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My solution to the education attitude issue in the us, which is very real: pay the families that perform best in school districts. Take the top grades on each y

My solution to the education attitude issue in the us, which is very real: pay the families that perform best in school districts. Take the top grades on each years final tests and give the family money. The entire society will change overnight, as people will suddenly be asking kids why they aren’t studying.

SoftTalker 3y ago
This is how I finally memorized my multiplication tables in elementary school. My father paid me. He made me a set of flash cards and had a schedule of credits for each fact learned but I did not get the payout until I learned them all flawlessly.
twothamendment 3y ago
My son struggled to read when he was young. Over the summer we set a goal and attached a payout to it. Yes, I bribed my son to read. The problem is now I can't get him to stop. Money talks.
- hguant 3y ago
  My math teacher in 6th grade had a conversation with my parents that essentially went "he's not going to learn algebra from the Hobbit, but I feel bad telling him not to read" There are worse problems to have!
- stevekemp 3y ago
  We've got a six year old, just about to start school in a few months, and we've done the same thing. We started giving him a quarter of a lego minecraft set every time he read two pages of text - either in English or Finnish - then we had to move to a bunch of bricks every time he read a full chapter. The surge in his effort, and abilities, was almost frighteningly quick. (Here in Finland kids can go to daycare from 1 year old, and start in pre-school when they're six. School-proper starts at seven.)
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    I don't think you can parent without some level of bribing but note that research has been done suggesting that extrinsic motivation can negatively impact intrinsic motivation. One personal anecdote of mine is a school friend who announced that he was never going to read a book again after finishing school (with good grades). For him, reading books was not a thing he loved, just a means to an end. https://www.weareteachers.com/understanding-intrinsic-vs-extrinsic-motivation-in-the-classroom/ https://www.weareteachers.com/understanding-intrinsic-vs-ext...
    - light_hue_1 3y ago
      Sadly, the link you provided shows how much nonsense there is in this space. They provide two sources of "evidence". Both of them are total junk. For example, they say: As educators, we have heard a lot about the downside of extrinsic motivation. Studies have shown that extrinsic motivation produces only short-term effects, at best. One study out of Princeton University goes so far as to say, “External incentives are weak reinforcers in the short run, and negative reinforcers in the long run.” That study? https://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/RES2003.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/RES2003.pdf It's an economic model of how idealized humans might work! It literally says nothing about real humans or children. The second piece of evidence comes from the founder of this website excelatlife.com A website by a psychologist who treats anxiety and depression, and "Dr. Frank's strong interest in Eastern philosophies and Buddhist psychology has led her to train in various forms of Tai Chi/Qi Gong as well as other mindfulness methods for over 15 years. She is a third degree black belt in American Kenpo and continues her involvement in martial arts at the Martial Arts Center." She knows about as much about childhood education as you do. Maybe your statement is right, but your evidence is non-evidence.
      - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
        That was just a Google result that I scanned and found reasonable, so I have no great desire to defend it strongly, but: The economics paper is trying to reconcile the economics orthodoxy of "incentives matter" with the experimental evidence (that it references from across decades) that incentives can in some cases hurt. It's intro is a decent survey of the issue, and has the meta benefit that economists if they could prove this effect didn't happen would be happy to prove that. Instead they are trying to adjust their model to account for it. > Kohn (1993) surveys the results from a variety of programmes aimed at getting people to lose weight, stop smoking, or wear seat belts, either offering or not offering rewards. Consistently, individ- uals in “reward” treatments showed better compliance at the beginning, but worse compliance in the long run than those in the “no-reward” or “untreated controls” groups. Taken together, these many findings indicate a limited impact of rewards on “engagement” (current activity) and a negative one on “re-engagement” (persistence). > A related body of work transposes these ideas from the educational setting to the workplace. In well-known contributions, Etzioni (1971) argues that workers find control of their behaviour via incentives “alienating” and “dehumanizing”, and Deci and Ryan (1985) devote a chapter of their