disillusioned yet idealistic people who sense that something is terribly wrong, yet have the overwhelming compulsion to rebuild the walls of this delapidated fortress.
You might be interested in an article about research that speaks to these pay-kids-to-learn programs:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-grolnick5-2008sep05,0,2652576.story
Looks like Obama may nominate Arne Duncan, who backs one of these programs in the Chicago schools, for Sec. of Education.
There are teachers who know how to get kids motivated, and there are programs to teach teachers how to build kids’ self-motivation. Seems like the money would be better spent there, because self-motivation goes on and on, while money gets exhausted. And there’s not guarantee that the motivation the money stimulated will remain once you take away the dollars…
Kathy
PS My books talk about how to motivate kids to learn: Motivated Minds: Raising Children to Love Learning and Pressured Parents, Stressed-out Kids.
Kathy,
Thanks for the link to your article. Could you please post the link to your book as a comment. I’m sure people would be interested.
Kathy, your article has said it in a nut shell. For many kids
“What drains this excitement — research shows that intrinsic motivation declines steadily from third to ninth grade — is a curriculum that doesn’t connect to children’s goals and interests, and the increasing dependence on grades, competition or awards as motivators.”
But that’s only part of the problem
Elona suggested I post the URLs for my books,
Motivated Minds: Raising Children to Love Learning, and Pressured Parents, Stressed-out Kids: Dealing with Competition While Raising a Successful Child.
So here they are:
http://www.pressuredparents.com & http://www.kathyseal.net (click on Motivated Minds on the lower right hand side of the home page)
You can check out my blog too at http://pressuredparents.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit.php or on my website above.
Happy reading, and thanks Elona!
Kathy
I have been personally very outspoken in public about the issue of paying kids for what should be baseline expectations. I’m working toward raising awareness that many of the “ills” facing our education system today is due to the lack of sufficient social skills and character development in our youth (and, in our adults, in many cases).
I’m the President and Founder of a US-based company that has built a very comprehensive and successful social skills education curriculum that re-grounds students in those critical interpersonal skills and character traits that will make them successful not only immediately in their school “careers” but long-term as they leave school to enter the job market.
I can say that our programs help students understand “what’s in it for me?” if they do a good job, show respectful and appropriate behavior, and focus on positive attitudes instead of following the tenets of an increasingly rude, crude, and indifferent society.
And, what happens when schools implement it is nothing short of awe-inspiring.
* Time on task increases
* Discipline problems drop as much as 80%
* Student, teacher and staff morale improves
* School culture is transformed
* Absenteeism drops
* Academic achievement goes up — double-digit or more improvements in test scores even in the first year and the improvements continue as the school remains on the program.
And the best part is, the kids DO it because they are motivated by the right reasons, not because someone has paid them off to do it. So, this model is scalable, repeatable, and sustainable, which a “buyout plan” such as “pay for performance” initiatives aren’t.
Elona had suggested I include my website address for anyone who wants more information so here it is: http://www.socialsmarts.com
I’m also happy to answer any inquiries, but in general, our philosophy is that it’s high-time we re-civilized the schools because our kids, our families, our communities depend on it.
It seems what we’re breeding here is a generation of kids who are going to be turned out on the work force with an extreme desire for money, so much so that they will go to bosses and refuse to do their work unless they’re getting raises left and right, and who will explain it away as incentive (for a very good example of this, take a look at Summer School. Same thing happened there.)
As for children slacking off because they’re supposedly discouraged by not having the same cool gadgets as everyone else; that’s just plain depressing. If they don’t feel that they can be seen if they aren’t decked out with the latest and greatest technology, they should investigate taking courses online (in some cases they will even provide the technology needed and reimberse you for the costs.)
In closing, as a high school student coming from a less than priviledged family, I find students demanding money to do their work more than a little insulting. I mean, I’m doing the work for free. Maybe it’s about time I start demanding equal treatment?
Knowledge is worth so much in the long run. By imparting this knowledge to young minds we are giving children the means to have a successful future, and in addition we must pay them? We would be denying them a great lesson in life: “Live for today and not tomorow’s satisfaction.” Later in life, oppertunity will present itself that would prove fruitful in the future, but if there is no instant rewards, the individuals may pass by this opertunity. True, these are just children and they may not see this point, but I feel we should leave it to the able parents to enforce attendance. If this is simply not possible, they should devise a better plan for ensuring their childs education, which should be a top priority. Teachers or parents should explain that knowledge should be insentive enough for children.
thands for helping me w/my speech