Should we pay kids to do well in school?

Would it work?-- Should schools have honor roll?-- Is learning valuable for its own sake?-- And if it is, how can we get kids to value it as such?-- What are we doing wrong?

To pay or not to pay? Particularly in lower-income districts with histories of struggling students, public school systems from New York City to Texas have taken to incentivizing students to strive for attendance and high grades through a variety of cash payments and expensive goodies. But is it a good idea for schools to provide material rewards for academic performance?

For many of us, the idea of mixing the classroom space with cold hard cash brought up an initial shuddering of sorts. The YSR, ever-true champions of intellectual inquiry, were quick to advocate for the sacredness of learning for learning’s sake. The thought of introducing monetary motivation into the realm of schooling deeply disturbed us, as it seemed to threaten the idea of pre-college education as a “sacred space” for intellectual growth free from the pressures of pre-professionalism.

Yet while the Roundtable held these truths to be self-evident, discussants reminded us of the issue at hand was not isolated to theoretical ideals but rather also to a real life, rather extreme reality- that of currently-failing schools and struggling students. Perhaps the dire conditions of certain public schools, ones in which entering classes of 400 dwindled to around 150 by graduation, and ones located as nearby as our own New Haven, were harsh realities that those from more privileged backgrounds needed to be reminded of. In these cases, school policymakers acted with a more pressing goal in mind – prior to being able to the elevation of a sacred space, school systems needed to ensure the survival of that space in the first place by keeping kids from dropping out of schools and saying goodbye to their future chances of climbing up the socioeconomic ladder. Another roundtabler adamantly stressed that these incentivizing initiatives amounted to an emergency project with the goal of lowering the income gap, a cause so important that the benefits of such projects must outweigh objections to it.

Yet of course, qualms remained, especially when, for argument’s sake, we considered the idea of expanding the payment-for-school idea more broadly. The roundtable agreed that promoting the commoditization of educational performance and a culture that devalues genuine intellectual passion be avoided as much as possible. Additionally, the incentive payments could at best be just a short-term solution to larger problems in the American school system. Thus even those who advocated for the incentive programs in the case of failing schools generally agreed that the benefits of such programs only outweighed their setbacks in the most dire cases.

Other roundtablers still maintained that in such situations the ends still failed to justify the means. Yet perhaps objections to the incentive program could be reconciled not just on grounds of their practical benefits, but on a fundamental level as well. Our greatest gut objections came from the thought of the crudeness of monetary payments sullying one’s motivations for intellectual accomplishment. Yet a roundtabler pointed out that even many of the most driven “good students” to a large extent have craved and been motivated by external recognition of some sort, even if not monetary. Recognition and the promise of future reward are inexplicably tied to the motivation and behavior of nearly all of us. Perhaps in the case of low-income, struggling students the small cash payments and free ipods represented the form of sorely-lacked recognition and encouragement that could speak to them most and that could most effectively plug the “recognition gap” between them and their more well-off counterparts.

For some roundtablers, financial rewards for school still remain an impermissible violation of the sacred space of education. Yet for others, they remained the best way to give certain kids a fighting chance of staying within it.