Haimson on Student Pay

A companion piece to the previous post critical of the Rhee in DC plan to pay students.

Check out our open letter to Harvard on the blog at

http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2008/08/open-letter-to-harvards-president-about.html

In an article in yesterday’s Washington Post, Michelle Rhee, head of the DC school system, said she intends to spend $2.7 million to pay 3,000 middle school students up to $100 per month for good attendance, behavior and grades.

Roland Fryer, the Harvard professor and author of this initiative, as well as the experiment in NYC schools designed to give up to $500 a piece to each middle school student for getting high test scores (as well as provide them with free minutes on their cellphones), claims that “Surveys of students and parents show support for the concept.”

What surveys? Our survey of over 1,000 NYC parents showed over 70% strongly opposed paying students for good scores. Another survey done by EdWeek showed that an overwhelming majority (81%) were against schools offering cash rewards to students.

Amazingly, Fryer will evaluate the results of his own NYC experiment in a report to be released this fall – a clear violation of standard research practices.

Meanwhile, a similar program this past year in NYC that cost $2 million to reward students for their AP scores led to fewer students passing the test. Barry Schwartz, a psychology professor at Swarthmore, wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times last spring, detailing numerous studies that reveal how cash rewards in the long run undermine “the intrinsic satisfaction” of positive behaviors like learning.

As to this particular DC experiment, “ Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) said the city has spent an inordinate amount on a school bureaucracy over the years that has failed students. Instead, he said, why not direct some of the cash to the students.”

As though there is no choice between wasting money on bureaucracy and offering cash to students for high marks?

“Rhee said she is targeting sixth- through eighth-graders because some students in the group typically have had intractable behavior and academic problems. …The schools need to focus on "how we can ensure that students are engaged, that they are invested in their education," Rhee said. "I think it's incredibly important to make sure students take ownership of their learning."

I love that word “intractable.” Is this is the only way Rhee can imagine to make students more engaged? It’s as though everything else reasonable has been tried, and that DC schools already provide all the personal attention and resources that students need to stay focused and on task.

There is now abundant research showing that given smaller classes, student engagement and achievement rise substantially. See this recent study by Thomas Dee of Swarthmore and Martin West of Harvard; revealing that smaller classes in 8^th grade are associated with significantly higher levels of student engagement and expected earnings, with the expected benefit from reducing class size in urban schools nearly twice the estimated cost.

See also this detailed observational report by Peter Blatchford, showing that low-achieving students in the middle and upper grades benefit greatly from smaller classes, in terms of the amount of time spent “on task” and focused on learning, with more than twice as much negative behavior per student in large classes than in small.

According to the Washington Post article, the $2.7 million cost of this experiment “will be split almost equally between the school system and Harvard's American Inequity Lab.”

At the same time that Harvard is apparently backing this experiment, it has put tremendous resources into reducing class size for their already high-achieving students, including limiting freshman seminars to twelve students or less. Now, 75% of Harvard’s undergraduate classes have fewer than 20 students, and this effort to reduce class size just caused Harvard to regain the #1 spot in the recent US News and World Report rankings, according to the AP.

Meanwhile, more than 70% of NYC middle school students, who clearly have a far higher need for instructional support and attention, continue to be crammed into classes of 26 or more, with about 70,000 of them in classes of thirty students or more.

While DC Mayor Adrien Fenty says of the DC experiment: “If it seems outside of the box, it is,” unfortunately, this is no longer the case. Amazing how such a controversial initiative with so much research evidence against it can spread like a bad virus.

According to its website, Harvard's American Inequity Lab, which devised and is partially funding this latest outrage, is supported by the following foundations: Broad Foundation,, Kaplan Educational Foundation, National Science Foundation and Smith Richardson Foundation

Check out our open letter to Harvard on the blog at

http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2008/08/open-letter-to-harvards-president-about.html

People should send their own emails to president@harvard.edu; with copies to msantona@nsf.gov, info@kaplanedfoundation.org; jhollings@srf.org and dk@broadfoundation.org

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
212-674-7320
classsizematters@gmail.com
www.classsizematters.org
http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/

Desperation Time In D.C.: School Is Money?

The Cold Splash of Reality, With A Side of Sizzle

Desperation Time In D.C.: School Is Money?

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/08/desperation_time_in_dc_school.html

The school renovations aren't going so well, the teachers are resisting Chancellor Michelle Rhee's ambitious plan to undo decades-old seniority and tenure rules, and student performance remains persistently miserable.

Despite her great energy and stunning ability to push dramatic change through a historically resistant political structure, the District's schools chancellor is getting a little bit desperate. The evidence: Yesterday's announcement of a deeply cynical effort starting this fall to pay D.C. middle schoolers to attend school, behave decently and perform in the classroom.

Yes, pay them, as in cash money. Rhee, Mayor Adrian Fenty and Harvard University economist Roland Fryer, a 30-year-old wunderkind who has taken on some highly controversial topics in novel and fascinating ways, are teaming up on a pilot project that will be rolled out in 14 District middle schools. Kids who show up, follow the rules and meet academic goals will collect points that could earn them paychecks of as much as $100 every two weeks--per kid. The money--the city expects to spend $2.7 million the first year--will be deposited into bank accounts in each student's name.

