I do believe that it makes sense for the Department to seek legislative relief from the eligibility requirement that districts receiving I3 funds make AYP for the two years prior to their application, but not because I support removing AYP requirements themselves, as do some others weighing in here. In fact, maintaining a high bar on the definition of AYP will be a very important tool for ensuring that districts and state education agencies continue to be intensively focused on the hard work of school and district turnaround that is critical to closing the nation’s achievement gap.

But as much as we need to preserve AYP requirements overall in the upcoming debate on ESEA’s renewal, there’s really no reason why the I3 grant program should be strictly linked to AYP. Indeed, one of the central goals of this competitive grant program is not simply to direct investment into what’s already been working for years on end, but also to spur innovations that can bring dramatic academic progress to the districts where it’s needed most.

This distinction is well borne out by considering the situation in Connecticut. Forty-five of the state’s 166 districts did not make AYP last year, including every single one of the state’s urban districts. Yet several of these urban districts, most notably Hartford and New Haven, have embarked on ambitious reform plans. In part because Connecticut has not implemented a growth model for NCLB compliance, a district like Hartford, whose academic gains have tripled the state average over the past two years, and which is on pace to eliminate its achievement gap within less than a decade, would be ruled out for an innovation grant. This despite the fact that this district has been innovating on numerous fronts, from an “all choice” approach to school selection for parents to the application of differentiated autonomy for schools based on performance and a weighted student funding formula that has dramatically boosted the resources actually reaching students for classroom instruction. Likewise, without relief from the AYP eligibility requirement, New Haven would also be ruled out for an I3 grant, despite the overwhelming ratification by their teachers’ union earlier this week of a breakthrough new contract allowing for teacher evaluation based on student achievement and charter conversions of failing schools.

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation is a proud supporter of Roland Fryer’s student incentive research in New York City, Chicago and Washington, D.C. because of its potential to make a significant impact in improving student achievement and closing chronic achievement gaps.

We join Dr. Fryer in believing that all students are innately capable of high achievement. Conventional solutions are not getting the job done. Far too many of our urban school districts have 50 percent graduation rates. We have an obligation to try innovative approaches to motivate young people who need it most to become engaged, lifelong learners.

Students from low-income communities often hear the mantra: “you have to go to school to get a good job.” But they often lack real world examples in their lives of adults who have successfully followed this path.

Yes, students’ incentive to do their best in school can and should take many different forms. The more, the better. To us, when an incentive is proven to dramatically raise student achievement – particularly for poor and minority children who have for far too long had subpar opportunities to learn – it poses a worthwhile, large-scale investment. The results under Dr. Fryer’s particular approach to incentivizing students are streaming in. We look forward to working closely with him to review these results in order to determine whether more students may stand to gain.

It is critical that as a nation we stop guessing what might work for students and start relying on rigorous methodology to measure whether any particular efforts are in fact yielding positive outcomes. This approach is standard practice in many other fields, such as the medical field where scientists seek cures to chronic global diseases. We applaud Dr. Fryer for introducing this innovative approach and for rigorously evaluating its impact.

As a veteran teacher of 30 years, the notion of using money to motivate students strikes me as absurd. Yes, motivation is a key to learning. I see that every day with my fifth graders, but motivation should flow from the quality of curriculum, the nature of the learning activities, the connectedness of the curriculum to the lives of the students, and the overall school experience.

I suggest that districts that have so much money that they can have programs to pay students for higher test scores, instead spend the money on making sure that all students have a full complement of physical education, visual arts, music, drama, dance, and library instruction as well as classroom teachers who are skilled at creating engaging learning activities.

For a brief critique of paying students for higher test scores, check out the article, “Children as Guinea Pigs: Washington, D.C. bribes its students to perform” by Deborah Menkart (Executive Director of the Washington D.C.- based Teaching for Change) that ran in the winter 2008/09 edition of Rethinking Schools.

I think the question isn’t as much about paying students to learn as it is trying to find the right incentives that motivate students to take responsibility for their education. As I wrote the other week, economists will tell you that incentives matter. That’s the reason the Obama Administration is exploring pay for performance programs that provide financial incentives for teachers who improve student performance. Race to the Top is essentially a large-scale incentive program to motivate states to adopt a set of reform-friendly policies around teacher effectiveness, accountability, and public school choice.

