Idea: Pay Students to go to school.

[nc-1701]

Okay, before you call me crazy please hear me out.


Education in America has a ton of problems, but the biggest one you hear if you talk to teachers is lack of interest from students and involvement from parents, etc. But education is completely vital for a person to be successful in America. However most children don't see it that way, the benefits are far too long term for all but the brightest to see. So most children to not apply themselves to school effectively, and don't understand the value. Certainly in their day to day lives school doesn't have value, and being intelligent humans (though perhaps not long term rational actors). School is seen as having little value, my proposal is that we change that and push children to see school as a job.

So I propose for Middle and High School students be given a cash card that is continually refilled over the school year. Each they month they would get money added to it based on their performance in school, according to an algorithm sort of like this:
Base pay depends on grade level but I would start it at around $50/month for middle school freshmen and gradually increase it to around $200/month for high school seniors. However for absences and/or disciplinary problems it would be reduced or removed for that month according to some formula, also it would be adjusted somewhat based on the students GPA but not too much because we don't want to cause too much grade inflation. Finally students would earn end of year bonuses in he range of $100-1000 for performance on standardized tests, perfect attendance, etc.

Benefits:
1) Hopefully increases scholastic achievement by encouraging students, especially poorer ones, to work hard in school by giving them something tangible to work towards.
2) Helps link education and intelligence with success in the minds of young students.
3) By making sure all students have some spending money you give poorer students a better chance to fit in with fashion, latest games, etc.
4) Since kids are likely to spend all the money locally it helps stimulate local economies.

Bottom line it would help kids learn about working for what they want and learning personal responsibility and it would help education and redistribute money to poorer children. In other words it is supported by both Conservative and Liberal ideas.

Drawbacks:
1) Cost. I estimated we'd spend in the ballpark of 50 billion on this, which isn't cheap. But compared to some of the other stuff we blow 50 billion on I think it makes more sense.
2) Potential for kids to use the money for drugs etc. or have their parents take it. This will happen, but I think that on balance it still helps. Even if the money is misused the kid still has to learn to get it and will end up better off as a result.
3) This would be terrible for private schools.
4) More I haven't thought of yet?



I'm aware this idea isn't perfect, and I don't think I'm going to go reform education with it. But I think it has strengths as an idea and would help, certainly small scale in some areas if not nationally. I'de welcome both criticisms and suggestions about modifying my initial concept into one that might work better.

 

[LamaGT]

Don't they do that already in Denmark?

 

[Tahuti]

Don't they do that already in Denmark?

They do if you count the government as an education establishment...

 

[LamaGT]

They do if you count the government as an education establishment...

I'm not sure what you're saying, here in Italy to get a decent education public schools are the only option, are those what you mean?

 

[Tahuti]

I'm not sure what you're saying, here in Italy to get a decent education public schools are the only option, are those what you mean?

In Denmark, colleges do not ask tuition fees, but students are paid stipends by the government for going to college. If I am not mistaken, the OP wants colleges to fund the scholarship of students themselves.

 

[warpus]

Higher Education should definitely be subsidised by the government to some degree, but I do not think it should be a free for all. Right now everyone and their grandmother are going to college. This many people attending university for free would not be sustainable, I dont' think, unless you raised taxes to annoying unreasonable levels.

I don't have a solution, I'm just sayin'

 

[BvBPL]

There are several problems with this idea.

The first off is that it assumes the students would behave in a rational manner in that they will make a considered effort to improve their behavior in order to get more money. That would not happen. People in general do not behave as rational members of the marketplace and children certainly do not behave rationally at all.

The second problem is that the method of distribution would be discriminatory. The purposed system would penalize students who have intrinsic developmental and disciplinary problems by not giving them as much money.

Another problem is the absurd expense this would impose on a school system with a limited budget. If this paid out $450 / annum per student, which would be about half of what the OP suggests for high school students, then for every hundred students you'd have less money for one less teacher. In a school of 1,000 students, that would mean ten less teachers or similar cuts.

One final problem is that children wouldn't spend the money well. They generally wouldn't save the money or spend it on good things, and many of them will go out and blow it on blow and grass because children have limited impulse control.

 

[downtown]

I actually like the general principle of this idea. It's not uncommon for teachers to create their own "economy" in their classrooms, and "pay" students for grades or good behavior, and allow them to redeem that money for prizes, privileges, etc. I had a similar system in my classroom, where students could buy extra recess, snacks, and other stuff. I know other teachers who have taken this a step farther, and actually charge kids "rent" for their school supplies or desks. The charter network where I volunteered in Chicago would actually fine kids for disciplinary problems as well.

