Kids In Atlanta Paid To Learn?

Message 189 of 339

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This was on the news. Kids who needed remediation were being paid $8/hr to go for tutoring and learn. What about kids who didn't need the extra help? Is this fair to them?

I can tell you that my district had a summer program (and also one on Saturday) which paid kids to attend classes on math and reading. It was a grant program.

Any views on this????

posted by Dasiavue

I can see how it might be beneficial but I could also see it backfiring. The middle of the road kids might decide to do worse if they can get paid to improve. I would hope that the higher achieving students would realize that they already have incentive to keep their grades up. I would like to know if they have a "consequence" for cheating too. All in all it may work. I know we had a program in the district I work in that was paying the high school females $1.00 a day NOT to get pregnant because they had such a high rate of pregnancy there. It worked for awhile but now they just provide on site day-care...

posted by ChristineAM
about 1 year ago

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Alfie Kohn has a written extensively on the detrimental effects on learning produced by the use of extrinsic inducements. The link above will take you his interview published in 1995 by Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

His remedy to eliminate punishment and rewards is to follow the three Cs of intrinsic motivation: Content, Community, and Choice.

posted by barbara2000
about 1 year ago

Another example of living DOWN to the lowest levels of society.

posted by rlsco27
about 1 year ago

I met teachers in Canada (Atlantic Provinces) that said the minority kids were paid to go to school. In our district we had a problem getting parents in to meetings so we'd raffle turkeys or tape $5 bills to the bottom of random chairs to get them in. These were our supervisor's suggestions to get parent participation. They are toying with the idea of paying them here, too. (Cleveland, Ohio.) We already have attendance raffles where expensive bikes are given. Pretty darn sad, I'd say.