Basically, I'm unimpressed with moralists who object to this new wave of programs that pay kids to do well in school. Parents--who can afford to--offer rewards all the time to their kids when they do well. I don't think it much matters that school authorities will take over that function.
Here's where my skepticism lies--the program assumes that the major problem with getting kids to function better in school is a lack of interest. Certainly that's part of the problem, but pre-high school, I don't think poor kids are much less interested in school than rich kids. The difference is the flood of distraction that weighs on poor black kids. Chief among them--getting your ass kicked. It's all well and good to give a kid $500 for acing a standardized test, but that doesn't do much for the constant violence which children in these neighborhoods are exposed to. When I was going to school in Baltimore in the 80s and early 90s, fully a third of my brain was occupied with the task of getting home safely. Another third was occupied with girls. The last third was an even split between (you know me now) the Dallas Cowboys, Rakim, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, and school. You can imagine how my scholastic career went.
And violence is just a part of it. It's coming home and not having an environment in which people are reading. It's the habits of your peer group and the unliklihood that they're a particularly studious bunch. It's the fact that study-habits are learned and not inbred, and that you need people around you who are interested also. I really hope this works, but the older I get and the more I read, the more I feel like we, as a society, aren't really set up to fix these problems. We can barely face up to big looming threats like energy consumption. How can we really hope to do anything at all for a troubled minority of citizens?
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It's perfectly true that morality and moralizers produce imbecilic public policy. Look at GOP economics, for one simple example. More serious is a basic question of motivation: what happens to students when the rewards are no longer there for the immediate taking? In other words, when they get to college, and no longer have the sense that a good grade yields instant payola? Will they have acquired a work ethic that sees them through? On the whole, I doubt it. What might be more effective is a system whereby grades are rewarded non-financially, but in terms of opportunities to do things, say in student government. This is a limited sort of opportunity, but probably a better life lesson.
I think college is different. First, you're older. Second, I doubt you're going to be paid for everything--doing better on the SAT, for instance. Third, in college--if you want it--there's a crowd of people who are all about studying. At most of these schools that crowd is a tiny tiny minority.
Clive Crook references an article from the Washington Post that might I say might have an answer.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/20/AR2008082002947_pf.html
The cultural indicators you mention--study habits, reading parents, etc. all pale in the face of structural factors.
And I'd say that who gives the money to the children actually does matter. Don't think about this as a program to create better educational outcomes, but as a program designed to embed certain ideological beliefs in institutions and constituencies.
What are the consequences of embedding market principles in the school system? Just over the last 15 years we've seen an increase in school "CEO's" as opposed to "superintendents."
The point of the trial program is to try it out and see if it works. All those other problems aren't going to be fixed now (or maybe ever). In DC schools now, a huge problem is just maintaining order with no carrot or stick to offer to kids. Hopefully, this will be an effective enough carrot to get the kids sitting in their seats paying attention. Learning to read well would be progress at this point.
"Certainly that's part of the problem, but pre-high school, I don't think poor kids are much less interested in school than rich kids. "
You have pretty well pegged the age. One teacher who had taught in"reduced-lunch" schools I saw quoted said that whne the kids start school they have the light of enthusiasm in thier eyes, but you could just see a little bit more of it die each year.
"And violence is just a part of it. It's coming home and not having an environment in which people are reading. It's the habits of your peer group and the unliklihood that they're a particularly studious bunch.'
This is a pronblem across society, not just for balck kids. Parents can say they are all for education, but when they themsleves have never known anyone, including themsleves, benefit in life form education, it's very hard for them to really believe what they are saying themselves. it will always look like some kind of hobby until you see it actually pay off for someone. Seeing school as hobby is not going to get you through the hard courses.
Good points Lester, but I'd add that there's a reason I didn't call those factors "cultural." There's nothing particularly cultural about having a mother who works two jobs and you not really having anyone at home to supervise. It's just a matter of not having resources. Likewise, in a country where people are screaming about a general literacy crisis, I don't want to jump on poor black folks for not reading. I don't think there's much cultural to black on black crime--white folks been killing each other over dumb shit like "honor" for centuries. But it is an entrenched problem.
