In New York City experiment, high test scores will pay off

The Department of Education expects about 40 schools to participate in the two-year program. Combined, the schools enroll about 9,000 students.

Participating fourth-graders will be paid $5 for completing each of 10 standardized tests they are required to take during the school year. There are scaled incentives for doing well on each test, up to $20 for a perfect score. The maximum payment for fourth-graders is $250 a year.

Seventh-graders will receive $10 for completing each of 10 tests. They can earn $40 for a perfect score and a maximum annual payment of $500.

The program is designed to “test the effectiveness of small monetary incentives in reducing the educational achievement gap.”

The money comes from private sources. The Rockefeller Foundation provided the initial research and development capital.  

The pilot program is part of a citywide anti-poverty initiative, Opportunity NYC, which includes a wide range of incentives, including paying adults who live in subsidized housing for maintaining full-time employment, completing job training, and meeting their children’s health care needs.

The program also will pay families in six poor neighborhoods for ensuring their children meet school attendance goals, attending parent-teacher conferences, discussing annual tests with teachers, and other education-related activities.

Graduation from high school will earn $400 -- half to the student and half to the head of the household.

The use of monetary incentives to help families climb out of poverty is based on the ideas of Roland Fryer, assistant professor of economics at Harvard University, whose work focuses on understanding the causes and consequences of inequality.

The city hired Fryer to help administer and evaluate the pilot and has named him to the new position of chief equality officer in the Department of Education.

This type of “conditional cash transfer program” has had some preliminary success in other districts, the Newhouse News Service reported in June.

It says students in the 2,000-student school district in Coshocton, Ohio, who were paid for good test scores showed greater progress in math and science than those who were not paid. But payments didn’t seem to have an effect on reading scores.

The idea of paying students for test scores has raised some concerns. Author and researcher Alfie Kohn has two main problems with the New York plan, which he says essentially amounts to bribing kids for test scores -- a faulty method and an unworthy objective.

“Paying for test scores sends two messages at once: first, that kids should be treated like pets, with goodies dangled in front of them to make them do what the adults want; and second, that high test scores are more important than real thinking, excitement about learning, or any other educational goal,” Kohn says.

Kohn, the author of 11 books including Punished by Rewards, says that in the long run, research shows paying students for rewards tends to backfire.