Pay-To-Behave
Two things got me thinking today. NPR’s piece “Pay-To-Behave Program Debuts In D.C. Schools”, and a Wall Street Journal article “The ‘Trophy Kids’ Go to Work”.
In the context of the WSJ piece (in which young workers are described as appearing “entitled”, and having high expectations with little desire to seriously commit to a job), the program to entice students into better performance with cash doesn’t seem like an inherently bad idea. The NPR piece never really brings up idea that this might be a reasonable way to ease students into a mindset that will help them later in life. It would be fantastic if no one ever had to work on things they didn’t like, but in reality these students will all go on to jobs where they’ll have to do something they don’t like doing. People don’t usually do that sort of work for no reason — instead, they do the work in exchange for a paycheck. Why is it unreasonable to use the same tactic in school? (Not all work is done for cash, of course — things like Open Source Software rely on work in exchange for more nebulous rewards such as peer recognition, but in general a person is going to need a paycheck to live on.)
Of course, it would be nice for students to want to learn for learnings sake. There’s value in that, but that doesn’t seem like something you can force on someone. The cash incentive might not be a good strategy. It might not help at all. But if it does work, is there something inherently wrong with using a cash incentive just like the jobs the kids will hold for the rest of their lives do? I like the plea in the article of Harvard economist Roland Fryer: “Let’s just let the data speak.”