I think any educator you talk to will agree that if the parents aren't actively engaged in their kids' education, there's very little schools can do. I, too, am very suspicious of the notion of paying kids to do well in school (regardless of who does it) - I knew a few parents who did that in my middle and high schools, and it seemed to have very little effect.
Sure, give the program a try and see if anything changes. My guess is it'll fail, because success in school stems from a cultural respect for education and direct parental involvement and concern. None of which seems to exist in much of D.C. If parents are cool with their kids dropping out to go hang with their homeboys, blast gangster rap and start racking up felonies, I'm not sure there's much schools can do about it.
My ex-wife is a grade school teacher for in inner-city district and another problem she seems to deal with a lot is that adminstrations, for various reasons, just never deal with students who are very disruptive. One or two kids acting out can be dealt with by a teacher, but if it is four or more, then the whole environment of the classroom is more harshly affected. Then no one learns when the teacher is spending all this time disiplining instead of teaching.
If the kid is sent to the office, the admin doesn't want to do anything out of laziness or a belief that "every kid is reachable". So the disruptors return to the class unpunished, and ruin the educational experience for the other 24 kids in the classroom.
Not that cracking down would solve what ails the schools, but at least it would clear some of the distractions.
Neat link, Sorn. The problem is, the success stories you hear about seem to be about the force of one personality-- that guy in Oakland, Jaime Escalante, that dude with the bat they made the movie about. Is it really true, as Will writes, that "A growing cohort of people possess the pedagogic skills to make "no excuses" schools flourish"? He says so, but doesn't offer anything in the way of substantiation. How many self-made millionaire Indians looking to teach are there, really?
Making life as a poor person less difficult seems like part of the solution, but it's hard for me to believe that there's some magic policy bullet (charter schools! Smash teachers' unions!) that will make things better.
Really, I think this is at least in part a bully pulpit issue-- if leaders are out there talking about how Reading Is Fundamental or whatever, maybe it'll be more on people's minds and change some expectations.
So I feel vaugley qualified to comment on this. Both my parents are teachers, My dad has taught school both in the Inner City in St. Louis and on several reservations in MT.
I feel lucky because I had something that most of my friends didn't have growing up. Parents who valued and stressed the importance of Education. Not just formal education but Poetry, Literature, History, and above all critical thinking and problem solving skills. Many of my freinds did not, and it is interesting to see the differences between those of my friends who went places and those who did not.
Intelligence it would seem has very little with success in school. The smartest person I know dropped out got a GED and is now washing dishes somewhere in Washington state. I think that the whole money payment thing has the potential to give a certain type of person the motivation to do well in school but for the most part I would say the odds are against money having a huge influence on grades.
How exactly is a child supposed to compete academically when he comes home and finds that his mother has pawned the furniture to go play bingo? When he's worried about whether or not dad is going to beat the stuffing out of him (if he even has a father). How exactly are kids supposed to value school when in order to keep from being terrorized they have to find friends that have enough clout to back them up and often in order to keep the friends they have they have to make school 3rd 4th or 5th on their list of priorities?
Can these problems be fixed? Education values a middle class ethic of delayed gratification and for most people in failing schools the emphasis is on today not tomorrow.
Because this problem is so immense, there is no single solution. It has to be addressed in many ways.
I honestly believe that Obama's win (if it happens) will change black america in ways we can't imagine.
For years film schools tried to recruit black students. Even with scholarships black students failed to apply. I guess the thinking was that majoring in film would be futile since there were so few successful black film makers.
After "Do the Right Thing" black students started applying in record numbers. They simply needed an example to show that it was possible. Obama will be able to demand black excellence in a way no one ever has. By this I mean he will have the largest bully pulpit a black man has ever had.
This is existential. Many poor black people (and other black people too) honestly believe that they are not really a part of the American family. Blacks in America are home, yet not. And although Obama will only be able to do but so much structurally, the little that he does will matter. More importantly, it is the change in consciousness that will do the most.
