Your child will not eat his broccoli. He ignores your entreaties, scoffs at your demands. And so, rather than discipline the scamp, you decide to pay him $100 for every month that he chokes down the vegetable. Plainly put: You bribe him.
Such a parenting strategy is likely to produce a hellion, of course – a juvenile who will learn nothing important and enduring about nutrition, behavior, obedience, personal responsibility, or authority. And yet, this is exactly the type of misguided educating strategy that Washington, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is poised to enact in the capital city’s classrooms.
Recommended Stories
Beginning in October, pupils at 14 District middle schools who turn in their homework, make it to class, and maintain good grades will be able to garner monthly paychecks of up to $100 for their diligence. The program – now called “Capital Gains,” originally called (tellingly) “School Is Money” – is being managed by economist Roland Fryer, who runs a similar set-up in New York City and who has peddled such pay-kids-to-do-right schemes to other municipalities, too.
Rhee and Fryer believe that recalcitrant pupils will eschew their bad behavior once good deeds are rewarded with cash. Unfortunately, both Rhee and Fryer also flippantly disregard the unintended consequences that their cash-incentive (read: bribery) scheme will likely induce.
What sort of consequences? Well, the broccoli analogy is apt. Young people who refuse to do that which is rightly expected of them deserve discipline, not payment. Discipline teaches the right lessons; dollars teach the wrong ones.
For example, Rhee and Fryer will distribute money to students who master such basic, mundane tasks as attending class and acting decorously while there. In so doing, they transform actions that are expected (and even, in the case of attendance, legally demanded) into actions that are exceptional and noteworthy. Instead of raising standards, which is how the most successful urban public schools have attained academic success, they drag them down.
The student who shunned class is paid to be there, which makes a mockery of the rules, and the pupil who already came to school on time now receives money for it and learns the false lesson that punctuality and conscientiousness are extraordinary.
Furthermore, past experiments with incentives show that paying pupils for high test scores and grades may cripple academic performance over time. Psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote in the New York Times that plans such as Capital Gains could “make the learning problem worse in the long run, even if it improves achievement in the short run – unless we’re prepared to follow these children through life, giving them a pat on the head, or an M&M or a check every time they learn something new.”
Of course, only the skimpiest of evidence shows that paying kids helps in the short-run, either. Fryer himself said just last month that “the jury is still out” about whether cash incentives cause middling pupils to improve.
Rhee and Fryer are therefore conducting a controversial experiment in public schools without fretting overmuch about those students upon whom they’re experimenting – or the unintended consequences they may induce. So mesmerized are they by visions of increasing test scores that they’ve forgotten that schools must also teach students about personal responsibility, delaying gratification, planning for the future, and learning’s intrinsic value.
Perhaps they’ve also forgotten, or choose to neglect, the “incentive” effects of promoting, graduating and admitting to college only those young people who have met certain academic standards and prerequisites.
All of which does not even begin to address the logistical flaws in Rhee’s plan. For example, if test scores don’t rise, or don’t rise enough, does D.C. increase the payouts?
And what if only the District’s better-off kids wind up getting paid? Does Rhee then limit the program to the just the poorest of the poor, and does she define down the standards for receiving dollars?
What if an investigative reporter for this newspaper reveals that some middle-schoolers habitually trade their good-grades cash for candy, Camel Ultra Lights, wine coolers, or sexual favors? Et cetera.
Suffice it to say that Rhee, usually a font of fine ideas, has now proffered a truly bad one.
Liam Julian, a District of Columbia resident, is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
