Cash Fails to Motivate Students

by Jessica Shiller · 2010-04-20 12:35:00 UTC
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How do you motivate students, especially low-income students, to do better in school? Pay them!

That's what Roland Fryer, Harvard economist, suggests. Cities around the country have done just that, paying students to earn top grades, read books, or improve their attendance. Urban school districts seemed desperate to find some strategy to improve academic achievement among the lowest achievers and the money poured in: $6.3 million to schools in four cities to fund Fryer's experiment.

In New York, a fourth grader could earn $250 and a seventh grader up to $500. In Dallas, students got paid $2 for every book that they read. In Chicago, they earned for $50 for each A, $35 for each B. In D.C., young people were paid for not getting into fights.

The experiment has been in effect for a few years, and results have come in: Money doesn't motivate young people. In the short term, it got some kids motivated to attend school more, read more, and get better scores on tests, but for the majority of the kids, it did not pan out as a good long term strategy. For most, test scores did not go up, so the monetary incentive did not seem to work.

In fact, it turns out that there is no consensus that money is a motivator. Money can motivate, but usually when it is tied to a short-term specific goal. An employee may get motivated to finish a project early for an extra case incentive, for example. But, over the long haul, other factors motivate workers to improve their work, like the work environment or the right boss.

In the case of students, we do not want short term motivators. We want long term ones, ones that build intrinsic desire to learn, right?  There is nothing wrong with thinking about ways to get students to do better in school, but cash will not get us to the goal of producing young people that like school and who want to keep learning. It will just get us kids who will do what they have to for money.

Maybe I am naive thinking that we should have higher hopes for kids. But I do. I hope that we will use money to make school interesting instead of paying them to get better grades.

Photo credit: photos8

Jessica Shiller is the education policy director for Advocates for Children and Youth in Baltimore, MD.
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