book to a criticism of the use of performance-contingent rewards in the work setting.2 > And, without condemning contingent compensation, Baron and Kreps (1999, p. 99) conclude that: There is no doubt that the benefits of [piece-rate systems or pay-for-performance incentive devices] can be considerably compromised when the systems undermine workers’ intrinsic motivation. > Kreps (1997) reports his uneasiness when teaching human resources management and discussing the impact of incentive devices in a way that is somewhat foreign to standard economic theory. And indeed, recent experimental evidence on the use of performance- contingent wages or fines confirms that explicit incentives sometimes result in worse compliance than incomplete labour contracts (Fehr and Falk (1999), Fehr and Schmidt (2000), Gneezy and Rustichini (2000a)). Relatedly, Gneezy and Rustichini (2000b) find that offering monetary incentives to subjects for answering questions taken from an IQ test strictly decreases their performance, unless the “piece rate” is raised to a high enough level. In the policy domain, Frey and Oberholzer-Gee (1997) surveyed citizens in Swiss cantons where the government was considering locating a nuclear waste repository; they found that the fraction supporting siting of the facility in their community fell by half when public compensation was offered.
- cgriswald 3y ago
  Learning is a kid’s job. A kid is working a decades long project to figure out how he wants to spend his life and do the work to make that happen. Imagine facing that and being told you have to do something you aren’t interested in doing without a clear concept of why it even matters… and without really any say in the matter anyway. I don’t know if I would have the tenacity to tackle a twenty year project partially against my will and I don’t have to worry about developing socially, growing physically, etc. Pay the damn kids, I say.
cjohnson318 3y ago
I think we tried that in the form of scholarships. Basically, the students with the highest grades get discounts from different colleges. It's not exactly the same, but the effect is similar, and this system has been running for generations. I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty. Parents who earn less usually don't have time to help kids with their school work, or don't understand the school work, or don't know how to study or teach children. Sure, there's exceptions to this everywhere, but that's the general pattern. Incidentally, Louisiana has/had a program called TOPs that covers in-state tuition for students that get over a 3.something GPA. Who benefits the most from it? Kids whose families make above the median income in the state. I don't think giving X dollars to the families with the top ranking students would change society overnight.
- xvedejas 3y ago
  Merit scholarships were already out of fashion by the time I was applying for colleges (circa 2010). Especially at more selective schools (those with lower admission rates), merit scholarships have been displaced in favor of diversity scholarships, which I suppose reflects the changing priorities of those schools.
  - AmpsterMan 3y ago
    Scholarships also just possibly dried up after the great recession. My wife and I both graduated from same state with similar GPA, though I was 2010, she 2012. We qualified for the exact same scholarship. Mine covered 100% of my tuition, hers 75%.
- peterfirefly 3y ago
  > I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty.I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty. True, but the arrow of causality is not from "poverty" to "low test scores". Children of poor (and sometimes illiterate) Chinese immigrants did and do quite well!
  - 3y ago
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
If we did that, the money would mostly go to the well off already. They’ve already got a system in place, they are already deeply into what their kids are studying. It doesn’t sound like much would improve.
- ecshafer 3y ago
  But school districts are already segmented by wealth. So sure money would go to some families in the wealthier school districts. But also families in the poor ones.
  - sb52191 3y ago
    I think you might be surprised at the distribution in wealth even within schools. Only an anecdote but I went to a public high school in somewhat of an inner city, and there was a stark contrast in financial well being across my classmates and myself. The kids from upper middle class families were the ones in AP classes and who went on to great universities, while the more median student likely came from a household that were much closer to the poverty line. If performance had come with a financial bonus, I'd guess 90% of the recipients wouldn't notice any difference in their lives/outcomes. Maybe even a higher percentage than that.
mkl 3y ago
Sounds like an excuse for parents to make their kids' lives hell. Such a policy would do a lot of damage.
gretch 3y ago
This Ted talk (includes a lot of data) shows that motivation via money hurts creative problem solving. https://youtu.be/rrkrvAUbU9Y https://youtu.be/rrkrvAUbU9Y
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

