Reasonable incentives? Bribes?

A few days ago, USA Today reported on the increasing prominence of financial/material incentives for students success. From a raffle for a TV to straight-up cash payments for high test scores, more districts are experimenting.  Here’s the argument in favor, from the USA Today story:

The two-year New York City experiment, begun last September, essentially pays students monthly to do their best on skills tests. If it seems like an economist’s dream, that’s because it’s the brainchild of wunderkind Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who also serves as the schools’ chief equality officer. He came up with the idea while trying to figure out how to make school “tangible” for disadvantaged kids with few successful role models. “I just thought that giving them some short-term incentives to do what’s in their long-term best interests would be a good way to go.”

While teachers talk about success, he says, it’s not enough to tell a kid that, in the long term, hard work will pay off. “We’re asking them to look down a path that they have probably never seen anyone go down … and then to have the wisdom and the fortitude to wait for their reward.”

In her blog Bridging Differences, education analyst Diane Ravitch responds:

And as psychologist Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore wrote in The New York Times several months back, ‘if we have to pay people to do the right thing, no one will do the right thing unless they are paid to do it.’ Down the drain will be any idea of intrinsic motivation, as well as any sense of civic duty.

Then there is the question of exactly what these tests mean and why they matter so much. Imagine that the incentivists carry the day. We will have created an educational system that strives mightily (and maybe even successfully) to teach kids to check off the right box when given a choice of four. Pray tell, in what line of work will that skill be valuable in the future? I don’t know.

I instinctively agree with Ravitch and Schwartz on this.  But there is an important issue that underlies the incentive programs that we shouldn’t ignore.  Kids, especially kids who don’t come from communities where school success is modeled and implicitly required, need some concrete idea of what they’re going to get out of working hard in school.  Maybe we don’t need financial incentives, but this does speak to a need for more programs that get kids from impoverished neighborhoods out to see colleges, to see communities other than their own, to see adults for whom education has paid off.

But, it’s essential to present students with a nuanced view of how success happens.  Education blogger Eduwonkette cites this quote from the book Ain’t No Making It that highlights for me the essential flaw with the way schools try to instill a sense of long-term payoff for students:

The familiar refrain of “Behave yourself, study hard, earn good grades, graduate with your class, go on to college, get a good job, and make a lot of money” reinforces the feelings of personal inadequacy and failure that working-class students are likely to bear as a matter of course. By this logic, those who have not made it have only themselves to blame. Because it shrouds class, race, and gender barriers to success, the achievement ideology promulgates a lie, one that some students come to recognize as such.

Labels:

I tend to agree with the Ravitch position, although I never thought I’d say that.  Her positions sometimes seem mean-spirited to me.  I also agree with the blogger that “it’s essential to present students with a nuanced view of how success happens.” One way is to support supplementary education for students from impoverished neighborhoods, educational and life experiences that take them out of their communities into a wider world of possibility. 

Supplementary Education: The Hidden Curriculum of High Academic Achievement by Edmund Gordon speaks eloquently to this idea with respect to students of color.  I would extend it to all students who live in poverty, regardless of their color.

“This book makes the case and lays the conceptual foundation for the significance of supplementary education in reducing the academic achievement gap between majority students and students of color. It further elaborates on the idea of supplementary education, which is based on the assumption that high academic achievement is closely associated with exposure to family and community-based activities and learning experiences that occur outside of school in support of academic learning.”

With school budgets tight and schools often resistant to taking kids out into the wider world on field trips, travel or other real world experiences, providing supplementary education is easier said than done, but is something we should work toward.

Having said all of this, I came from a white middle class family, where dad gave us dollars for As on report cards.  I don’t think I only learn for dollars or only do the right thing because or when I am paid to.  So perhaps Fryer is on to something.

I come from a white middle/working class family and while many of my classmates’ families rewarded them with money for grades, my sister and I were never bribed, nor rewarded in that way.  I was intrinsically motivated to do well in school and I knew from an early age that I would go to college, even though neither of my parents had the opportunity to do so.

However, I am torn on the subject at hand.  I feel a strong affinity for intrinsic motivation in education, but I also think about one of the reasons that some of my former high school students gave for leaving or wanting to leave school (need for money and a job).

For some students that come from working class families, it is possible that the long term reward of a diploma and then a degree (2-6 years down the line) and then a career might not be within eyesight.

I studied in Denmark and they pay their young people a stipend while they are in school (it is on a sliding scale, and is somewhat based on whether or not the student still lives at home.) I think that while it is unwise to ALWAYS reward positive behavior with an extrinsic motivator, it may be an idea to help those students that have been otherwise shut out of the system.