So why wouldn’t we also use incentives for students? We need to at least acknowledge that there already exists a patchwork of informal student incentive systems. Schools offer pizza parties and trophies to encourage perfect attendance. Many principals offer to camp out on the school’s roof if students reach some milestone – such as read a number of books by a certain date. Some local stores offer discounts or free items for students with good grades.

More recently, there has been more serious thought given to carefully developing financial incentive programs to motivate certain students. Roland Fryer, an economist from the Harvard School of Economics, has developed interesting pilots in DC, NYC, and Chicago that offer financial rewards based on student attendance, behavior, homework completion, and grades. These programs are designed to help counter the significant negative pressures many high-need students face in terms of seeing education as critical for their future.

Two programs are also exploring the use of financial incentives to attract students to take more rigorous courses. The Learning Makes a Difference Foundation offers financial rewards for students who participate and pass advance levels of math and science. The AP Incentive Program (which was highlighted in the Rising Above the Gathering Storm report) provides financial rewards to students who participate and receive passing scores on Advanced Placement exams (their teachers are also eligible for financial rewards). The National Math and Science Initiative is replicating this program in several states based on evaluation research that shows that the program is successful in increasing the number of minority students who take and pass AP exams.

Entrepreneurs are also developing solutions to help school systems establish and manage local incentive programs. uBoost has created an online rewards platform that allows teachers to determine point values for attendance, performance, class participation, teamwork, homework completion, and other activities. Students earn these points and then can redeem them from over 100,000 prizes, including gift cards, music downloads, and contributing to charitable organizations.

This is still a relatively new area that needs further research and exploration. What incentives work best for which students? How does the cost of implementing incentive programs (such as paying dropout at-risk students to attend class) compare to other reforms (such as credit recovery)?

There is also room for additional innovation in this space as well. What if an incentive system offered to pay at-risk students for certain activities (attendance, homework completion) as well as college-ready course completion but then deposited the funds in a 529 account to help pay for college. Students would have an incentive to not only do well in school but also to attend college.

We shouldn’t so quickly dismiss the idea before more carefully designed evaluations can be done. Race to the Top and the forthcoming Innovation Fund offer opportunities to explore these ideas in the context of other reforms.

Paying Students to Learn

What a moral dilemma! As educators, we typically expect students to learn for the sake of learning; to take ownership in the expansion of their minds; to become lifelong learners. However, as we see in New York City’s Spark initiative, being paid to learn seems to be a motivator.

What a coincidence that a School Resource Officer shared with me that he and another officer encouraged a couple of seniors to stay in school and offered to pay them $40 if they “walked across the stage.” A small payoff but they did it!

As a superintendent, I hear so many teachers speak to the rampant apathy that tends to grow bigger each year. So what motivates our digital natives? I’d like to believe that enthusiastic teachers with 21st Century skills would be the answer. But I know that’s not all it takes. As educators, maybe we need to be more open to discussion that includes “pay to learn” or other motivational incentives.

This question reminded me of a time long ago when I was in elementary school in rural Northeastern Ohio. Since every teacher was assigned to two grades (in the same room), I got to know some of the students who were a year ahead of me in school. One young lady in the next class was the top student. Her parents paid her a quarter for every “A” grade on her report card, and that was the only grade she ever got.

I now realize that it really wasn’t about the quarters that this student received; it was all about how she wanted to please her parents. Although I never got any quarters for my grades, I did very well in school. My motivation was learning itself, but also I never wanted to let my parents or teachers down.

I agree with my colleague commentators who wrote that this is really a question of motivation—motivation to learn and not just to perform well on a test. But motivating students in high poverty schools is not an easy task. While students in my era may have wanted to please parents, too many of today’s students are being raised in homes with an absent parent or in homes where both parents are consumed with their work and don’t have the time to worry about school performance unless it becomes a serious problem. Often peer pressure runs counter to learning achievement. Teachers often find it easier not to challenge students to improve performance.