SoftTalker 3y ago

This is how I finally memorized my multiplication tables in elementary school. My father paid me. He made me a set of flash cards and had a schedule of credits for each fact learned but I did not get the payout until I learned them all flawlessly.

twothamendment 3y ago

My son struggled to read when he was young. Over the summer we set a goal and attached a payout to it. Yes, I bribed my son to read. The problem is now I can't get him to stop. Money talks.

hguant 3y ago
My math teacher in 6th grade had a conversation with my parents that essentially went "he's not going to learn algebra from the Hobbit, but I feel bad telling him not to read" There are worse problems to have!
stevekemp 3y ago
We've got a six year old, just about to start school in a few months, and we've done the same thing. We started giving him a quarter of a lego minecraft set every time he read two pages of text - either in English or Finnish - then we had to move to a bunch of bricks every time he read a full chapter. The surge in his effort, and abilities, was almost frighteningly quick. (Here in Finland kids can go to daycare from 1 year old, and start in pre-school when they're six. School-proper starts at seven.)
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  I don't think you can parent without some level of bribing but note that research has been done suggesting that extrinsic motivation can negatively impact intrinsic motivation. One personal anecdote of mine is a school friend who announced that he was never going to read a book again after finishing school (with good grades). For him, reading books was not a thing he loved, just a means to an end. https://www.weareteachers.com/understanding-intrinsic-vs-extrinsic-motivation-in-the-classroom/ https://www.weareteachers.com/understanding-intrinsic-vs-ext...
  - light_hue_1 3y ago
    Sadly, the link you provided shows how much nonsense there is in this space. They provide two sources of "evidence". Both of them are total junk. For example, they say: As educators, we have heard a lot about the downside of extrinsic motivation. Studies have shown that extrinsic motivation produces only short-term effects, at best. One study out of Princeton University goes so far as to say, “External incentives are weak reinforcers in the short run, and negative reinforcers in the long run.” That study? https://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/RES2003.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/RES2003.pdf It's an economic model of how idealized humans might work! It literally says nothing about real humans or children. The second piece of evidence comes from the founder of this website excelatlife.com A website by a psychologist who treats anxiety and depression, and "Dr. Frank's strong interest in Eastern philosophies and Buddhist psychology has led her to train in various forms of Tai Chi/Qi Gong as well as other mindfulness methods for over 15 years. She is a third degree black belt in American Kenpo and continues her involvement in martial arts at the Martial Arts Center." She knows about as much about childhood education as you do. Maybe your statement is right, but your evidence is non-evidence.
    - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
      That was just a Google result that I scanned and found reasonable, so I have no great desire to defend it strongly, but: The economics paper is trying to reconcile the economics orthodoxy of "incentives matter" with the experimental evidence (that it references from across decades) that incentives can in some cases hurt. It's intro is a decent survey of the issue, and has the meta benefit that economists if they could prove this effect didn't happen would be happy to prove that. Instead they are trying to adjust their model to account for it. > Kohn (1993) surveys the results from a variety of programmes aimed at getting people to lose weight, stop smoking, or wear seat belts, either offering or not offering rewards. Consistently, individ- uals in “reward” treatments showed better compliance at the beginning, but worse compliance in the long run than those in the “no-reward” or “untreated controls” groups. Taken together, these many findings indicate a limited impact of rewards on “engagement” (current activity) and a negative one on “re-engagement” (persistence). > A related body of work transposes these ideas from the educational setting to the workplace. In well-known contributions, Etzioni (1971) argues that workers find control of their behaviour via incentives “alienating” and “dehumanizing”, and Deci and Ryan (1985) devote a chapter of their book to a criticism of the use of performance-contingent rewards in the work setting.2 > And, without condemning contingent compensation, Baron and Kreps (1999, p. 99) conclude that: There is no doubt that the benefits of [piece-rate systems or pay-for-performance incentive devices] can be considerably compromised when the systems undermine workers’ intrinsic motivation. > Kreps (1997) reports his uneasiness when teaching human resources management and discussing the impact of incentive devices in a way that is somewhat foreign to standard economic theory. And indeed, recent experimental evidence on the use of performance- contingent wages or fines confirms that explicit incentives sometimes result in worse compliance than incomplete labour contracts (Fehr and Falk (1999), Fehr and Schmidt (2000), Gneezy and Rustichini (2000a)). Relatedly, Gneezy and Rustichini (2000b) find that offering monetary incentives to subjects for answering questions taken from an IQ test strictly decreases their performance, unless the “piece rate” is raised to a high enough level. In the policy domain, Frey and Oberholzer-Gee (1997) surveyed citizens in Swiss cantons where the government was considering locating a nuclear waste repository; they found that the fraction supporting siting of the facility in their community fell by half when public compensation was offered.
cgriswald 3y ago
Learning is a kid’s job. A kid is working a decades long project to figure out how he wants to spend his life and do the work to make that happen. Imagine facing that and being told you have to do something you aren’t interested in doing without a clear concept of why it even matters… and without really any say in the matter anyway. I don’t know if I would have the tenacity to tackle a twenty year project partially against my will and I don’t have to worry about developing socially, growing physically, etc. Pay the damn kids, I say.

