Getting Paid To Learn: Is it Enough?

CNN’s special report on being Black in America raised a host of issues, but the one that stood out to me most is education. The achievement gap is not a new problem. Black children continue to under-perform and we continue to be unsure how to remedy the situation. The special raised the question of whether students should receive monetary incentives for good grades. A Harvard economist, Roland Fryer, has instituted a program in New York City which pays students for test scores. Other cities, such as Baltimore and Atlanta, are following suit. The data aren’t in as to whether this approach works in the long-run, but short-term results suggest that the incentives are motivating students.

It’s important, though, to critically examine the variables at play and the methodology that would be needed to deem this approach a success. Those who support this perspective, say that money is an easy way to motivate students to perform in the short-term so that they can be better positioned for the long-run. However, some students are making the decision to work hard and study without these incentives. The difference is intrinsic motivation- the desire to engage in a behavior in the absence of obvious external reinforcers. An example would be the student who studies for studying’s sake. Adding money as an incentive for studying introduces an external reinforcer- rather than an internal reason to study, an individual now also has an external motivator. Some research suggests that when you reward someone for behavior that intrinsically motivating, it can decrease the motivation to continue the behavior. So, if we apply this finding, we could spoil the intrinsic motivation that some students have for learning by offering the monetary reward.

However, we can’t be too quick to bash these programs. My hunch is that it works for certain students. The incentive programs have been mostly aimed at low-income youth and inner city schools. A number of students attending these schools have a host of factors influencing their lives which complicate the idyllic “your job is school” mentality. For example, these students have to possibly contend with financial stress, neighborhood violence, and schools lacking physical and human resources just to name a few stressors. On average a student in a middle-class or upper-middle class family have fewer of these extraneous variables to tackle in addition to focusing on their schoolwork. Perhaps for those students whose lives are already full of demands beyond their years, a basic monetary reward is enough to re-focus their attention towards school. We’ll have to wait until the results start to roll in to know for sure. We’ll know more if we have data from students who were and were not a part of the program from 1) inner-city, resource-poor schools 2) suburban, resource-rich schools, and 3) students from a variety of sociodemographic backgrounds. With that information was can compare results and have a greater understanding of who these incentives work for and for whom they do not.

That last point reminds us that closing the achievement gap is not going to happen with one approach. These interventions are not one-size-fits-all. We have to understand that while we develop programs to students achieve, we also have a responsibility to provide them with educated teachers, safe environments and current resources. Those are the missing variables. Say we find that the monetary incentives work. We can pay kids to study but that does not change the fact that some are learning in dilapidated buildings out of old books with no computer in sight. There are institutional changes that would help support individual students in their pursuit of education. I recall a story of a young girl from Appalachia who graduated at the top of her class and dreamed of being a doctor. Yet, when she entered college, she was years behind her peers in math and science. Whether she earned money for her grades through her early education or had the intrinsic motivation to succeed, as a country we failed her in not providing access to up-to-date resources. We need to do better by our students. Since we don’t seem to be intrinsically motivated, perhaps we need some monetary incentives.