Although I am as offended as most of my colleague responders at the notion of paying students for test scores, I welcome the experiment. We do not completely understand the dynamics in today’s low performing schools. Perhaps experiments like this one will lead to others that will help policy makers and school principals and teachers to save some of these children.

One more quick comment. The question is whether students should be paid to learn. I think the responses make clear we already have plenty of research to show that the answer is 'No."

However, the example in the question is about test scores, and almost all the reward programs pay kids for boosting their scores. Learning does not equal test scores: it is far richer and deeper, while the tests measure far too little and the focus on boosting test scores narrows curriculum and instruction. These kinds of rewards programs only produce more fuel for test score inflation instead of providing support for real learning. Some of the posts address this point well, so here I will only ask that we cease pretending that boosting scores through inflation is the same thing as learning.

Test score "bribes" for students are like steroids for athletes -- they can temporarily boost performance, but their long-term impact damages the very thing you are trying to improve. Policymakers, educators and parents need to ask if short-term test score gains are worth the cost of long-term damage to students’ intrinsic motivation to learn.

From the distant vantage point of politicians and policymakers, short-term test score bumps look mighty attractive, especially in the age of No Child Left Behind. By the time the test score bubble bursts, policymakers and pols are likely to have moved on. Parents and teachers, however, often have longer term goals of nurturing kids’ self-motivation and love of learning, knowing those are the qualities that will carry them through to success throughout life.

There’s substantial research supporting the short-term gain, long-term damage view of paying students for higher test scores. A multiyear study by Eric Bettinger of Case Western looked at the results of paying students for performance on reading, writing, social studies and science tests. Only math scores showed any positive effect, and there was no sustained improvement once the incentive was removed. Bettinger concluded, “This may suggest that the existence of external motivation has a negative effect on the intrinsic desire to learn.” Some policymakers see pay for student performance as a hard-nosed, pragmatic way to close stubborn achievement gaps between affluent and poor kids. Interestingly, Bettinger found that higher achieving students gained the most from incentives, not the kids on the bottom of the gap.

A study of Israeli K-12 students, by Josh Angrist and Victor Lavy, found that paying students to pass a high-stakes test worked with girls, but not boys. Echoing Bettinger’s study, the authors found that girls who had a higher chance of passing in the first place showed a bigger effect from the bribes, again calling into question the efficacy of this approach if the goal is raising achievement for lower scoring students.

The evidence suggests that this quick and dirty approach does not get us where we really want to go. So why not focus on things that produce sustainable results, like high-quality early childhood education, small class size, high-quality teacher training and professional development, and schools engaging and supportive enough not to have to resort to bribes.

Alfie Kohn (www.alfiekohn.org), author of Punished by Rewards and The Schools Our Children Deserve, submitted the following:

Rewards, like punishments, can produce only one thing: temporary obedience. What they can never do is help kids become more effective or enthusiastic learners. In fact, a huge body of research demonstrates that exactly the opposite is true: Dangling carrots in front of people is actually counterproductive.

What the data show, more specifically, is that the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward. To understand why, it helps to realize that the meaningful question isn’t “Will rewards motivate kids?” but “What kind of motivation do rewards create?” And the answer is: “A motivation to get more rewards.” Unfortunately, that tends to reduce their motivation to learn.

Psychologists distinguish between intrinsic motivation, in which the learning itself is seen as meaningful, and extrinsic motivation, in which the learning becomes just a means to an end. That end could be money, grades, stickers, or any other incentive. More than 75 studies have shown that extrinsic and intrinsic motivation aren't just different; they tend to be inversely related.

Thus, for example, kids who are led to focus on grades -- the reward of an A – are apt to think in a more superficial fashion, prefer easier tasks, and find learning less interesting when you compare them to kids in classrooms where grades are absent or invisible. Paying kids for good grades is basically a reward for a reward. It doubles the damage.

The bottom line is that dangling incentives in front of children is a way of doing things to them. It’s a form of sugar-coated control. In the long run people react badly to being controlled, even if they like the goody itself. In fact, the bigger or more desirable the reward, the more damage it tends to do, according to the research.