Conservatives who love to hate on poor black people should welcome Obama. He will tell this group everything they have been trying to say. And many will listen.
I can already imagine Obama, after moving to class-based affirmative action saying, "start SAT study groups in your communities." I'm telling you things will change in a way that no government program could foster.
To address global warming takes action that is at least at the national level. Continental and global action are necessary.
Progress in schools and education can take place at a much more local level. Successes can be replicated, failures avoided. Leaders can be trained one place, and move to another.
"success in school stems from a cultural respect for education and direct parental involvement "
More the latter than the former. No American should get on a high horse and talk about "cultural respect for education"--not when we look at how badly the world is outpacing us all. It's weak to act like your better off because your neighbor is more fucked than you are. Your both still fucked. A little humility would do us all some good.
The point isn't that parents can't help, but these sort of broad, unspecific, unsubstantiated critiques (gangsta rap??) don't really get us anywhere.
Payola for good performance is nothing new. When I was in an Iowa high school fifteen (!) years ago, we had a rewards program. Local businesses contributed to prize packs for kids who fell into one of three categories: semester GPA's higher than 3.5, higher than 3.9, and GPA's that rose more than half a point from one semester to the next. The packs held things like movie passes, coupons for discounts at restaurants, music stores, stuff like that. The winners of these prizes got publicly recognized in a school ceremony each semester.
Did it work as an incentive? Maybe on some kids, but when I was sitting down to do homework or thinking about skipping class, it wasn't a factor for me.
Would cash have worked better? Maybe, but it would have to be some pretty serious cash. More than our district could have afforded.
My point is simply that I doubt how much public policy can do for folks who are unwilling to help themselves. An example of my own - I come from a rural part of Virginia, where test scores and college matriculation is quite low. Academic success for most folks simply isn't a priority compared to snagging a job at the poultry plant, joining the military or maybe cooking meth. Most of the folks who live there are poor, and they're going to stay poor unless they change their priorities and outlook.
So yes, I think one can talk coherently about "cultural respect for education." "Culture" doesn't necessarily refer to that of our nation, whose regard for education is surely too low; it also refers to communities and families writ small. Families who truly value the advancement of their children will generally succeed, and I don't so much buy the poor, disadvantaged urban youth being destined to failure excuse.
Question - can public policy help change individual families' priorities? Should it even try?
Blair,
Point--or points rather--taken. Your outline of rural Va. sounds very familiar. I think most people want their kids to college. I think policy can help make that possible.
I didn't grow up in the worst neighborhood but what kept me out of trouble was the neighborhood recreation center.
So even if a child has a bad home life there is a place in the neighborhood that they can go that is safe and fun.
First comment here, I think... Blair asks whether public policy can change individual family priorities. I think absolutely it can, if the policies are reasonably pragmatic, results-based, and non-cynical. I look at some of the initiatives that are supposed to improve educational standards (such as the recent testing mania), and they look more like attempts to keep up appearances than anything else.
I think addressing the structural problem is the most important. Healthy economic growth in general is a good start. If mom can support the family with one well-paying job, she can spend more time with her kids; she can provide an alternative role-model to the drug dealers that make $50,000 a week; or at least be there to recognize that her kids may be going astray.
I could be wrong about payola, but I think injecting the profit motive into education is the wrong way to go. I grew up in Harlem and trust me the kid that won the prize would get jacked. Thanks buddy! Keep up the hard work.
I wouldn't have a problem with incentives except in the long run they don't work.
Lepper (1973) started showing the finding experimentally and it has been replicated over and over again.
Incentives actually had the effect of making people less intrinsically motivated to be involved in the relevant task. The task "feels" less interesting and rewarding BECAUSE you are getting a reward for it. For rewards/incentives to be effective motivators they have to appear randomly.
This seems a bit weird but you see it a lot anecdotally as well. How many atheletes have you seen talk about having far less fun playing their sport since they turned pro?