No reasonable person expected Rhee to start producing better test scores in such a short time, and despite some rough spots, she's still very much enjoying a political honeymoon. So why would she and Fenty embrace a totally unproven, wildly speculative, and depressingly classist, bordering on racially condescending, tactic like "School Is Money?" (That's the name the D.C. school system first circulated for the program, but now it's being called "Capital Gains"--much smoother, much more corporate, but the first name is more revealing about the mindset behind this ghastly concept.)

(Whoa, hold it right there: You can't just drop in that bit about race and move on.

(Right. But how else to explain a program that assumes that underperforming, inner-city black students must be paid to attend and perform in school, while no one has ever suggested that such an approach is even worth discussing for more affluent, suburban, white children? And how else do you explain this bizarre comment from Professor Fryer, who came up with the pay-to-learn plan and has implemented versions of it in New York and Chicago?

("We have incentive programs in our suburbs," he said. "Kids get shiny red cars at graduation." Wow. I've never heard of that actually happening outside of a Hollywood teen flick, but I'm sure there must be some real parents who promise their precious ones a car for graduating from high school. Still, for a Harvard economist to offer that silly stereotype as justification for treating inner-city students as if they are incapable of being infected with a pure love of learning is nauseating and, yes, smacks of racial condescension.)

Ever since she got to town, Rhee has won the hearts and minds of parents and others by talking about her passion for instilling in young Washingtonians the love of learning that school should be all about. That's why she's fought against the narrowing of curriculum forced onto school systems by the No Child Left Behind test mania. That's why she's recruited a whole new generation of teachers and principals to replace those D.C. schools staffers who truly believed that "these kids"--the mainly low-income black students who account for nine in ten D.C. schoolchildren--cannot learn.

So how does she now justify the idea that children must be paid to behave properly and take school seriously?

Washington's middle school students are failing in spectacular fashion. In the national NAEP test scores, the District ranks last among all urban districts in the country, with only 12 percent of eighth graders proficient in reading and only nine percent at grade level in math.

"These numbers are absolutely dismal," Rhee said. "Middle school is a turning point. These are the years when they crystallize their attitudes toward education. This is the time for some sort of radical intervention."

So far, so good, and that's why Rhee has been properly fascinated by experiments in all-day or all-year schools and even boarding programs--anything to pull kids away from dysfunctional homes and neighborhoods where there are far too few models of devotion to academic achievement.

But here's Rhee's rationale for embracing the idea of paying kids: "This is exactly what life is about. You get a paycheck every two weeks. We're preparing children for life, for their jobs."

Really? I asked the chancellor if she does her grueling, all-consuming job for the money. To her credit, she took the question seriously.

"Do I do my work for the money? Absolutely not. However, would I do this job if I wasn't paid at all?" She couldn't do that, she said, but that was a deflection of the question. Of course Rhee doesn't do this for the money. No one who does creative or enterprising work is in it solely for the bucks. At every level of work, whether executive or clerk, the energy and commitment put into the job is determined far more by a sense of pride, belonging or achievement than by the money. That doesn't mean money isn't important, essential, and a factor in determining job happiness. But money is at best a short-term, superficial motivator.

School, according to Rhee's own oft-stated views, should not be a grim, bottom-line enterprise. If you can get kids to discover the thrill and satisfaction of mastering new material from a very early age, you have them hooked--the whole job of educating then becomes vastly easier. Paying them is the ultimate expression of surrender.

"If this new partnership seems out of the box, it is," Fenty said at the presser announcing the deal. (No money changes hands between the District and Harvard; Fryer's lab handles most of the paperwork on the project and grants pay for Harvard's end of the costs, Rhee told me.) The mayor said it's time for a radical approach in "a school system that for too long has seen too much money being spent with too little result."

But this radical approach is wholly unproven. Fryer is something of an intellectual firebrand. He takes on hot button issues and submits them to the kind of rigorous test that they don't usually get because most people are too sensitive about open discussion of the possibilities. So he examines whether differences in racial groups' academic performance might have genetic roots (not likely, his research concluded), whether distinctively black names sentence children to lives of discrimination or lower economic status (no, it's the family background that plays a much larger role, he found), and whether school segregation is necessarily a bad thing (in the aggregate, yes, but in a particular school, not really, he concludes.)

The pay-to-learn schemes Fryer is running in New York and now Washington are experiments. He does not claim to have evidence yet that the program works, though he hints that he will have data this fall indicating some success.

But the early reports from another New York City pay-incentive program show no such luck: High school students who were offered up to $1,000 if they scored high on Advanced Placement tests were indeed more likely to take the exams, but actually scored lower than those who took the test than those who went through the process before the pay incentives took effect.

Must 3,000 D.C. students in 14 middle schools really be subjected to this degrading experiment just to build up the pile of evidence that school is indeed not money? Apparently so, because we live in impatient times, and Mayor Blackberry and his dynamic schools sidekick want to get there right now.

Here, kid, here's a dollar. Now shut up and learn.