Economist Roland Fryer's Educational Innovation Laboratory is off to the races, thanks to the Broad Foundation, experimenting with new ways of incentivizing kids to learn in three big cities (New York , Chicago, Washington ). In D.C., the plan involves paying students in fifteen middle schools up to $1500 a year if they (a) attend, (b) behave and (c) get good grades.
I'm a longtime believer in giving young people real-world incentives to study hard and do well in school, though I've long supposed that means doing a better job of hinging promotion, graduation, college admission and jobs on school success. I don't have any big problem with more immediate and kid-like rewards, either, such as taking students with perfect attendance records to a theme park at the end of the year or giving pizzas to those who read more books .
Paying them cold cash to do the right thing gives me pause, however. It's fundamentally??amoral. It creates??weird and perverse incentives for pupils and teachers alike. It could get very expensive, using serious money that might otherwise go into better teachers, better textbooks, longer times, more instructional technology, etc. (Chicago has about 125,000 students in grades 5-8. At $1500 apiece, a totally successful program for them would cost $187.5 million per annum.)
Besides all that, I really want to know if it's going to work--and I really want that question to be addressed by analysts completely independent of Roland Fryer. Is there a freestanding evaluation built into this? Will the necessary??data be available to one and all to analyze? Fryer is a fine economist and presumably an honest man. But nobody should be his own evaluator. That's an even more dubious proposition than paying kids to do what's in their own interest in the first place.
