paying children to learn, or has roland fryer heard about this?

Fabio

The SF Chronicle recently ran article about how Ron Machado, principal of San Francisco’s Miraloma Elementary School, got a bright pink Mohawk when his pupils managed to pull up their school’s standardized test score by 67 points on a 1,000 point scale. Normally, you’d just consider this a cute story about a dedicated educator. But it actually raises a core issue in the study of education: do children respond to incentives? Can you really bump your school’s performance by 6.7% just by promising to get a silly haircut?

Of course! Kids are paid to learn all the time and it works. Many parents reward good grades, while others emphasize the future benefits of education. That’s the reasoning behind Roland Fryer’s project called “Incentivising: An Experiment in NYC Public Schools,” where he has tried to set up an experiment where pupils are rewarded for standardized test performance. There are no reports posted yet, but the idea is promising and worth investigating.

Fryer is on the right track, but Machado’s strategy offers a bigger lesson most people have not yet appreciated about schools. You need incentives because most schooling is terribly boring and, frankly, often useless. Schools were designed to impart a one size fits all education in a factory style setting. That’s why kids need to be rewarded if they are to exert any meaningful effort. You have to compensate for the negative school experience.

Machado’s idea was to make the school itself more fun, if only by making the principal look funny for a few days. He didn’t need money, just the insight that you had to change school itself by making it a less tedious environment. I am not claiming that ridiculous antics should be the only way we get kids to learn, but too much focus on incentivizing education misses the point that the school itself discourages learning. There’s definitely a role for rewarding educational effort, as Fryer proposes, but the biggest changes will come when people rethink the school from the ground up so students actually want to be there, instead of a place you endure while waiting for that nice middle class job.