Money for high marks

Posted by helen at 7:58 AM

In a signature transposition of business practice into the education environment, the Klein administration at the DOE has installed a range of mechanisms to pay people -- teachers, principals, and students, at selected schools -- for performance. Today's Times story challenges the merits of a $2 million REACH incentive program (for REwarding ACHievement). Guess what? The results are a mixed bag.

Turns out more high-school students took Advanced Placement exams, which can earn college credit for high-scoring students. Fewer students passed overall, but a fraction more scored at the highest level, 5.

Promoters beg more time to show stronger results; critics say there are better ways to spend that kind of (private) money, despite similar programs' rising popularity in schools nationwide. And you can bet that man-about-town Joel Klein will face sharp questions on the program in his three public appearances today, at a REACH briefing, an NAACP event in Brooklyn and a Teach for America welcome-teachers evening program. But a quote at the end of the story caught our eye: Kati Haycock, director of the DC-based Education Trust, says that "rich kids get paid for high grades all the time and for high test scores by their parents."

Do you pay your kids for good grades? Do you reward effort (trying hard) or outcomes (the grade itself)? And what's the line between motivation and bribe -- between incentive and payoff? We don't think parents have deep pockets for report-card shakedowns, but we could be wrong...

Student Thought: Special College Edition (The Posse Scholarship and Cash-For-Kids AP Style)

Posted by Seth Pearce at 1:53 PM

Today, I stayed home sick (somehow my back went out yesterday after a long School Leadership Team meeting), so I figured I'd be productive and write a post. A few days ago, I sent out my first college application so I am a little "college-on-the-brain"ed. It looks like other people are too.

In September, Deborah Bial, the founder of the Posse Foundation, won a MacArthur "genius grant" of $500,000. I have a lot of friends who are currently going through the Posse process and they are really working hard so that if they win they could end up at the one of the great schools that Posse is connected to. Posse is a pretty innovative way to encourage students from NYC to go to and succeed in college. Its strategy is sending students in groups, or posses, of about ten students to one college where they would be more comfortable and eager to continue because they come into the school with a built-in posse.

Another interesting strategy for getting kids to go to and succeed in college was announced last week.

Though controversial, the plan would give students up to $1,000 for scoring well on an Advanced Placement exam. As some of you may remember, my fellow students and I were a bit uncomfortable with Opportunity NYC; however, I'm kind of into this new plan.

Studies have shown that students who take AP courses are more likely to succeed in college. Then, you ask, why doesn't every student take AP courses? In my experience students refrain from taking AP courses for several reasons:

1) Their school doesn't offer the AP course they're interested in.
2) They have a time-consuming job and can't bear the extra work.
3) They don't see college as a real option.

Seems to me that this program could alleviate those problems. It could encourage schools to offer more AP courses through the extra funding they'd receive. It could make taking an AP course more accessible for students who need the money. And it could encourage more students to pursue a college education, now that they have some idea of what a college course looks like.

The reason I prefer this program to Opportunity NYC is that this uses the cash-for-kids formula to promote the idea of going to college and to give students the abilities to succeed. Even though both problems draw similar criticisms, I feel that Opportunity NYC was more of an end in itself and didn't work to promote future plans so much.

Do I contradict myself? Just a little? Okay then, I contradict myself. This is the New York City public school system. There's a lot going on.

Incentives may be a misnomer in DOE's cash-for-AP scores experiment

Posted by Philissa at 4:39 PM

At this point, you've probably heard that the DOE is rolling out a new program, titled Reach NYC, to reward high-achieving high school students with cash for passing scores on Advanced Placement exams -- ranging from $500 to a just-passing score to $1,000 for a perfect one. The program is privately funded, thanks to the work of reformer Whitney Tilson, who blogged about the launch, and will start this year in 25 public and six private schools in the city. In addition to the student rewards, schools -- and possibly principals -- with large numbers of students who pass AP exams will get cash of their own. This program is similar but not related to the DOE's Opportunity NYC program, which will pay younger kids in needy schools smaller amounts for their academic performance and behavior.

I happen to believe that kids shouldn't get cash rewards for success in school. I especially think that in this case, because passing scores on AP exams can translate into college credits, which can net kids savings in excess of $1,000 an exam. But I can also see potential policy benefits in finding out whether financial incentives improve student performance. The original cash-for-kids plan is troubling but could yield meaningful information. I don't see how the AP initiative could possibly do that because as far as I can tell, the "incentives" will be operating on kids who are already successful.

The new program was announced at the selective Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem, where students will be eligible for the money. FDA has about 1,500 students in grades 6-12. Divided evenly, that would mean there are about 215 kids in each grade. AP courses are most typically offered to 11th and 12th graders; only a very few schools nationwide allow students younger than that to take AP courses except in exceptional circumstances. So we know that about half of all students in 11th and 12th grade are taking AP courses at FDA. How does this rate of AP enrollment stack up?

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post has been monitoring AP nationwide for years, using test-taking rates to compile a "Challenge Index" of the nation's high schools. Any school where students take at least one test per graduating senior makes the list; Mathews says only five percent of all high schools qualify. So even if each kid taking AP courses at FDA is taking only one, the school would rank at the low end of the top 5 percent of all schools nationwide, according to Mathews' index. And 80 percent of FDA's test-takers pass their exams, a more-than-respectable rate at any school. (Those are just the numbers in the New York Times article; the Daily News's coverage makes it sound like 350 kids are currently taking AP classes.) Sure, FDA can do better, but in a city where, according to the Times, only 1 percent of black students pass an AP exam, are its kids the ones who need incentives?

Roland Fryer, the DOE's Chief Equality Officer, is absent from the coverage of this new initiative. I wonder if he is involved in it at all. With a Harvard economist on the DOE's payroll, I would hope for more rigorous experimental conditions for an expensive project like this one. Or else the DOE and the private groups distributing money to its students should stop calling cash payments "incentives" and call them what they really are -- salaries for kids.