Do we turn the educational system in poor rural/urban areas over to the Catholic Church? After all they seem to have a higher success rate at getting people out of poverty. Or am I confusing the success record of the parorchial school system with the fact that most parents that care enough to send their kids to a religious afilliated school care more about other things too?
Two studies I think bear on the situation. These are dealing with younger kids, though.
1. Take a group of kids who like to color with markers. Divide them into 3 groups:
a) If you color, we will give you this special prize.
b) Surprise! Because you colored, you get this nifty prize.
c) Left to their own devices, no offers, no prizes.
The next week kids from both groups a and b colored less than they used to. Kids in group c were the same.
I keep this in mind for thinks like paying for grades (from anyone)--if the reward is all external, it can be counterproductive. This comes up in debates about how we can get kids to read, which is a different task from getting kids to love to read. For that, I think a combination of reading parents, the assumption that reading will play a major role in your life, and exposure to a variety of types of reading (if you hate nonfiction in 4th grade you might still come to like it for the right topic in 8th grade) are all big factors; paying by book read is not likely to do it.
And a personal anecdote, my son (Mr. Gross Motor Skills) learning to write was aided by his making a little buddy who would always do the craft in preschool. Buddy didn't particularly like crafts, but his mom expected him to do it (coop preschool, parents in the classroom) and so he did it without much thought, and my son followed him over and did the craft too. Those crafts really help with the fine motor control needed for writing. So I will allow that anything that gets you to try X, where X is a good skill, might be to the plus side of the equation. But there are plenty of bad methods (pointing right at my daughter's summer reading list here) that discourage kids from ever doing X except when they're forced.
Study Number 2:
Take infants at high risk (e.g. poor young clueless parents) and divide them into 3 groups:
a) Free high-quality preschool
b) Free lessons for parents in how to do the high-quality preschool stuff
c) General parenting advice
Kids in group a did much better than their peers. Sadly, group b and c were indistinguishable from the general population.
There's a lot schools can do--I've heard from the same teachers as someone above, that the glow in their eyes dims as they approach high school. I've also heard from those who can see the benefit the structure and safety and dependability of school have in their kids in their Wednesday-highpoint curve over the week. If the remaining problem is the larger culture, what can we really do? What will virtually eliminate violent crime? I don't know. I'm fine with strict discipline that says you get only so many chances--keep the other kids from learning, and you can leave. But my kids aren't discipline problems, they're the kids shortchanged by the time needed to deal with the discipline problems. Anywhere you draw the line on "I give up on you, get out so you don't drag everyone else down" will be unfair to someone. I don't have a solution.
My favorite general topic.
I think you're generally right that the are much much larger factors that "study for pay" can't address.
DC has the highest avg teacher salary and spends the most on it's student on a per student basis.
Something is seriously wrong with the system.
You're going to have to wait for a long, long time if you expect some politicians to set some policy that makes it all easier. Its a handy excuse, though, like Estragon's, "Nothing to be done".
Seems to me all these things- whether it's offering payouts as a motivation to do the work, after school programs providing a place of safety or sanity, "cracking down" on the troublemakers, they are all different variations on the theme of trying to develop surrogate systems to provide the functions that parents should be performing. I think these types of efforts can have some incremental effect on some fraction of the kids they touch, but to see real, substantive, large scale change in the performance of these kids, it is going to have to come from a change in the way parents are raising or not raising their kids.
I think the question has to be how do you get parents who are not involved or not involved in a positive way to put in the work? And how can we help those parents who are trying but really don't know what do to be more effective.
The efforts really need to go into fixing the family unit first and foremost, but I suspect that's something money can't buy.
I taught honor classes, average classes, and "general diploma" classes. Each term we have an open school evening and open school afternoon for the parents. ALL the honor kids' parents showed up to find out about their kids, Some of the average track parents dropped in. Year after year, not a single parent from the kids in the "general" classes showed up.
I vote for parental responsibility as the key to better students, not giving monetary awards.