But in the case of initiatives like Fryer’s, the news is even worse. To this point I’ve just been addressing the method: How do we get kids to do something? My contention is that, apart from the inherently objectionable nature of carrot-and-stick control, rewards are ineffective at best (for producing anything beyond temporary compliance) and harmful at worst – even if the goal is laudable. But in these programs, the goal isn’t to help students love learning or think more deeply. The goal is just to raise scores on bad tests to make the adults look good. Standardized exams, as I and others have explained elsewhere, measure what matters least. We even have studies that demonstrate a statistically significant negative correlation between deep thinking, on the one hand, and results on a range of standardized tests, on the other. So what you’ve got with these cash-for-scores programs is a flawed means married to a terrible objective – the worst of both worlds.

One reason adults are so fond of reward programs is that they’re spared from having to ask why kids have to be bribed in the first place. What would it take to create a school where kids want to show up? How can we nourish kids’ natural curiosity and desire to learn? What does it say about homework that children dread doing it and rarely find it of value? To answer those questions, to make school meaningful for students, takes time and talent and courage. But you don’t need any of those things to toss kids a goodie when they jump through your hoops. Such programs are powerfully conservative in that they discourage us from changing the status quo.

Finally, four quick responses to arguments offered by proponents:

Q. Shouldn’t we do anything to help kids who are desperately poor and trapped in bad schools?

A. We should do what’s likely to help. Bribing students to raise standardized test scores does absolutely nothing to address the real problems – social, economic, or educational. To the extent that it leads kids to see academics as just a tedious prerequisite to snagging some cash, it devalues the very thing we want to help them become excited about – and therefore worsens their plight.

Q. Shouldn’t we wait for evidence and see if these programs work?

A. First, there have been enough studies of similar incentive programs so that it’s pretty clear by now that they don’t work – certainly not in the long run, and certainly not with respect to outcomes that matter. Second, there are many more studies of rewards in general – and an impressive body of theoretical work in the field of motivational psychology -- that provide the context for understanding why such programs can’t work.

Q. Why not use rewards to jump-start kids’ interest, then fade them out so facilitate a transition to interest in the learning itself?

A. If only it were so simple! Unfortunately, as soon as you introduce an extrinsic inducement – a reward as a reason for doing something -- you affect the way students look at learning, at the people offering the reward, and at their own reasons for doing what they do. It then becomes more difficult to promote – or recover – intrinsic motivation than it was to begin with.

Q. Lots of affluent kids get financial rewards from their parents. Why not offer the same to inner-city kids?

A. First, I’ve never seen a speck of data to support this rather dubious claim about the supposed pervasiveness of financial incentives in the suburbs. Second, even if we grant that some rich parents are bribing their kids to bring home high grades or test scores, how is that an argument for doing it to poor kids, too, if it doesn’t make sense for anyone? Third, it’s one thing for individual parents to use these tactics on their children, but something else again for schools and public officials to officially endorse this kind of manipulation.

Also, notice that the most controlling classroom management and school discipline programs – carrots and sticks to enforce obedience – are far more likely to be imposed on low-income kids of color. That’s the real context in which to understand this latest version of “do what we say and we’ll give you a doggie biscuit.” If anything, given the structural and attitudinal obstacles facing poor children, we should be going out of our way to support their autonomy and critical sensibilities, working with them to solve problems. This kind of program does exactly the opposite and amounts to a plan for doing things to them so they’ll do what they’re told.

I don’t think this is a question about money; I think it’s a question about motivation. No reputable researcher, theorist, policymaker, or school leader that I know of has ever recommended the long term use of cash incentives as a method for improving student performance. And in the schools and districts where I’ve worked with kids who were eligible to receive pay for performance, I’ve found that money and prizes were not the magical motivators people thought they would be.

Yet motivation is absolutely critical – especially for kids who might be starting school a few steps behind where we’d like them to be. So what is it that motivates kids consistently over the long term?

Themselves.

External motivations, like money or other rewards, are short lasting and fraught with unintended consequences. Even worse, they have to be increased over time in order to keep working, and when they’re eventually removed kids have a hard time recovering from the shock. The only motivation we can really count on is the motivation kids build up inside themselves.

