Paying Kids for Good Grades: Does it pay off?

Contribution by Katie Weigl

It’s instilled in us from the time we are children. “Be a good boy/girl and I’ll give you a lollipop.” We see the same principle applied in the workplace as adults. “If you’re good at your job, I’ll give you a raise/promotion.”

So it would seem a no-brainer to offer school-aged children similar incentives for performing well in school.

…Or would it?

The debate—arguably most famously posed by Roland Fryer, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and founder of the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard University—is ongoing.

Through his social experiments, Fryer discovered that financial incentives for what he terms “output”—or results—failed across all grade levels and all cities to increase achievement. However, when incentives were offered for improving their “inputs”—factors related to effort, such as attendance and behavior—students demonstrated marked improvement in these areas.

Steven D. Levitt, co-author of the bestseller Freakonomics, spearheaded a similar experiment to test the effects of incentivizing effort, not results.  In Levitt’s study, students were not told of the financial reward in advance; instead, they were informed just as they were sitting down to take their tests. This way, the study measured the success of encouraging students to apply themselves more effectively in the “here-and-now”, rather than prompting additional hours of studying or note-taking ahead of time. Interestingly, Levitt’s study inspired the greatest improvements when students were given a financial reward in advance, knowing that it will be taken away if certain standards are not met.

On the opposite side of the argument, in her article for the National Education Association, Mary Ellen Flannery writes that incentivizing academic performance at all could be detrimental in the long run, especially when it comes to creative pursuits. Financial incentives are considered “extrinsic” rewards, whereas the rewards reaped from learning should be intrinsic. Flannery opines rhetorically, “Isn’t there greater value in reading a good book than a certificate for cheese pizza?”

Still, Greg Toppo of USA Today quotes Gregg Fleisher of the National Math and Science Initiative, who helped launch an initiative to offer urban youth a $100 cash reward for earning passing grades on their AP exams. Fleisher argues “this teaches [students] that if they work at something very hard and have a lot of support, they can do something they didn’t think they could do.”

As with any worthwhile debate, there is no right or wrong answer, and the experts (and the general public) may never agree.

What do you think? Does paying kids for grades pay off?