Kid may not be rational actors all the time, but based on my experience, I have a hard time believing this wouldn't serve as an incentive...I saw it with my own students. It would just need to be carefully calibrated by age. I think you'd also want to set specific goals for students with IEPs, or tie payments to value added growth, rather than necessarily just absolute growth. There is room to differentiate this.

For younger kids, even up to late middle school, I think you could set up classroom economies that pay out in a pretend currency, rather than USD, and have the same impact, provided you had the right incentives.

It would be expensive, but I also don't think you would need to do it for every school in the country. Our most expensive suburban kids probably don't need the same reinforcement that our inner city kids do.

The devil is very much in the details, but I'm not opposed to the general principle.

 

[Mise]

They actually tried this already, with mixed results: http://www.economist.com/node/16163411

Satchel, uniform, bonus: Pay-for-performance for school students is no silver bullet

POLITICIANS around the world love to promise better education systems. Proposals for reform come in many flavours. Some tout the benefits of more competition among schools; others aim to train more teachers and reduce class sizes. Still others plump for elaborate after-school programmes or for linking teachers' pay to how well pupils do.

A relatively recent addition to this menu is the idea of paying students directly for performance. Boosters argue that pupils may fail to invest enough time and effort into education because the gains—better jobs and higher incomes—are nebulous and distant. Cash payments, on the other hand, reward good performance immediately. Link payments to test results or graduation rates, the argument goes, and test scores should increase and drop-out rates decline. Two new papers* describe the effect of such schemes in Israel and America. Their results will disappoint those who hope for a silver bullet. But they also suggest that cash payments may have their uses in some situations.

Joshua Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Victor Lavy of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem studied high-school students in 40 Israeli schools where few pupils went on to get their school-leaving certificate (the Bagrut). In half the schools students were offered a chance to earn nearly $1,450 if they passed all the tests and got the certificate. The economists found that completion rates in “payment schools” increased by about a third—but only for girls and mainly for those who needed to do only a tiny bit more to graduate.

In America Roland Fryer of Harvard University carried out an ambitious set of experiments involving 38,000 students who went to state-run schools in New York, Chicago, Dallas and Washington, DC. Over four-fifths were from poor families; nearly 90% were black or Hispanic. These are the schools that reformers in America most urgently need to fix. Students in inner-city schools do particularly poorly in national tests. Less than 20% of their 8th-graders (13-14-year-olds) have better-than-basic reading skills for their age. The national average is 29%.

In each city about half the participating schools were randomly selected to be ones where students received money; their progress was then compared with that of their peers in the other schools. Pupils in New York and Chicago were paid for test scores or grades. The children in Dallas and Washington, DC, were paid for specific tasks, like reading books or wearing uniforms.

The results of the experiments where scholastic performance was rewarded were uniformly disappointing. In New York fourth- and seventh-grade students in payment schools could earn up to $25 and $50 respectively, depending on their score on each of ten standard maths and reading tests. In Chicago ninth-grade students were rewarded on a sliding scale for good grades in five courses, including English, maths and science. Getting an “A” was worth $50; a “D” meant no money. In theory a student could earn up to $2,000 a year. Plenty of money was paid out, but Mr Fryer found absolutely no evidence that paying students led them to do better than their peers in the control schools. Neither girls nor boys gained, and it did not seem to matter how students had previously performed.

What explains this disappointing result? Some argue that the external push provided by money erodes an inherent love of learning. But participating students also took tests that measured how much they enjoyed studying. There was no indication that the payments affected those sentiments. Nor was it the case that students were uninterested in the programme.

Mr Fryer has a different explanation. Most would agree that school facilities, teachers' skills, and the effort both students and teachers put in all matter. But how precisely these inputs are converted into a test score is a mystery, and without knowing which lever to pull, it is difficult to design an effective incentive scheme. But leaving it up to participants to find the best way to earn goodies will not work either if, as Mr Fryer believes, pupils have very little idea how to go about improving their own scores.

Grade expectations

When students in New York or Chicago were asked how they would earn the rewards on offer, they came up with all sorts of ideas about test-taking strategies, but not one mentioned reading the textbooks or doing practice questions. On the other hand, those whose performance improved in the Israeli experiment had clear ideas about how to go about making sure they graduated. They took more practice tests and were much more likely to attend free coaching sessions.

If students do not know how to improve their own performance, the best strategy may be to pick a simple task, reward pupils for doing it, and hope that this translates into higher grades. This was the approach Mr Fryer took in Dallas, where second-grade students were simply given $2 for every book they read if they passed a computerised comprehension test on it. Predictably this spurred them to read more books and improved their vocabularies. But it also improved their school grades substantially, although this is not what they were paid for. A year after the payments had stopped, students in the schools that had offered money were still outperforming those in control schools, although the gap had narrowed. It may have helped that the Dallas students were younger. Middle-school students in Washington, DC, gained little from being paid for inputs like attendance. But the results from Dallas suggest that payments can help at least some students get more out of school.