So how do we help kids build intrinsic motivation? Here’s an approach our company has used in classrooms for years.

CHOICE. Choice is the foundation of motivation. Kids need some degree of choice (not free choice; but what we call “guided” choice) in most of what they do in school. They need the freedom to choose the books they want to read; they need the freedom to choose the things they want to write about; they need the freedom to study the things that interest them most – within responsible parameters set by responsible teachers. This doesn’t mean ditching standards and curricula; it means finding ways to give kids meaningful choices within those parameters.

OWNERSHIP. Kids who make their own choices tend to take more ownership of their work and classroom conduct. As I explain to the kids, it’s like the difference between renting and owning a house. When you’re renting, someone else has to fix things when they go wrong. But when you own, you fix things. The reward for taking that responsibility is peace of mind and increased control over the circumstances of your life.

ACCOUNTABILITY. If you own it, you’re accountable for it. If a kid picks his own book, he’s on the hook for his own book review about it. And that doesn’t mean just turning in junk and saying, “Ooops. My bad.” It means fixing things and getting it right. We talk so much about accountability for adults in schools, why not teach the kids what accountability means? It’s not very hard, especially when they’re young. Kids are accountable to themselves first, to their peers next, and to their teacher last. Accountability does not mean seeking out fault or assigning blame; it means understanding the role we play in the results we achieve.

EFFORT. The result of high motivation is strong and consistent effort. Kids can’t instantly become brilliant no matter how motivated they are. But with sustained effort over time, they can optimize their progress. Effort is a direct result of accountability. The more accountable kids feel about their work, the more effort they put into it. If we can help them feel accountable beyond themselves, to their fellow classmates and to our classroom community, their effort will be especially strong – even strong enough to encourage others who may be struggling.

ASSESSMENT. Throughout the process of helping kids build intrinsic motivation, it’s vital to teach them how to assess themselves at each stage: Are they making good choices? Are they extending their ownership? Are they being accountable? Are they giving it their best effort? Taking them through this cycle, again and again, cements the process. Helping them become aware of how they’re doing gives them the power to do better.

If you want to know why kids aren’t very motivated in school these days, all you have to do is look at the process I’ve laid out here and notice one thing: school is exactly the opposite at every stage.

Dan Willingham’s new book “Why Students Don’t Like School” sums it up pretty neatly. In one of his nine rules for helping kids learn, he points out that kids need just the right degree of challenge. If the work is too hard, kids get beaten down over time; if the work is too easy, kids get bored. This means that differentiated instruction is a requirement of good teaching.

But few teachers differentiate successfully because the traditional model of teaching (the “transmission” model) doesn’t encourage differentiation – every student does the same thing, the same way, at the same time, on the same day.

At our company, we use the workshop model of teaching. This approach has differentiation built right into it through choice. It takes a little while at the beginning of the year to teach kids how to make good choices, but once taught, they’re off and running – highly motivated, independent, and with the best possible chance of achieving the highest levels of success.

Everyone knows motivation is key. We can’t actually force kids to learn. But whether we choose money or pizza parties or special field trips doesn’t matter. All of these things have been tried and we can all understand why they fail. For every ounce of effort we put into externally motivating kids, we sap their own ability to motivate themselves. Rewards and punishments may work in the short run (and this, of course, is their seductive appeal) but the only long run – and truly responsible – solution is to teach kids how to motivate themselves through methods of teaching that support choice, ownership, accountability, effort, and self-assessment.

I love Mike's comment! Why do we have to resort to gimmicks to improve student achievement? Let's put those dollars into professional development and improving what goes on in our classrooms. Pay for learning is a very bad policy statement.

Why not bring the market to the classroom? Because it's dubious ethics and bad economics.

I’ll skip lightly over the ethical implications of paying students to learn--not because they don't trouble me but because policy-makers yawn whenever ethics gets broached--and head straight for the economics. .

