What if we gave students a paycheck just to attend school? Some people are serious about it. Some authorities are actually doing it. High-level, if theoretical, discussion at the Becker-Posner Blog.
(That’s Nobel-winning economist Gary Becker, and law professor and federal Judge Richard Posner.)
This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 6:58 am and is filed under Economics, Education, Education reform, Education spending, Politics, Public education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
(The Life of Reason, vol. 1: Reason in Common Sense)
Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump:
Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control. My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it. BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub
i think that we should not give students that who don’t want to learn or who is failing money only the people who is doing the right thing should get paid
LikeLike
Great Idea, What if we told our employees that they had to work for there employers for around 9 years before they would get paid. Look at it this way you can pay and reward a little now, or you can pay alot later and carry some of the non productive people till their death bed.
LikeLike
I think this is a bad idea because stupid students shoulddnt get paiid
!!
LikeLike
I don’t have a problem with the concept of paying the kids to attend school, only if they attend. I think it should be pro-rated on grades and put into a “college/continuing edcuation account” to be given only upon graduation. Graduation would be a must to receive any of the money. If some of the kids decide not to continue school they should be able to receive at least half of what is in their account.
Just some thoughts. It would help motivate those kids that want to go to school to learn. It may get more of them to graduate. Most importantly, it will allow families who would have a difficult time saving for college to have something to start off with.
LikeLike
According to the California Department of Education, one in every four of the state’s students fails to finish high school. In the LAUSD — which is supposed to educate 10% of all California’s school-age children — a third of all students drop out. The numbers are even more distressing when you break them down racially and ethnically: More than 40% of the LAUSD’s black students will not complete high school, and 35.4% of the Latinos will drop out. (Currently, 73% of LAUSD’s nearly 700,000 students are Latino; 11% are African American; 9% are white; and 4% are Asian.)
And California isn’t the only place where there the drop-out rate is rising. Urban school districts throughout the country are experiencing similarly high drop-out rates with some reaching as high as 70%. “Despite a number of targeted efforts, the nation’s high school dropout rate remains high. Some experts say that nearly one third of all public school students fail to graduate with their class. According to “The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts,” the national graduation rate is between 68 percent and 71 percent; the graduation rate for Black, Hispanic and Native American students is about 50 percent, while “graduation rates for Whites and Asians hover around 75 percent to 77 percent, respectively.””
So what’s being done about it? The answer is either not much or not enough! It is time for a radical approach. I suggest paying students to attend school; it would be cheaper than the current social and economic cost of a 25-50% drop-out rate. It has often been proclaimed that “education pays”; let’s make that a reality in terms that youth can understand.
The concept of delayed gratification is difficult even for adults to grasp; similarly for delayed consequences. See, for example, the massive credit card debt that adults are able to build. Imagine how difficult it is for children to understand the concept of get an education now so that many years from now you will be able to get a good job, maybe, if their is no recession. Most members of the adult working force expect payment for their labor at the end of the week; some wait until the end of the month. And some bank on commissions or year end bonuses. But they sure don’t have to work for years before receiving their payday.
So what about school children? Especially those from lower income groups where their family may be struggling to pay rent or put food on the table? How are they supposed to be motivated to delay gratification in order to obtain a job “some day” and be able to help their family?
Learn and Earn
Perhaps it is time to think about paying children while they are going to school. We often hear parents say to their children that it is their job to go to school. If that is true, why not pay them rather than forcing them to think about the lofty ideal of study for its own sake? Perhaps a better approach would be to emulate the real world and actually pay students to go to school and make their salary dependent upon their performance and the difficulty of the job, just as in the real world of work.
Schools should consider operating as an employer, paying their students as one would an employee. Schools provide guaranteed jobs to all students with a minimum wage. Salaries paid would be based on performance and difficulty of the task. A student would earn more depending on how well s/he did his or her job with grades being the indicator of performance. Some jobs, e.g., physics, chemistry, mathematics, would be more highly compensated than others, e.g., physical education, home economics, etc. Bonuses could be earned for outstanding performance, meeting quotas, etc.
A Token Economy. Payment could be in the form of tokens that could be used to purchase merchandise in the school store. Such merchandise could range from clothing to plasma TVs. I believe that most of the merchandise could be either donated by manufacturers or purchased at volume discounts.
I believe that if students were being paid to attend school and perform on the job, not only would they have more of an incentive to attend school, but they would feel more of sense of participation in the support of their families. Parents would similarly have more of an investment in supporting their children to attend school and perform well. The school would be a reflection of the real world in monetary terms. Students would see immediate value in their attendance. Rather than looking to the streets as a way of making a buck, they could look to the schools. The long range societal payoff would be the training of a labor force, keeping youth in school longer where they learn the skill of learning and the value of performance. Such a program would have the effect of increasing the self-esteem of the youth as they learn and earn. It is not enough to tell a student that someday learning history or English grammar, will be valuable to them. They must see the relevance today. If they are getting paid to learn and to perform, the salary received makes it relevant. The learning will accrue to them incidentally.
Some people would argue that such a program would be too expense. I would argue that it is too costly to have the mounting drop-out rate. It has been estimated that the public cost of high school drop outs runs into the millions when considering the loss of productivity, cost of entitlements, legal costs due to the higher crime rate among high school drop outs – it is cheaper to pay youth to stay in school than to incarcerate, gang related activity among drop-outs, increased substance abuse, and the myriad of unsuccessful programs designed to reduce the drop-out rate.
How about trying a pilot study to test the above plan?
LikeLike
Thanks for that link, Ed.
I live in New York and was not aware of this initiative. I thought people have always known what will actually make a difference (smaller class size, for example) but can’t seem to summon the will to make it happen. I wonder at these “what if” experiments.
LikeLike
I wouldn’t mind! :) …especially when our EFC shot up from $0 to $16K because of wages rising $1000.
LikeLike