Last week's edition of Time Magazine 

includes a feature article titled, "Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School." Much of the piece details the recent work of Harvard economist Roland Fryer, Jr., who is attempting to ascertain whether, to what extent, and in what ways offering students cash incentives impacts pupil behavior and standardized test scores. The research is interesting, if not conclusive, drawing as it does upon different forms of incentivization involving students of varying ages in four large, urban centers. 

 

In New York City, some 142 schools participated in an experiment in which 4th graders could earn up to $25 for doing well on each of a series of school-based tests.  Pupils in 7th grade could receive up to $50 per test.

 

In Chicago, Professor Fryer worked with then Superintendent of Schools Arne Duncan to put a system in place that paid 9th-grade students $50 for each grade of "A" earned, $35 for every "B," and $20 for each grade of "C" to a maximum payout of $2,000 in a year.  (Half the money was assigned to repose in a savings account pending graduation from high school.)

 

In Washington, DC, middle school students were paid for satisfying some, or all of five criteria, including school attendance and good behavior.  Perfect marks in each category generated payments of $100 every two weeks.

 

Finally, in Dallas, 2nd graders were paid a flat $2.00 every time they read a book and passed a validating computerized test.  (On average, participating students read seven books, and earned $14 over the course of a year.)

 

In each of the four cities, the standardized test score performance of cash incentive recipients was compared to that of counterparts in a control group.  The majority of students in both groups was comprised of African-American and Hispanic children hailing from low-income families. 

 

In New York and Chicago, no statistically significant difference was found between the two groups.  In Washington, DC, and Dallas, however, the students who were paid demonstrated higher scores on standardized reading tests.  The results led researchers to consider factors that were common to the incentives employed in DC and Dallas, but absent in New York and Chicago. They concluded that incentives were more likely to be effective when they were linked to behaviors under the control of the students, such as attendance, behavior, and reading books.  As Professor Fryer remarked, "If you pay a kid to read books, their grades go up higher than if you actually pay a kid for grades, like we did in Chicago." 

 

Are cash incentives a good idea, or not?  Commenting on the Time article, University of Chicago economist and Freakonomics co-author Steven D. Levitt writes:  "It is amusing to an economist to see how controversial it is to offer financial incentives to children in public schools. We offer financial incentives to just about everyone else in society in all sorts of settings, whether it is work, sports, encouraging people to recycle cans and bottles by paying a nickel each, etc."  Washington, DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee demonstrated a purely pragmatic view:  "If it doesn't work, we're going to stop and start doing something else.  But if it does work, it should drive where we put our money."

John I. Goodlad was the very capable dean of the graduate school of education I happened to attend (back in the Stone Age). Professor Goodlad was, and is as bright a person as one is ever likely to encounter. He has published over 30 books, written some 80 book chapters, and penned over 200 scholarly articles.  An eloquent speaker, if ever there was one, Dr. Goodlad opted to bestow simple titles upon his books. Examples include, A Place Called School, In Praise of Education, What Schools Are For, Education for Everyone, and Behind the Classroom Door.

 

One wonders whether John Goodlad could manage to make it through a Ph.D. program in a contemporary graduate school of education.  One wonders whether his clear thinking would constitute a peremptory bar to admission, or whether, once admitted, he'd have killed himself (God forbid) long before reaching the dissertation stage.  One wonders about such things upon obtaining a current glimpse inside our nation's graduate schools of education via articles such as "The Pedagogy of Monsters: Scary Disturbances in a Doctoral Research Preparation Course,"  which Teachers College Record was good enough to have furnished as its most recent "free for a week" teaser.   