While incentive schemes look cool to some economists but they don’t work. In studies carried out in Ohio and West Virginia, the results were unequivocal--test scores skyrocketed when students are paid to perform, only to fall back to earth when the cash goes away. It’s education’s version of a crash diet.

Despite the hype, the results from the New York City experiment aren’t especially impressive. In one-third of the “incentive schools,” there was less improvement in reading test scores than the citywide average, and even a barracks statistician like me can tell you that those results could be explained by chance.

It's estimated that a third of New York's inner city students have uncorrected vision and dental problems. It would be far wiser, if less sexy, to spend that money getting them glasses and dental care. After all, if you can't see and you're in constant pain it's hard to focus on schoolwork..

My instinct is to favor it. Others may be inclined to oppose it.

Perhaps the better approach is to ask: does scientific research show that the practice, whatever it is, boosts student achievement over time on a cost effective basis?

Let's structure all of ours concerns into the scientific study. For example, we should test whether gains continue after the rewards cease. Do students "need" the rewards to continue striving? Or does better performance build intrinsic desire? Rather than deciding these things on the basis of our biases or "feelings," let's test them out and make decisions on the basis of what's proven to work.

We know surprisingly little about what motivates students to do difficult work, to persist in school, graduate and go on to post secondary learning. The "hook" is different for every young person.

Perhaps most often, the hook is a great teacher that connects with and inspires a young person. For some students, the hook is a themed school with application opportunities in areas of interest.

For some students, the opportunity to earn financial rewards is an important motivation. Affluent families have used versions of this strategy for generations. Reach is a New York City program, based on the success of AP Strategies in Dallas, that encourages low income New York students in selected high schools to take advanced coursework. Results in New York, like those in similar Texas programs, have been very encouraging.

We'll soon see a new generation of engaging adaptive content with instant feedback and a variety of reward and recognition schemes. We must continue to create options and search for the "hook" that encourages every student to work hard and succeed.

It's pretty easy to beat up on the idea of paying students to learn. Perhaps the most common approach is to invoke a golden age when children walked eleven miles uphill in the snow for the chance to glean the benefits of public education. Another is to ignore the fact that many families, especially in wealthy suburban communities, implement their own pay-for-performance programs: direct cash payments for grades, access to automobiles, and so on. Such intellectual shortcuts are unfortunate because schemes that set up financial incentives for students from low-income families may be very smart social policy. The jury is still out, and we stand to learn a lot from the ongoing work of scholars like Fryer.

Meanwhile, there are three reasons to keep an open mind about the kinds of experiments going on in New York, Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, DC. First these programs tend to target young adolescents from low income families. Without intervention, the life-prospects for many of these students are grim. The social costs of their failure are a little hard to measure, but they are massive. One imagines that preventing a single student from dropping out of school and winding up in prison would cover the cost of quite a few incentive payments. Second, the financial incentives in the various pilot programs tend to focus on inducing academic and behavioral success. In particular, students are paid for demonstrated learning outcomes, and for foregoing disruptive behavior that would have otherwise prevented other students from succeeding academically. In other words, students are paid for buying into a belief system that puts academic success and others' well-being right up front, and assessments of the morality of payment schemes should pay attention to this. And finally, schemes to pay students can include entree into the world of financial services, with a curriculum to go with it. In this sense, pay-for-performance schemes may be effective instruments in promoting social justice. In fact, maybe we would be better off if more AIG managers, for example, had attended inner-city schools with pay-for-performance schemes.

It would serve us right if the students organized for better pay, shorter hours, pensions after graduation and overtime for doing homework.

I will confess to being old-fashioned on this question. I would exhaust every other available option before even considering payments to students to learn. It demeans education to pay youngsters to study and achieve in school. Is there a point at which the payments stop? Do the students then stop studying? My guess is that this is a short-term gimmick that cannot withstand close scrutiny. Let's put our taxpayer money to better use.

I would be wary of assuming that the New York Post conducts rigorous evaluation research. Roland Fryer’s experiment assumes the existence of homo economicus, the utility-calculating relative of the people who currently occupy the planet. I wish I were as rational as Dr. Fryer assumes I am, but I suspect I am not, and today’s teenagers are probably only a little more rational than we dinosaurs. I would love to see some education research designed by behavioral economists to supplement the interesting work of Fryer and his colleagues.

