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Time for kids to share in FCAT booty
If your don't have a strong stomach for the cynical, don't read on.
BY Fred Grimm
Florida pays an FCAT bounty. A-rated schools rake in a hundred bucks a student. But, as any kid laboring in an ''A'' school can tell you, Junior ain't seeing none of it.
The money goes to teacher bonuses. Or to buy stuff for the school. None of the cash incentives goes to the very people in need of incentivizing.
Not in Florida, anyway. But a town in Ohio where failing state test scores brought an officially designated ''academic emergency,'' schools have skipped the middle man. In Coshocton, Ohio, kids get the bucks.
About 300 of Coshocton's 2,000 students, chosen by lottery, can earn up to $100 in gift cards redeemable from area stores. Ohio gives five tests. In Coshocton, each kid rings up $20.
In the past, standardized tests brought mostly grief to Coshocton, a poor factory town in central Ohio that has run short of factories. About 47 percent of its students come from low-income households.
Three years ago, a private foundation put up $100,000 to fund a pay-to-perform experiment. Eric Bettinger, a professor of economics at Case Western Reserve University, has been crunching the numbers. ``I'm still working on this year's data, but in the first two years students showed significant improvement in math and social studies. Some improvement in science. No movement in reading.''
The surge in test results moved Coshocton schools off probation. And the school superintendent parlayed improved scores into a better job at another school district. For more money, of course.
NEW BOTTOM LINE
Purists are deeply offended that students might be able to game the testing craze for money, just like the adults. But cash could be the new bottom line in education.
Another foundation pays high school students in Dallas schools $100 for each Advanced Placement test they pass. Kids can make $600.
Two weeks ago, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg introduced a program that pays students in low-income schools just for showing up to class -- more if they do well. High school students would make $600 for each state exam they pass.
Traditionalists are uneasy. They worry that money will undermine the true meaning of education. Except high-pressure, high-stakes mad testing regimes have already sabotaged the meaning of education.
Besides, Florida schools already reward FCAT winners with pizza parties and T-shirts. They bribe kids with prom tickets, give out prime parking spaces and relax dress codes.
Kids get iPods to show up for tutoring. A middle school in Port Charlotte gave out $5 Wal-Mart gift cards.
A STUDENT'S OPINION
Why not give Florida kids a civics lesson in political reality? Bribe them.
I asked a young friend of mine, a student at Harbordale Elementary School in Fort Lauderdale, if he deserved a share of the $100-a-head booty he helped deliver to his A-rated school. ''Yeah. Gimme my cut. We do the work. Show us the money,'' Quinn Donoho said. Or rather, that's what he might have said if his ethics resembled mine at the age of 9.
Instead, Quinn killed my premise. ``No. I don't think that would be right for the school to pay a kid money for passing the tests.''
I was flummoxed. What's this kid? Some sort of 1950s idealist? I called him back and sweetened the deal. What if the school gave out video games? Say, a Pokemon Ruby Version, Game Boy ready?
''Oh,'' he said, rethinking the pay-to-perform concept, ``that would be awesome.''
— Fred Grimm
Miami Herald
2007-07-03
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
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