Community Checkup

Bloggingheads recently posted a great discussion between Glenn Loury (Brown University economist) and Heather McDonald (of Manhattan Institute) about the NYC school system incentives program. Since this program was implemented last June, it has been something that has bothered me to no end. From a 2007 NYT article:

NEW YORK CITY has decided to offer cash rewards to some students based on their attendance records and exam performance. Diligent, high-achieving seventh graders will be able to earn up to $500 in a year. The plan is the brainchild of Roland G. Fryer, an economist who has been appointed as “chief equality officer” of the city’s Department of Education.

The assumption that underlies the project is simple: people respond to incentives. If you want people to do something, you have to make it worth their while. This assumption drives virtually all of economic theory. [Source: NYT]

Yep, a Harvard economist touted as one of the best and brightest up-and-coming black academics thinks it’s a good ideas to pay kids to learn. As this article points out, it ignores compelling research pointing to this being ineffective, or worse yet, counterproductive. But it doesn’t take an in-depth understanding of the research to come to the conclusion that this might be a bad idea. And the problem isn’t with the concept of incentives. Incentives are used all the time to motivate children and adults. The problem is with money as the primary incentive for getting children to learn. Of all the means to motivate children, money is probably the least effective way to do so and the most rife with potential negative side-effects (e.g. diminished caring about learning, sense of entitlement to payment).

Monetary incentives is also out of touch with one of the key factors needed to best promote achievement in youth–an intrinsic desire, or at least an appreciation, for the endeavor of learning. It takes building an academic culture in schools to nurture this, not building a payment structure.

This quote nicely sums up the what’s really wrong with this program:

[T]the plan will distract us from investigating a more pertinent set of questions: why don’t children get intrinsic satisfaction from learning in school, and how can this failing of education be fixed? Virtually all kindergartners are eager to learn. But by fourth grade, many students need to be bribed. What makes our schools so dystopian that they produce this powerful transformation, almost overnight? [Source: NYT]