This article was from 2010, and I'm sure there are updates to the studies. Certainly, there are a number of key takeaways that could improve future plans along the same lines.

 

[Zelig]

I'm in favour, as it would basically be free money for my kids without any extra effort.

 

[Dralix]

Where does free money come from?

 

[Formaldehyde]

In America Roland Fryer of Harvard University carried out an ambitious set of experiments involving 38,000 students who went to state-run schools in New York, Chicago, Dallas and Washington, DC. Over four-fifths were from poor families; nearly 90% were black or Hispanic. These are the schools that reformers in America most urgently need to fix. Students in inner-city schools do particularly poorly in national tests. Less than 20% of their 8th-graders (13-14-year-olds) have better-than-basic reading skills for their age. The national average is 29%.

Small wonder it failed. You can hardly learn any lessons from this other than setting overly high expectations among students who typically perform poorly isn't going to work.

But I think paying students like this based on grade is absurd. As the study determined, it didn't really change anything except making the better students a bit less poor.

If students do not know how to improve their own performance, the best strategy may be to pick a simple task, reward pupils for doing it, and hope that this translates into higher grades. This was the approach Mr Fryer took in Dallas, where second-grade students were simply given $2 for every book they read if they passed a computerised comprehension test on it. Predictably this spurred them to read more books and improved their vocabularies. But it also improved their school grades substantially, although this is not what they were paid for. A year after the payments had stopped, students in the schools that had offered money were still outperforming those in control schools, although the gap had narrowed. It may have helped that the Dallas students were younger. Middle-school students in Washington, DC, gained little from being paid for inputs like attendance. But the results from Dallas suggest that payments can help at least some students get more out of school.

Now this is a better idea. Motivating all students to read more by giving them a nominal reward is something I can see working.

 

[Zelig]

Where does free money come from?

Taxing parents with kids dumber than mine.

 

[Tahuti]

Higher Education should definitely be subsidised by the government to some degree, but I do not think it should be a free for all. Right now everyone and their grandmother are going to college. This many people attending university for free would not be sustainable, I dont' think, unless you raised taxes to annoying unreasonable levels.

I don't have a solution, I'm just sayin'

It is primarily a mentality problem and while government subsidies play a part, these are just half of the story, if not less. With that I do not mean that people are too lazy for college, rather that you are considered by others to be an uneducated idiot if you do not finish college.

People go to college for the social experience, because it is deemed necessary - often by bureaucratically hellholes such as corporations - and what not. People actually seldom go to college to get an academic exposure to subjects and rarely consider dropping out when they realise that they do not necessarily need or want academic exposure. Even though the primary function of college is exactly that: Give people academic exposure.

I'm a CS major myself and while I am writing these lines, I sometimes wonder whether or not I should drop out (actually, I'm almost sure to drop out before finishing college). I prefer having a business over a white-collar job - though the fact companies ask you to have some degree and most students pursue degrees for that particular reason is part of the problem. And while I think CS is a fascinating subject and I like participating in intellectual debates, I really doubt I want to become an academic or a scientist. College might ought to return to its previous function: Prepare people for a career in science and academia. Though to be fair, I'm using government provided university loans as easy capital for my business which requires me to be formally enrolled at a university.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

You can hardly learn any lessons from this other than setting overly high expectations among students who typically perform poorly isn't going to work.

What expectations? I don't see them in the article.

 

[Formaldehyde]

The expectation that their grades will suddenly improve merely because you are bribing them. Perhaps they should try amounts more in line with the NFL and the NBA.

 

[BvBPL]

I disagree. Attempting an experiment of that nature among the least proficient students first makes sense because if it worked there may be the greatest potential for gain amongst those students.

There's also some face validity to the notion that providing money to poor students may be more effective based on the scarcity of their own family's wealth. $200 bucks, or whatever, is probably more meaningful to students in, say, South Chicago than those in Beverly Hills.

 

[Formaldehyde]

Yet it had no apparent effect. Do you disagree with that?

What makes you think that poor students, many of whom are functionally illiterate, will suddenly become good students when offered a few dollars which they have little or no hope of getting?

 

[BvBPL]

A hypothesis was formed and tested. That's science at work. Nothing wrong with that. A hypothesis proven to be invalid still advances the course of knowledge.

 

[Formaldehyde]

This was not "science".

So, again, what do you disagree about? That it had no apparent effect?