Paying For Grades Yields Mixed Results in Boosting Student Achievement
As public school districts struggle to boost student achievement, an increasing number of districts are turning to incentives for students, such as paying them cash money, to improve their attendance, test scores and grades.
February 13th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
“Advocates of incentives make the case that while students initially may just be in it for the money, when the incentive is taken away, they will developed an appetite for education. Bettinger found that the opposite may be true.”
So you give poor performers other people’s money to do their homework and then when you stop paying them they perform poorly again. Should we be surprised? I have some problems with projects like this. First, I resent having my tax money given to kids to do their homework, that’s their parents’ responsibility. Second, the teachers should be finding ways to motivate students to learn. If teachers aren’t capable of doing this then what are we paying them for? Third, giving kids a government handout for something they should be doing anyway is a really bad idea unless you want them to be looking for government handouts for the rest of their lives. Finally, what happens when they go to college and have to pay their own way? Granted, the government is working on subsidizing all aspects of university life too, but somewhere in these kids’ lives they will have to pony up the money for their own development.
Government handouts and institutional coddling of adolescents will never turn them into independent, self-sustaining individuals. Strong Americans aren’t developed through programs like this. If kids don’t go to class and do their homework, then they can pump everyone else’s gas or cook their fries. That’s the reality of merit-based capitalism, the greatest economic system ever created.