In my last post about education reform, Shoothouse Barbie left a comment that indicated that bribing kids to do well had proven to be an effective means of improving school performance. That intrigued me, because, if true, it offered a realtively inexpensive, non-disruptive means to help improve schools. It turns out that, if you do it correctly, Barbie was correct: bribing kids works.
A Harvard economist, using private money, set up four randomized experiments in four different urban school systems. Each test had a different incentive structure (what behavior was reward, when it was reward, and to what amount it was rewarded) and operated against a randomly selected control group. The results were significant:
And in Dallas, the experiment produced the most dramatic gains of all. Paying second-graders to read books significantly boosted their reading-comprehension scores on standardized tests at the end of the year — and those kids seemed to continue to do better the next year, even after the rewards stopped.
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One clue came out of the interviews Fryer’s team conducted with students in New York City. The students were universally excited about the money, and they wanted to earn more. They just didn’t seem to know how. When researchers asked them how they could raise their scores, the kids mentioned test-taking strategies like reading the questions more carefully. But they didn’t talk about the substantive work that leads to learning. “No one said they were going to stay after class and talk to the teacher,” Fryer says. “Not one.”
We tend to assume that kids (and adults) know how to achieve success. If they don’t get there, it’s for lack of effort — or talent. Sometimes that’s true. But a lot of the time, people are just flying blind. John List, an economist at the University of Chicago, has noticed the disconnect in his own education experiments. He explains the problem to me this way: “I could ask you to solve a third-order linear partial differential equation,” he says. “A what?” I ask. “A third-order linear partial differential equation,” he says. “I could offer you a million dollars to solve it. And you can’t do it.” (He’s right. I can’t.) For some kids, doing better on a geometry test is like solving a third-order linear partial differential equation, no matter the incentive.…
So what happens if we pay kids to do tasks they know how to do? In Dallas, paying kids to read books — something almost all of them can do — made a big difference. In fact, the experiment had as big or bigger an effect on learning as many other reforms that have been tested, like lowering class size or enrolling kids in Head Start early-education programs (both of which cost thousands of dollars more per student). And the experiment also boosted kids’ grades. “If you pay a kid to read books, their grades go up higher than if you actually pay a kid for grades, like we did in Chicago,” Fryer says. “Isn’t that cool?”
And the results were just as good among the traditionally worst/most disadvantaged students:
Nevertheless, according to Fryer’s results, kids with a history of serious behavioral problems saw the biggest gains in test scores overall. Their reading scores shot up 0.4 standard deviations, which is roughly the equivalent of five additional months of schooling.
Now, this is no panacea, as the author of the study freely admits. But it is a cost-effective, prove method of improving performance if done correctly. It doesn’t disrupt the lives of students by closing schools, it doesn’t encourage a race to the bottom of teaching to the test like most reform movements, it doesn’t drive people away from the teaching profession, and it doesn’t rely on hoping charter schools and their 83% failure rate at improving student results can magically find something that maybe might work outside of the very controlled environment of a particular charter school.
Yet I cannot find it among any of the education reform movement suggestions and certainly not among any of the steps required to improve failing schools. One could begin to think that reforms are about nothing more than confirming their own biases, punishing unions, and funneling money toward their pet causes and not, you know, what works for kids.
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Kevin
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I haven’t gotten to follow the links yet, but 0.4 sigma is huge!
Bribery is really the only tried and true way of getting kids to do anything, I think. Once they get older, you can just try to convince them that’s how to get laid, but that’s much harder (no pun intended), better to just fork over the cash… which is really the best way to get laid anyway, to have cash that is – so it all comes full circle.
Anyway, the discomfort with bribery comes from an entirely emotionally and irrational haven for cognitive dissonance. I knew parents who paid kids for good grades. Largely, it worked. But, that’s not how people want to fix these kinds of problems – it doesn’t feel “right.” “That’s not why kids should work hard – they should do so because ‘it is the right thing to do’” I mean, they don’t ask adults to work without pay, under the motivator of excrutiatingly deferred and abstract, if not mythical, or amorphous gratification. I mean, no shit this works! Hey, guess what – you know what else works? Paying collegiate athletes under the table to come to your school. Who woulda figured that?
This whole debate reminds me of the fairly well known Malcolm Gladwell article, “Million Dolar Murray.” Certain cases of homelessness are solved more cost-effiectively and easily by swooping in and curing them versus tough love, or just providing treatments, or programs. But, think that some solutions just don’t feel right and object to them when they contradict the idealized value system that people hold, even when it opposes the actual factuals.
No matter how effective this model is, a ton of people out there just don’t want to pay kids to get good grades.
Bribery is really the only tried and true way of getting kids to do anything, I think.
I’m going to have to strongly disagree with that. Kid’s will also do things that they enjoy. Observe:
those kids seemed to continue to do better the next year, even after the rewards stopped.
Reading has the property that how enjoyable it is substantially increases the more one does it. There’s some cost in starting to read for enjoyment, and the cash bribes can overcome that cost, but the fact that they continue working after the fact suggests that there’s some other impetus that remains present.
(On the other hand, there is the fact that understanding new school material is vastly easier when you understand old material, so I’m curious whether the results of these studies were normalized for that.)
And I think this actually also explains the visceral objection to bribes for grades.
