What’s North Korea Got?

The Other Side Of The Gitmo Debate

Vice Presidents

Responding To North Korea

From California To…

Obama’s Executive Decision

An Altered Obama Experience

Obama’s Iran Policy

America’s ‘cash for grades’ scandal

Spiked Online:

A debate is raging in US education circles about a scheme introduced in schools in Dallas, Washington, Baltimore, Chicago and New York which will financially reward students if they improve their grades.

Financed by private initiatives, these schemes are primarily aimed at ethnic minority and underachieving students. In New York City over 200 schools offer students money for passing Advanced Placement tests and standardised exams. Some Dallas schools have experimented with financial reward schemes since the mid-1990s. Recently, the UK government has funded similar experiments (1). Some of the US schemes also offer money for student attendance and good behaviour. Even elementary students are being bribed with points which can be redeemed for gifts. And teachers and principals are offered cash bonuses, too, if their students’ grades improve.

Many parents and teachers intuitively balk at the idea of paying students to learn. They believe students should be motivated by learning itself, and that offering money can only corrupt the learning process. Yet, so far, these protests have fallen on deaf ears…

Through knowledge and ideas, students can learn to appreciate and understand the wonders of the natural and human world, and start to appreciate the nature of humanity itself. Access to this world of knowledge and intellectual skills is essential for young people if they are to begin exploring their own creativity and to find a niche for themselves. In the twenty-first century, there’s a wealth of knowledge available to help young people become future scientists, designers, musicians, writers and academics. Education is a creative pursuit that contributes both to our individual potential and our collective wisdom.

However, once we start paying students to learn, we implicitly communicate the idea that learning, in and of itself, is not of sufficient worth. We might justifiably pay a kid for mundane acts like cleaning a car or raking leaves, because these are laborious tasks that are necessary but which have little intrinsic value. Education, by contrast, is a different matter entirely, because it is anything but a mundane activity. Yes, a sound education requires doing a significant amount of work in order to understand areas of knowledge and to master various skills; however, such work is undertaken in a purposeful manner with the end product of clarity of thought and comprehension…

And yet, those who are understandably appalled by the idea of cash for grades are struggling to win the argument. This is partly because American schools allowed economical rationality through their doors many years ago. Education has become more and more tied up with the market since the 1980s and the publication of the federal report A Nation at Risk, which tied the failings of capitalism to education standards. Since this time American society has tended to measure schools by their contribution to the market, meaning that education has been well and truly commodified (5).

Awarding cash for grades takes this economic rationality to a new level of banality. In trying to give students a feeling of instantaneous gratification for their work, policymakers and teachers are effectively saying that they don’t believe in the long-term transformative potential of education. Hence, it is not students who are at fault here; it is not they who are concocting schemes to motivate themselves to learn. No, it is teachers and policymakers who have lost faith in the value of education and who are seeking alternative means of engaging young people. In doing so, they have ended up communicating to students their own loss of belief in the importance of knowledge and ideas. If they truly believed in the importance of the subjects they teach, they wouldn’t need to bribe students to learn…

Read it all.

Tragedy In Berkeley