Let Me Bribe You...

...to do well in school.



Article



I am definitely opposed to this idea. I knew kids in highschool who were paid for their grades. I knew students in highschool who weren't paid for their grades. I was never paid to get good grades.

There are some kids with which nothing will work. No matter what you do, nothing will encourage them to get their work done. I've seen it happen first hand. Parents will try threatening, gold-starring, punishing, and bribing their kids to get their work done, but sometimes it just doesn't work. Paying them isn't going to make it any better. What happens when students aren't paid for their grades any longer. What happens to that motivation when students leave the school where they were in a program that paid them for those grades? What about college? You surely won't get paid to get good grades there. In a Washington Post article, they have come to a similar conclusion. "Paying kids may not help in the short run, either. Roland G. Fryer Jr., who will manage the D.C. program, has himself said that "the jury is still out" on whether cash incentives cause middling pupils to improve" (Liam Julian).
Janet Bodnar, an editor for Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine wrote in her article "High-achieving students will get good grades anyway, so you're wasting your money. Kids who are underachievers fail because they're inconsistent, says child psychologist Sylvia Rimm. So if they slip and get a poor grade, they figure they're not going to get the reward and give up." I agree with her. Like I mentioned earlier, kids who aren't going to try no matter what method you take, aren't going to try when you bribe them with money. I've seen it fail personally.

A certain desertjim agrees in his blog post on goldenapple.org. "The little bit of research that exists was all done on earlier programs. It seems to show that, despite short-term gain, pay for grades may be detrimental in the long-term." This is exactly my sentiment as I've previously stated above. Students aren't going to keep getting paid as they advance through the school system, so that initial motivation disappears and then what happens? Sure, some might keep trying, but my bet is that many will gradually taper off and give up, realising they aren't receiving some sort of benefit out of educating themselves.

Mike Frazier brings up a new point in his blog. "I believe that school will just become a job for students. They will show up and put in eight hours of work to get a pay check at the end of the week. There is no other incentive than that especially if this program is being implemented in schools made up of a poor demographic." If school is just a job for students, then what's left. Once they leave the school system and enter the real world, they're most likely to be disappointed. With the specific program mentioned in the original article, the students are only paid for freshman and sophomore year. The other two thousand dollars they will receive after graduation. Students, especially high school students, aren't especially known for thinking about the future. After all, high school students are invincible. I know I sure was. However, a lot of students might just cut and run with the two thousand after sophomore year. After all, they aren't required to continue, since they would be sixteen by that point.

Basically I'm not a fan of this sort of program, and I think it will fail students in the long run. What happens when the private donors run out of money and have to stop the program. When the funding cuts out, so does any motivation that the students had for getting through high school, and any other grade that implemented this type of program.