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A Times.com article provocatively titled Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School? came my way this morning (via the Chief Happiness Officer.
It's about a study done across 4 American cities on the benefits of paying kids for educational activities or outcomes (each city used a different model).
Read the article, because there are too many bits I'd like to pull out and quote. The most important outcome appears to be though that paying kids for activity (eg attendance, reading) improves their performance more than just paying for grades.
This bit about the New York, where there was no measured success, has particular wider implications that interest me (ref the subject line of this post).
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Of course the study wasn't about "bribing" kids , that just makes for a better headline. It was about paying them, either for a successful outcome (I'd call this a "commission model") or for activity performed (a "contractor model"?). And why the hell not? Education (or worse, achieving high grades) is not an end in itself in the real world except for people who have the luxury of being able to pursue knowledge for knowledge's sake. I think we're doing kids, teens and adults at all levels of the education system a huge disservice presenting it as such.
In the adult world, tangible rewards come in the form of money. Kids know that. They have a very good grasp on the value of money - they know exactly how many sweets their dollar of pocket money will get them (example from an earlier age :) ). There comes a time when ribbons and gold stars just aren't substantial any more.
Paying kids through school would provide so many early opportunities for practical lessons about money management. It would output young people already comfortable with the idea of working to earn, better equipped to transition into the workforce, possibly with funds already saved to invest in their great idea, support themselves through tertiary education or take an OE while they figure out what they actually want to do with the rest of their life.
Betcha it would cut truancy rates as well.
Obviously money isn't the only motivator, and it's not the best motivator for everyone. It wouldn't have done much for me. But
That's got to be worth a try.
It's about a study done across 4 American cities on the benefits of paying kids for educational activities or outcomes (each city used a different model).
But all this time, there has been only one real question, particularly in America's lowest-performing schools: Does it work?
To find out, a Harvard economist named Roland Fryer Jr. did something education researchers almost never do: he ran a randomized experiment in hundreds of classrooms in multiple cities. 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. The results, which he shared exclusively with TIME, represent the largest study of financial incentives in the classroom — and one of the more rigorous studies ever on anything in education policy.
Read the article, because there are too many bits I'd like to pull out and quote. The most important outcome appears to be though that paying kids for activity (eg attendance, reading) improves their performance more than just paying for grades.
This bit about the New York, where there was no measured success, has particular wider implications that interest me (ref the subject line of this post).
The students were universally excited about the money, and they wanted to earn more. They just didn't seem to know how. When researchers asked them how they could raise their scores, the kids mentioned test-taking strategies like reading the questions more carefully. But they didn't talk about the substantive work that leads to learning. "No one said they were going to stay after class and talk to the teacher," Fryer says. "Not one."
We tend to assume that kids (and adults) know how to achieve success. If they don't get there, it's for lack of effort — or talent. Sometimes that's true. But a lot of the time, people are just flying blind.
~~~
Of course the study wasn't about "bribing" kids , that just makes for a better headline. It was about paying them, either for a successful outcome (I'd call this a "commission model") or for activity performed (a "contractor model"?). And why the hell not? Education (or worse, achieving high grades) is not an end in itself in the real world except for people who have the luxury of being able to pursue knowledge for knowledge's sake. I think we're doing kids, teens and adults at all levels of the education system a huge disservice presenting it as such.
In the adult world, tangible rewards come in the form of money. Kids know that. They have a very good grasp on the value of money - they know exactly how many sweets their dollar of pocket money will get them (example from an earlier age :) ). There comes a time when ribbons and gold stars just aren't substantial any more.
Paying kids through school would provide so many early opportunities for practical lessons about money management. It would output young people already comfortable with the idea of working to earn, better equipped to transition into the workforce, possibly with funds already saved to invest in their great idea, support themselves through tertiary education or take an OE while they figure out what they actually want to do with the rest of their life.
Betcha it would cut truancy rates as well.
Obviously money isn't the only motivator, and it's not the best motivator for everyone. It wouldn't have done much for me. But
Because of the small size of the school system, the Washington sample was less well balanced than those in the other cities. But its results contain one remarkable finding: the kids who were helped the most by the experiment were the ones who are normally among the hardest to reach.
That's got to be worth a try.
