In an article on Time titled “Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School”, journalist Amanda Ripley investigates whether monetary incentives for students to perform well in school is a good idea. The author reminds us that using incentives and/or punishment to shape children’s behavior is a trick that has been used for centuries and even suggested in the Bible. While kids generally like the idea of monetary incentives, some adults express concerns it may be a bad idea.
The most comprehensive study to understand the impact of monetary incentives on children’s behavior was done by Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. who ran the experiment in four cities, i.e. Chicago, Dallas, Washington, and New York. The study’s results implied that a well-designed incentive scheme may yield significant improvements in children’s academic performance, even better than more expensive reforms. Fryer manages a lab that is determined to narrow learning gap between the country’s white and minority kids by 2025.
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Fryer was first inspired to investigate the potential benefits of monetary incentives when he heard about a school in NYC that was trying an incentive plan. His initial efforts to recruit schools for the pilot program failed due to political factors as a result of opposition from some parents. A $2 million grant from Broad Foundation gave new life to Fryer’s efforts but it was still not easy signing up schools, even those which were struggling. His efforts paid off as 143 schools did sign up for the pilot program. Kids in half of the schools were not to be paid any incentives while others were to be paid incentives throughout the year.
Even before the pilot program started, opposition grew intense and Fryer even lost some funding as a result of negative media publicity. Opposition even came from academia such as psychologist Edward Deci who argued that monetary incentives hurt creativity and may even cause performance to decline. Deci suggests we should make people value learning and help them enjoy it. Fryer doesn’t deny learning should be for the love of learning but he cautions that is not the case in real world.
Different incentive plans were designed for schools in different cities. The early feedback was positive and even earned Fryer media appearances but media appearances also led to death threats. Final results were mixed. Children in New York didn’t show expected improvement in academic performance but a different model in Chicago did influence children who were getting paid, to improve both attendance record and academic performance. In Washington, students improved in reading but monetary incentives also did lead to improvement in other behaviors such as attendance. In Dallas, students showed significant improvement in reading and continued to perform well even after the incentives disappeared. The children in the pilot program in all four cities came from minority groups yet the results were not the same. After analyzing results from different cities, one of the major insights was that effective incentives encourage activities that help improve overall academic performance such as paying children to read more. Incentives may be less effective if instead they focus on the final outcome such as grades.
School officials in Washington are skeptical of long-term benefits but one of the encouraging findings from Fryer’s study is that kids with behavioral problems may make the most progress as incentives could be used to modify their behaviors over which they have more control as opposed to test scores. Fryer’s study does get credibility from the experiences of Knowledge is Power Progam (KIPP), a highly successful charter-schools network in NYC, that has been using financial incentives for 15 years and whose results support Fryer’s findings. KIPP’s incentive system also focuses on behaviors students can control. Fryer does admit incentives alone won’t work but instead reforms are also needed to achieve substantial improvements.
