Paying Students to Stay in School

This Time Magazine article is about a year old, but I thought it fit well into our discussion of education policy. It's about whether schools should pay students to stay in school, get high standardized test scores, or not start fights. The article mainly describes an experiment done by a Harvard professor that payed students in low-performing schools and compared their progress to students who were not paid. The results were inconclusive. Students in one of the four cities showed absolutely no extra progress when paid. However in another city, students who were paid scored better than their classmates on end of the year standardized tests. "Statistically speaking, it was as if those kids had spent three extra months in school, compared with their peers who did not get paid."

Even though the results were not very exciting, I thought this was a really creative way to deal with high dropout rates. The article also mentions unanticipated consequences of this policy, such "cheapening learning" and cultivating a generation of adults who have no self-motivation.