Summary Of Paying Kids To Do Well In School

The general argument by author Arianna Prothero in her work, “Paying Kids to do Well in School?”, is that school authorities are trying to use incentives to help kids perform better on tests. More specifically, Arianna argues that educators have long used rewards to prod children into doing what they want. The rewards sometimes consist of items such as gift cards, scholarship money, and in some cases cold hard cash. Technically, anything that motivates a student to do something is an incentive. Therefore, an incentive could be as simple as putting a sticker on a test or even as extreme as rewarding perfect attendance with a brand new car, like Raytown did last year. During the article, the author suggests many different types of incentives such as using money to try and improve test performances. Roland Fryer, an economist at Harvard University, paid out more than six million dollars to more than eighteen thousand low-income students trying to raise their test scores. If the incentive is tied to how well the students will perform on the test, the effects are very small and limited whereas if it is tied to the preparation for the test, like incentivising on doing practice test, it tends to have a greater effect on the

If a teachers goal is to instill a love of learning, paying students to read books or study does not really do that. Therefore, I believe that when teachers instill the habit of using rewards or incentives like paying them to do well on tests it tends to become a serious problem. It becomes a problem when the teacher stops giving students these rewards because the student feels that there is no point in doing good on a test or homework assignment if they are not going to gain a reward from it. Paying kids for doing something they should do anyway can lead to a very unattractive bargaining attitude, where kids demand, ‘what do I get if I do