Should We Pay Students to Study And Learn?

When I first head of this it was because they were paying the school administrators more because the students scores improved and that sure caught my attention. I didn't realize until later the students were also getting money.

think students should be taught how to study. No payment.

I think everyone would agree with that in theory. The question becomes, what do you do when that doesn't work? When that isn't enough?

OK I'm going to take off my hat as an educator and put my education reporter hat on (I covered the schools as a reporter before leaving journalism to become a teacher.) Incidentally of my four mentor teachers two quit within the year so either the profession has major problems and/or I'm some kind of education leper.

There's a few competing arguments that should probably be mentioned. One effect of No Child Left Behind has been not only more careful tracking students progress but tracking who progresses under what teacher. Sounds good, right? The problem comes when you have, say, a fourth grade teacher who starts the year with half the class at a second grade reading level and the other half at a third grade reading level. If she's lucky she might get half the class up to the reading level they're supposed to be at. But some would say she failed in not bringing everyone up to fourth grade level.

So one argument is penalize the teachers who aren't doing well. But the problems with that are 1) unions. I'm usually pro-union but what happens when unions and tenure are protecting bad teachers? 2) the kind of thing I just explained above, namely how do you decide what progress means? is it how well the class did as a whole? how the student with special needs did (that student's progress being more carefully monitored than others by NCLB) and/or the minority students (also monitored and tracked separately.)

Here's how this all plays out in Maryland: When there's a school that doesn't meet the state standard of Adequate Yearly Progress certain actions occur. When that happens for a second the punishments get more severe with the big scary one being that the district will have to pay for students to get additional educational help (this gets really interesting in rural districts.)

So what do you do when you have a failing school? What they do in Md is "reconstitute it" -or, essentially, give everyone there a pink slip. Everyone at the school is told they have to reapply if they want their jobs. The administrators are often automaticaly transferred elsewhere. So you may end up with totally new administrators, as much as 50 percent or more of teachers new to a school but with the same students as before.

It reminds me a bit of the card game 52 card pickup (where you just throw all the cards in the air.

How well are the cards shuffled before and after you toss the cards? are they going to be more shuffled and random after you toss it? Maybe. Does that mean it'll be better?

The other approach is rather then try to identify, isolate and get rid of the bad teachers to instead try to identify and reward the really good teachers. Again, this is good in theory but hard in application. This can lead to teachers fudging data and test scores to make improvements appear bigger than they are.

Personally I support the approach of rewarding good behavior - be it by a student or teacher - rather than punishing bad behavior. So I can see the logic here of paying good teachers and if the money for students was for students making marked improvements I could get behind that.

But giving money to every student who goes to a tutor or something like is occuring here seems like it'd be else effective.