Those of us who have already invested in the learning that allows other learning to be enjoyable have the correct introspection that we don’t learn just to get money. It’s entirely true those who only learn for money do not value learning to the same degree that the educated value it, but this is seen as a different in value system (and thus reason for opprobrium), whereas it’s actually a difference in fact situation: The un-learned value learning less because it benefits them less, not because they do not value the attainments of learning.
And add on top of this the effects of class! It’s one thing for a suburbanite to send a kid to school to have them paid to acquire suburbanite values. It’s quite another for an impoverished inner city family to send their kid to school to have them paid to acquire suburbanite values. Hence we get that lovely phenomenon of black youth being told they’re “acting white” when they get good grades. How’s paying them to act white gonna work out?
Oh, I wouldn’t actually worry about that. Black kids seem to have no problem acting white if acting white basically means getting paid. See Carter, Shawn, and his wife, Knowles, Beyonce.
But, Dan, I think you’re entirely right. You really just need to bribe kids to get them to start giving an eff about school, or reading, or learning, whatever. Once you get into it, you develop the desire and it never really burns away.
So, basically, to amend my statement, kids will do things that they are either good at or enjoy. Sometimes they don’t enjoy things only because they aren’t good at them – adults too. I love to play baseball… I’m sure I would love to play soccer too, if I could dribble a ball and kick a goal as well as I can hit a baseball that is.
The only way to develop skills and enjoyment for activities is to participate in them. Parents have to bribe kids to start things all the time, from trying a seemingly exotic food to taking that first piano lesson. So, why should reading books or studying be out of bounds.
The current set of incentives societies uses could clearly stand some improvement, so I don’t see why least common denominator, most direct incentives should be considered out of bounds.
Sometimes kids are good at predicting what they think will be fun – playing basketball, playing video games, going to an amusement park. But in many instances they don’t realize how fun certain things will be and so they don’t immerse themselves in those activities. There, bribes can make sense.
Reading – come for the money, stay for the love.
…enjoyment for activities is to participate in them.
<rant>
<topic>gym class</topic>
<schema>
<rant>
<victim>most kids</victim>
<topic>math class</topic>
<result>disinterested incompetence</result>
</rant>
</schema>
<victim>&self;</victim>
</rant>
Sometimes kids are good at predicting what they think will be fun – playing basketball, playing video games, going to an amusement park. But in many instances they don’t realize how fun certain things will be and so they don’t immerse themselves in those activities. There, bribes can make sense.
Holy sh*t, when I saw that title, I was expecting something more backhanded!
What can I say, my mother has a masters in education and my father has a masters in psych.
Yes, kids will do things that they enjoy, and while I expect most kids enjoy learning when they feel that they are learning, I venture to say that the majority of kids do not largely enjoy school, for multiple reasons, but mainly because their favorite subjects are either gym class, recess, or a class they’re good at. It’s hard to make the average kid *want* to sit down and read a school book at the behest of their parents or school teacher (hardyboys and other recreational reading not withstanding).
I remember that my parents connived me into doing a readathon for charity. Nasty trick that is, especially when the kid doesn’t understand that their only reward will be having read a bunch of books and thinks that they’ll get some kind of reward at the end. After going door to door asking for pledges of money if I could read X number of books, my folks thought I automatically understood that the money was for someone else, not me. I was pretty disappointed when I learned the truth, but man, I read a lot of books that summer!
I don’t think bribes need be money based. It’s especially easy to incentivize children if they have activities or hobbies that you can hold over their heads. With me, it was ice skating. Bad grades meant my parents wouldn’t let me skate, while good grades meant they would happily allow me to go to the rink whenever I wanted. I imagine one could also bribe a kid with extra time on the play ground, toys, relief from household chores, pizza and icecream, etc.
Dan:
with regards to “How’s paying them to act white gonna work out?”…
Do you think it would be better to let them fail out so that their blackness will be preserved and they won’t be taunted by their peers for finding an avenue to success?
The way it looks to me, school performance appears to be more of a fixable problem than the “ghetto culture” issue. It’s something that we can probably do something about, we can probably turn it around to kids to care more about finding an avenue to success than their association with the ghetto. I think one of the problems that allows ghetto culture to persist is that there aren’t enough avenues to success, and all some kids have is the ghetto. If we put systems in place that can help them to become more successful, then it will eventually become apparent that “acting white” is not stupid, and if more kids are able to success, it will also become apparent to others that there’s nothing white about looking out for yourself and your future, and that not taking a drink when someone has lead you to the water is a stupid course of action.
It’s remarkable and yet really not surprising when you think about it that, given incentives, inner-city low income kids can do as well as suburbanite kids. Even though the test-scenario is not possible to implement in all schools as a means to get better performance, it tells us that kids who don’t show up at school with previously instilled values of the educational experience can pick up on those values, or at lease get the jist of the effort=reward system.
Do you think it would be better to …
I had hoped it was obvious that I didn’t consider it a good thing to encourage racist, classist anti-intellectualism. I just think the existing problems on that front will make the education problems worse.
(I’m also not convinced that it’s beneficial to think of it as “ghetto culture” as opposed to “mainstream culture as it manifests when ghettoized”, but much of what you say is compatible with that.)