 

According to its authors, the purpose of the study was to "... understand the unusually strong student responses to a new doctoral core course that aimed to initiate them into the competing theoretical, epistemological, and paradigmatic complexity of contemporary educational research."  I will resist the temptation to elaborate upon the possibility that the "strong student responses" may well have been the product of exposure to sudden immersion in a foreign language.  Instead, I'll simply provide a few excerpts from the above-mentioned article:

 

If you're a private school administrator or business manager working in or near Orange County, don't forget to register for CAPSO's May 25, 2010 "Emerging Legal Issues" workshop.  The half-day program will run from 8:30 a.m. to 12:00 noon, and will focus upon a variety of personnel issues.  Attorneys Melanie Poturica and Michael Blacher from the firm of Liebert Cassidy Whitmore will cover a range of recent cases and newly enacted or revised statutes, as well as current trends that are of particular interest to private schools.  Best of all, CAPSO is making the program even more value-laden by offering a deeply discounted registration fee of $25.00 per-person, for administrators and business managers working in schools affiliated with CAPSO member organizations.  More information and a registration form is available, here.

 

 

The crew of the SSV Tole Mour invites educators to join them for a free weekend overnight sail to Catalina Island on May 8-9, 2010.  Spend the weekend setting sails, participating in marine biology lessons, snorkeling, and networking with your peers! Find out how you could get your school out on a trip!  Please contact Program Director, Kristina Barber, by e-mail at kbarber@guideddiscoveries.org or by phone at 310-508-0952.  Additional information about the opportunity can also be found, here. 

 

Those of you who may be interested in comparing education statutes across all 50 states and the District of Columbia can thank the Cornell University Law School for having provided a compendium of links on a single web page that can be found, here.  Warning: Some of the links are inactive, while others require a bit of additional searching.  If you have a couple of minutes, you may wish to randomly explore several state codes, and marvel at the variability in organization and complexity from state to state.  That's federalism!

 

 

After more than two years of negotiation, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and Washington DC Schools Superintendent Michelle Rhee have reached agreement on a ground breaking teachers contract that would boost the ceiling on the amount of money a teacher can earn from the current $87,000 to $147,000. The quid pro quo is that the new arrangement includes merit pay bonus provisions, and removes barriers to the termination of teachers rated ineffective.  The performance-pay feature of the new agreement is being funded to the tune of $64.5 million by four private foundations over a three-year period.  What happens after that is anyone's guess.  The agreement has yet to be ratified by union members and approved by the DC Council. You can read more about the story, here.

Dear Mr. President,

 

While I can only imagine what it must be like to hold the world's most demanding job, I'm fairly certain of one thing: the President of the United States can't possibly remember all the information required to inform sound public policy decisions.  Therefore, I am writing to humbly remind you of something you appear to have forgotten: private schools are partners in the education of the public.

The families that choose to enroll their children in private schools reside in the same neighborhoods as those that send their kids to public schools.  Private school people shop in the same stores, eat at the same restaurants, and attend the same churches, synagogues and mosques.  Their children play on the same Little League, Pop Warner and Youth Soccer teams, participate in the same scout groups, and probably spend too much time hanging out in malls, watching TV, and playing video games with their public school counterparts.

For example, your administration effectively wrote private schools out of the $53.6 billion State Fiscal Stabilization Fund component of the federal stimulus package.  Considering the fact that private schools relieve states of the burden of educating 10 percent of the nation's young people - saving government tens of billions of dollars per annum, while creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the bargain - you'd think it would make good economic sense to help them patch a leaking roof or fix a broken heating system. 

 

Your Investing in Innovation Fund program treats private schools as second class citizens who must hitch a ride on the backs of public school districts in order to participate.  Given the manner in which the program's rules have been written, one would think that private schools have nothing of value to share with the public schools located down the street or around the corner...or anything to learn from them.  I'm pretty sure you know that there are a good many private high schools located in some very tough neighborhoods that are succeeding not only in producing graduation rates approaching 100 percent, but in enabling young people from the most challenging backgrounds to access and excel in colleges and universities.  Why pretend otherwise? 

 

 

You recently announced a Race to the Top High School Commencement Challenge, in which schools will be given the opportunity to compete for the honor of hosting yourself, the President of all the people of the United States, at the winner's commencement ceremony.  Private schools, however, need not apply, as you excluded them from the program.   

 

If only this once, thank you for remembering us, Mr. President.

 

Ron Reynolds

April 14, 2010

The E-Mailer will be taking a belated Spring Break next week, meaning that there will be no publication on April 21.  The next scheduled edition of the E-Mailer is slated for April 28.