There is at least one good thing to be said about paying kids to learn and it is this: it grows out of a recognition that student motivation is a key – if not the key – to improving student achievement. Of course we need good teachers and good schools. Just as important, however, are the students themselves and their attitude toward education. If kids come to class motivated; if kids actually value what is happening in class, then all the rest of our efforts cannot fail.

And that is what fascinates me about programs that are giving cash to kids. These programs are a real attempt to directly influence student motivation – a debased one, perhaps, and one that cheapens the thing it attempts to place a value on, but an attempt nonetheless, and that’s intriguing. Right now, we seem mostly to talk around children when we talk about education. We talk about opening new schools and closing old ones, changing teachers, involving parents, using test score data everyday in every class. Some of these things matter, but ultimately, education begins with the kids themselves. To the extent that a cash-for-education program puts the kids themselves at the center of our attention, I am grateful for it. Cash programs try to address education where it starts, and that’s a big step in the direction we need to go.

Having said that, however, let me add what I said over a year ago in American Teacher: that placing a dollar value on something that has an intrinsic value depreciates the value of the thing itself. As I said then, we “send our children to school so they will be able to enjoy the same private and communal satisfactions as do other educated people, such as the ability to think and speak without ignorance about the human questions, the social questions and the universal questions. We want children to treasure knowledge. Paying cash for learning degrades that treasure, the same way paying cash for love would, or getting paid to take a long walk in the woods.”

From that kind of degradation, I am not so sure we can transition back.

What is more, even if it did not debase education, a little pocket change isn’t going to have a significant influence on student achievement. No matter how much we pay children, we can’t expect them to be terribly motivated in fifth grade if they had arrived in kindergarten without the background knowledge and broad vocabulary they need in order to succeed. A few weeks ago, I visited my four-year-old nephew. He is a cute kid, but not what one might call a genius. The boy owned twelve different alphabet books (animals, countries, different kinds of trucks). He attends a story-telling circle at his library once a week, and during the course of our visit, he informed me that the planets move in an ellipse. Granted, he had no idea what an ellipse was, and granted, he didn’t quite pronounce it right. Still, he did know the word. That word is not going to defeat him when he comes across it again in a school lesson about the wonders of the sun. My nephew is perhaps an extreme example, but my point is (and research shows) that all young children need a rich language environment and exposure to a variety of things when they are small. When a young boy comes to school knowing little beyond the inside of his apartment, no amount of cash incentives can patch that up.

There are other influences on student motivation, of course: family, friends, teachers, school culture (an enormous influence), health, and just plain old life, especially if that life is being lived in poverty. We all know this. And, we all recognize that it is incumbent upon us to make policies that will remove as many obstacles to student achievement as we can. The problem is that we also recognize that these aspects of our students’ lives are hard to influence . They can take a lot of money and a lot of political will, and even in the best of situations, they can take a lot of time. Meanwhile, we feel the immediate pressure to eradicate the glaring academic deficiencies in the young adults we are graduating (and not graduating) from our schools.

And so, we offer cash. It’s politically simple, totally American, but it won’t change the equation for our students.

Still, shouldn’t we offer some kind of incentive for working hard and doing well? Yes. Kids absolutely need that recognition. What then should be the proper reward for doing well in school?

To me, the reward of education has always been, well, education. Any incentive program ought to reflect that. If we can create incentive programs that inform everything we do in school and that recognize the day-to-day successes of our children in both attitude and academic progress; and if we can reward children in ways that dignify education, rather than degrading it (meaningful honor ceremonies? weekend trips to college campuses? A whole new set of books?), we might find we are onto something good.

Because I am writing this in August, because it is a beautiful day, and maybe because I have gotten enough value out of my education to know that a beautiful day ought never be wasted by typing on a laptop, even if I were being paid for it, I will conclude by repeating here what I said last year in American Teacher: paying for scores threatens to undermine both the higher pleasures of education and our own resolve to address obstacles to achievement through anti-poverty programs, early childhood education and great curricula.