When my middle child was in high school, nothing I said or did could keep him from dropping out. But what if I’d tried paying him?
Paying students is what the Philadelphia School District is implementing. In 2025, public school students who failed the Keystone Algebra 1 exam will be offered the chance to enroll in an eight-week course of extra classes to meet in the morning before school, in the afternoon after school, or on Saturdays, and then to retake the test in May. Those who opt-in will receive a cash stipend.
Philadelphia’s Algebra state test results are dropping. Only 27 percent were proficient last year, down from 30 percent the year before. The hope, obviously, is to reverse the downward trend via financial incentives directly to families.
There is a history of paying students, in America and around the world.
Starting in 1997, as part of Mexico’s Progresa Program, families living in 506 low-income communities were issued an educational stipend of 60 pesos per month on the condition that their third grade children attend school 85 percent of the time and not repeat a single grade more than twice. Rewards went up as the children progressed through the grade levels, and more was paid for girls to attend, maxing out with 225 pesos for females enrolled in the third year of junior high school
Despite the higher fees, the most benefit was seen in increased enrollment for fourteen-year-old boys, which went up 14 percent. Similar results were seen in a program in Colombia.
Meanwhile, teens above the age of sixteen in Sweden receive an allowance as long as they remain full-time students, and some schools in England have offered stipends for attendance and performance to low-income youth.
In America, Harvard University’s Roland Fryer has studied the impact of financial academic incentives the most. Throughout the mid-2000s, the economist spent more than $6 million dollars seeing if financial rewards would improve low-income students’ test scores in Chicago, Dallas, New York City, and the District of Columbia.
There were some minor successes, such as in Dallas, where students who were paid $2 per every book they read and understood (averaging about ten books per participant) advanced roughly two and a half months academically compared to those in the control group.
What Fryer found most often, however, was that, while test scores didn’t increase, attendance did. (This does raise the question of what was happening in those classrooms that spending more time receiving instruction didn’t translate into kids actually learning more—at least, not in a way that could be measured.)
Bentley University’s Jeffrey Livingston’s major takeaway from Fryer’s research was that students achieved more when they were encouraged to do things they believed were under their control. A concept summarized as “rewarding inputs instead of outputs.” Livingston claimed students succeeded when they were recompensed not for doing well on a test, but for performing the tasks necessary to do well on a test, such as taking notes, studying the material, or as demonstrated in Dallas, reading.
This would explain why the Philadelphia program is promising payment to all those who attend the extra tutoring sessions—regardless of how well they do on the final exam. It is similar to a program in Detroit, where students were promised $200 gift cards for every two weeks of perfect attendance between winter break and March, maxing out at $1000 per student.
Consequently, I have two questions.
If the goal is not to have students actually learn more, then what is it? Yes, getting kids off the street, helping them stay out of trouble, and providing positive role models is noble. It’s even incredibly valuable to society as a whole. Preventing crime benefits both the potential victims and perpetrators.
But should that really be a school’s primary objective? We hear talk about schools providing mental health services, about them providing food and dental care, about making every child feel valued. But those aren’t ends within themselves, are they? All those wrap-around services are supposed to be in service of K–12 students learning the skills they will need to function in the world, to find employment, to contribute to society, to raise families of their own (if they so choose). If we provide all these services—including actual cash payments—and they still don’t result in an adequate education, then how can any of them ultimately be considered a success? What purpose do they serve if learning isn’t it?
Furthermore, kids instinctively understand carrots and sticks, often better, faster, and in a deeper way than the adults issuing them. If students are told they’ll be paid for taking a test a second time, wouldn’t the logical thing to do be to deliberately fail it the first time? Kids will grasp much quicker than the administrators who created the incentive program that they are, in fact, being penalized for passing Algebra 1 on the first try. Good pupils are being punished, and bad ones are being rewarded. (Kind of like when those who act up in class receive the special treat of getting to leave and spend time with an administrator who feeds them candy and offers undivided attention, while those who behave have to stay behind and keep grinding—with no candy, to boot!)
If the Philadelphia school district insists on offering cash to their students—though the money won’t come from the district itself but from a private non-profit called The Fund For the School District of Philadelphia—and if they actually want kids to learn, wouldn’t a better incentive be to offer more money to those who pass the first time, with the returns diminishing every time you retake the exam?
This way, students wouldn’t just be incentivized to show up and serve their mandated time (did someone say school to prison pipeline?). They’d be incentivized to learn. Those who worked the hardest would receive the largest reward, yet those who took longer would still be encouraged to continue. In this way, the system wouldn’t be giving up on anyone, while still demonstrating the benefits of putting in maximum effort initially. At the very least, taking into account that factors other than hard work can affect academic performance, an equal cash payment should be available to anyone who passes the test, regardless of if they did it on the first or tenth try. There should also be no expiration date, like there is now in Philadelphia with a single time frame for extra tutoring, on finally getting it right, either.
As for my own son, I doubt any amount of money would have succeeded in keeping him engaged. By the time he dropped out of high school, he’d been working professionally as a computer programmer since seventh grade. Some days, he made more money than I did. He understood very quickly where the financial incentives were. And he realized that they weren’t in school, or in the system that required him to fill a seat for a certain number of hours, day after day, year after year—without really caring whether he learned anything while he was there.
Alina Adams is a New York Times best-selling romance, historical fiction, and mystery writer, the author of Getting Into NYC Kindergarten and Getting Into NYC High School, and mother of three. She believes you can't have true school choice until all parents know all their school choices—and how to get them. Visit her website at: www.NYCSchoolSecrets.com.