cjohnson318 3y ago

I think we tried that in the form of scholarships. Basically, the students with the highest grades get discounts from different colleges. It's not exactly the same, but the effect is similar, and this system has been running for generations. I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty. Parents who earn less usually don't have time to help kids with their school work, or don't understand the school work, or don't know how to study or teach children. Sure, there's exceptions to this everywhere, but that's the general pattern. Incidentally, Louisiana has/had a program called TOPs that covers in-state tuition for students that get over a 3.something GPA. Who benefits the most from it? Kids whose families make above the median income in the state. I don't think giving X dollars to the families with the top ranking students would change society overnight.

xvedejas 3y ago
Merit scholarships were already out of fashion by the time I was applying for colleges (circa 2010). Especially at more selective schools (those with lower admission rates), merit scholarships have been displaced in favor of diversity scholarships, which I suppose reflects the changing priorities of those schools.
- AmpsterMan 3y ago
  Scholarships also just possibly dried up after the great recession. My wife and I both graduated from same state with similar GPA, though I was 2010, she 2012. We qualified for the exact same scholarship. Mine covered 100% of my tuition, hers 75%.
peterfirefly 3y ago
> I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty.I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty. True, but the arrow of causality is not from "poverty" to "low test scores". Children of poor (and sometimes illiterate) Chinese immigrants did and do quite well!
- 3y ago

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

If we did that, the money would mostly go to the well off already. They’ve already got a system in place, they are already deeply into what their kids are studying. It doesn’t sound like much would improve.

ecshafer 3y ago
But school districts are already segmented by wealth. So sure money would go to some families in the wealthier school districts. But also families in the poor ones.
- sb52191 3y ago
  I think you might be surprised at the distribution in wealth even within schools. Only an anecdote but I went to a public high school in somewhat of an inner city, and there was a stark contrast in financial well being across my classmates and myself. The kids from upper middle class families were the ones in AP classes and who went on to great universities, while the more median student likely came from a household that were much closer to the poverty line. If performance had come with a financial bonus, I'd guess 90% of the recipients wouldn't notice any difference in their lives/outcomes. Maybe even a higher percentage than that.

mkl 3y ago

Sounds like an excuse for parents to make their kids' lives hell. Such a policy would do a lot of damage.

gretch 3y ago

This Ted talk (includes a lot of data) shows that motivation via money hurts creative problem solving. https://youtu.be/rrkrvAUbU9Y https://youtu.be/rrkrvAUbU9Y

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]