Comments on: Good Schools Don’t Reward Students . . . Except When They Do

By: Malcolm Kirkpatrick

Malcolm Kirkpatrick — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:54:59 +0000

I’ll believe that academics believe their own arguments against material incentives for learning when I see College of Education faculty strike for lower pay.

Schools as they currently operate give many students no reason to do what schools require. School is designed by academics, by people who are good at school, by people who have spennt their entire lives in school. They imagine that the academic is the highest form of life on Earth and that everyone wants to be an academic. The tasks they assign and the incentives they offer do not appeal to many normal children. Training a mechanically or artistically inclined child for an academic career using a transcript as the incentive is like training a cat to swim using carrots as the reward.

I suggest this explains a lot of the income-related test score gap and income-related drop-out rate.

By: Polytope

Polytope — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:12:15 +0000

The best evidence that young people highly discount the future comes from the relatively high rates of cigarette smoking among teenagers from ALL SOCIOECONOMIC strata (CDC Youth Behavioral Risk Survey is one source of data.) Anecdotally I am astounded
by the number of upper middle class youth I see smoking at an almost exclusively white, mid sized, state land grant institution.

By: Greg Forster

Greg Forster — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:50:12 +0000

In addition to more disadvantaged children having a higher “discount rate” – which is a good point that I hadn’t though of – there is also the simple fact that children don’t understand the higher, more noble purposes for education. As I wrote in my PJM column, the 30-year-old may well look back and say that his life was richer, more fulfilling, and more fully human because he studied hard in school, but try explaining that to a ten-year-old.

By: Jay P. Greene

Jay P. Greene — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:45:27 +0000

Greg’s point that “promising kids prosperity later in life if they study hard now is not really different, in principle, from giving them tangible rewards now. The only difference is the time lag” is right on target. The problem is that low-income kids are more likely to have higher discount rates so that they are not sufficiently motivated by rewards later in life. Saying you’ll get a better job in one or two decades is not particularly effective with some disadvantaged students. Providing tangible rewards now addresses that problem and should have a disproportionate benefit for kids that are currently the most behind.