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Incentives Can Make Or Break Students Ethical Issues Come With Gains on Tests

Enter "Deci" into a search
on this site and read about how these so-called
rewards go against everything we know about
what makes people tick, what motivates them to
try harder, and what effect gee-gaw giveaways
have.

By Bill Turque

The inducements range from prepaid cellphones
to MP3 players to gift certificates. But most
of them are cash: $10 for New York City
seventh-graders who complete a periodic test;
$50 for Chicago high school freshmen who ace
their courses; as much as $110 to Baltimore
students for improved scores on the Maryland
High School Assessments.

Desperate for ways to ratchet up test scores
and close the achievement gap separating white
and minority students, school officials from
Tucson to Boston are paying kids who put up
good numbers.

The District joined the list this fall,
launching a one-year study of 3,300 middle
schoolers who can earn up to $100 every two
weeks for good grades, behavior and attendance.
On Oct. 17, the first payday for the Capital
Gains program, students collected an average of
$43.

The efforts vary widely in scope and objective.
But nearly all trigger passionate arguments
about the wisdom of monetizing academic
achievement.

Critics denounce the initiatives as bribery and
say the money could be better invested in ideas
known to work, such as smaller class size. They
also point to a body of psychological research
suggesting that tangible rewards can erode
children's intrinsic motivation. DePaul
University education professor Ronald Chennault
says there are ethical issues posed by the
ventures, most of which are experimental and
dependent on private funding and local
political support.

"The potential for harm is, what happens after
the incentive no longer exists?" Chennault
asked. "Not everything is worth trying."

Capital Gains has emerged as an issue in this
fall's at-large D.C. Council races. At an
education forum last week, candidate Patrick
Mara said he was "completely disgusted" by the
idea at first but is now willing to see how it
works. Incumbent Carol Schwartz said she never
would have proposed such a plan but doesn't
object. Incumbent Kwame R. Brown and challenger
David Schwartzman are opposed, with Brown
echoing Chennault's concerns about what happens
when awards disappear.

Proponents, who include Chicago Mayor Richard
M. Daley, assert that the initiatives are a
modest attempt to give children from low-income
families a taste of the rewards, formal and
informal, that kids from well-off backgrounds
have enjoyed for years.

"Wealthy parents in the suburban area, they
give their kids a car. They take them on a trip
to Hawaii. They send them around the world,"
Daley told reporters last month at the launch
of the city's "Green for Grades" project.
"These kids don't even get out of their homes
for many, many years."

Although a flurry of incentive programs have
started up in the past year, the idea is as old
as gold stars. Some school systems have had
cash initiatives in place for years. So what
difference do they make?

The evidence, not surprisingly, is murky. Even
the apparent success stories come with caveats
and qualifications.

For the past 12 years, a Dallas nonprofit
group, Advanced Placement Strategies, has
targeted more than 100 Texas high schools with
predominantly minority and low-income students,
offering up to $500 for top scores on AP tests
in English, math and science. A new study by
Cornell University economist Kirabo Jackson
found that the program produced a sizable
increase in the number of juniors and seniors
taking AP or International Baccalaureate exams.
Jackson also linked higher SAT and ACT scores
to the effort.

But the Texas initiative also rewarded
teachers, with annual bonuses of up to $10,000.
Gregg Fleisher, former head of Advanced
Placement Strategies, said instructors are "the
missing big variable" in a lot of incentive
programs.

"When you address student-only incentives, you
only attack half the issue," said Fleisher, who
is working to replicate the Texas strategy in
67 schools across six states, including
Virginia, this fall for the National Math and
Science Initiative, founded in 2005 with a $125
million grant from ExxonMobil to improve math
and science education.

A new New York program inspired by the Texas
effort but that does not give cash incentives
to teachers has not fared as well. The
privately funded Rewarding Achievement offered
up to $1,000 to students at 31 high schools for
high AP test scores. More than 340 additional
students took the tests this year, but the
number who passed dipped slightly. Collective
bargaining agreements in New York sharply
restrict incentive pay for teachers.

Researchers say the commitment of all adults is
essential to student reward programs. A
Stanford University study of 186 charter
schools with incentives showed a "consistent
impact" averaging four percentile points on
reading scores. The report, released in May,
said the stronger and more enthusiastic the
staff and parents, the larger the gains.

Some programs seem to reinforce concerns about
the consequences of withdrawing the incentives.

Since 2005, the small central Ohio town of
Coshocton has given half of its third- through
sixth-graders "Coshocton Kid Bucks" -- gift
certificates redeemable at businesses -- for
good scores on state exams.

The only significant gains were in math scores,
according to Superintendent David Hire. More
tellingly, scores of students who were deemed
eligible through a lottery one year but
ineligible the next fell.

Detractors also point to research on the
corrosive quality of tangible rewards on
student motivation. In one study, University of
Rochester psychologist Edward L. Deci gave two
groups of college students building-block
puzzles to work on. One group got $1 for every
puzzle solved; the other received nothing. When
Deci said the experiment was over and
encouraged everyone to relax, those getting the
money were more likely to abandon the puzzles.

In 2001, Deci and three colleagues published an
analysis of 128 studies on the effects of
tangible rewards, concluding that they "do
significantly and substantially undermine
intrinsic motivation." This was especially
true, they said, for young children.

The District's Capital Gains project is part of
what is likely to be the most influential study
of cash incentives for kids. It is led by
Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr., who has
also set up the incentive programs in New York
and Chicago, with the help of the Broad
Foundation as part of a larger effort to bring
the rigor of private research and development
to educational issues.

Each program is designed to study different
sets of inducements for various age groups.

Freshmen and sophomores at 20 Chicago high
schools get $50 for each A in a five-week
marking period, $35 for a B and $20 for a C. An
F negates any cash reward for a given period.
Half of all student earnings are withheld until
graduation.

New York's Spark program, now in its second
year, focuses on fourth- and seventh-graders at
59 city schools. Younger students get $5 for
completing each of 10 periodic tests; seventh-
graders get $10.

Fryer said he will be the first to call for
abandoning cash incentives if they are shown to
have no significant impact.

"This is not a silver bullet," he said during a
recent visit to the District. "But it's better
than sitting around and doing nothing."

Shelontae Carter is not quite as sure. Carter,
whose son Christian is an eighth-grader at Shaw
at Garnet-Patterson Middle School, said she's
willing to try Capital Gains but sees numerous
potential pitfalls: resentment from kids whose
grades or behavior don't earn them much,
parents who claim the money for themselves.

"I don't know if it's going to be good for very
long down the road," she said. "I know that
when you give rewards, it can go both ways."

Research director Lucy Shackelford and staff
writer Nikita Stewart contributed to this
report.





— Bill Turque
Washington Post
2008-11-02


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