For my inner city students, it isn't just the violence in the streets that occupies their minds, it's also the chaos at home, pregnancy, arrests, drugs, not getting enough sleep, and hunger. Most of my students are hungry every day, and all they think about while in school is food and the next meal. Every few months or so, we have a buffet where staff bring in dishes they make at home. Absenteeism on those days is low, and the kids fight to take home the leftovers.
ANd DougEFresh is spot on about the discipline problems. ANd they just get worse at the high school level.
Anybody who thinks this is a good idea should read the book Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn.
If rewards work, it is only in the short-term. In the long-term, rewards cause people to lose sight of the intrinsic rewards, the reasons they are being enticed to do the thing for which they are being rewarded.
From the book flap: "Drawing from hundreds of studies, Kohn demonstrates that people actually do inferior work when they are enticed with money, grades, or other incentives. Programs that use rewards to change people's behavior are similarly ineffective over the long run. Promising goodies to children for good behavior can never produce anything more than temporary obedience. In fact, the more we use artificial inducements to motivate people, the more they lose interest in what we're bribing them to do. Rewards turn play into work, and work into drudgery."
I know an excellent elementary school teacher who considers this one of the most important books she has ever read.
Call it "cultural," or call it "social" or even "environmental," the fact remains that the people around you matter. A lot.
Where I grew up, the local "hoods" -- so regarded by the community and by themselves -- hung out evenings at the public library. And studied. They'd take an occasional break, and go out to the parking lot and rev their car engines. Then come back and study some more. (My source? I worked there the last two years of high school, and saw it first hand.)
Mind, this wasn't some rich, elite neighborhood. This was a small, semi-suburban, California farming community in the early 1960s. With class sizes in grammer school and junior high typically in the low to mid-30s. Still, out of my high school graduating class of 200+, upwards of 98% were in college or junior college the next year. Ditto my younger siblings' classes. It wasn't something that you were pushed towards, exactly. It's just how things were.
John Henry: *If mom can support the family with one well-paying job, she can spend more time with her kids;*
Most poor people have plenty of time to spend with their kids. Out of 25 million poor adults, only 7.8 million qualified as working poor (in the labor force for 27 weeks/year or more), and only 4.5 million poor adults actually worked full time.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2004.pdf
I'd say the odds are about 4:1 that mom has plenty of time to spend with her kids.
(To get the number of poor adults, I took 38 million poor - 13 million poor children, from http://www.chn.org/pdf/2006/2005ChildPovertyCensusDatabyState.pdf. Yes, I combined 2004 and 2005 numbers, I'm lazy. If it makes a big difference, please correct me.)
I wonder if group rewards would work better. When I was young in California, we had individual rewards for reading books (getting to get free pizzas at Pizza Hut). Basically the kids who would be reading anyways got lots of pizza while the kids who didn't might get one or two, but then stop later. When I moved to Massachusetts, classes in each grade were collectively rewarded for being the class that read the most books. This created more social pressure within the class to read because nobody wanted to be the weak link in the chain. I wonder if this could work.
How do you get kids to work hard at sports? Enthusiastic coaches, team camraderie, the chance to show off and win social approval... why wouldn't these work for academics as well? In too many parts of the country (not just poor neighborhoods), an interest in schoolwork makes a kid a social pariah. When that changes, I expect you'll see kids competing to be the best at math.
So how to start the change? I'm not sure that cash payments are the way to go, because they imply that school is something unpleasant that you only do if you're paid. This does not make studying cooler.
"imply that school is something unpleasant that you only do if you're paid."
I don't know about you, but school is unpleasant. Don't you remember rolling out of bed at the crack of dawn to sit in class all day listing to idots droning on about nothing?
Why did we put up with it?
Because we knew if we didn't the rest of our lives would be nothing but poverty and missery.
You do need the "enthusiastic coaches" part. Droning teachers don't help, and believe me I had some doozies. But the information about the world that you can get in school isn't inherently dull. Lots of people find subjects they enjoy, then do the others as a form of cross-training.