Current Events: Cash Rewards for Passing Scores??

What's in the News? (from 05 March 2008, C. Speck)

Article: Is It Good for Kids? Tomorrow's Leaders, Today's Challenge
ASCD News:"Is it Good for Kids?" column by Gene R. Carter, Executive Director, ASCD:
"Is It Good For Kids?"

Summary: Mr. Carter highlights a cash incentive program instituted by Baltimore City Public School System officials to pay high school students up to $110 for raising their scores on Maryland's graduation exams. The author quickly gets at the underlying issue of capability and motivation in students and does question whether a cash incentive is an appropriate or effective measure or just another stopgap program with little or no longterm payoff. The question of spending limited funds in this manner versus the pursuit of real educational reform is raised. Key reasons for dropouts are identified as student lack of interest, boredom, and disengagement in the curriculum; this is coupled with lack of motivation to work hard with an indication that a large number of students feel they could have graduated had more been demanded of them. Compounding students' disengagement and lack of interest in traditional programs and curricula is the increasing demands of the modern workplace for fluency in the very skills that many of these same students are not developing under traditional methods. Simply put, the workplace is demanding computer skills, and the same "target" students for the "cash incentive" and other such programs, students who are dropping out or just not graduating, are not developing these skills because they are not exposed to them in their school curriculum. Entrepreneurship and other ASCD supported programs are also highlighted as perhaps better incentive programs than cash rewards, along with real educational reform.

Response: Without overtly stating it, perhaps not even realizing it, Mr. Carter brushes up against some issues very close to the crux of our Multimedia in Instructional Design course in using multimedia and particularly modern computer-based multimedia tools and resources in real educational reform. As Dr. Kozlosky stated, it is not all about the Multimedia Resources themselves, it is about effectively using them in instructional design to better engage students. It is highly likely that the very students the schools are losing, to a large degree, are the ones without computer or internet access at home and for whom the school could be an oasis of opportunity for such tools that would open up the larger world to them. I cannot help but feel that if these students gain access and proper instruction, Baltimore would not need to pay them cash rewards to do better on their graduation exams, but instead could reinvest those same cash resources into improving the technology infrastructure and perhaps build a "critical mass" for learning that could bootstrap these students out of the non-motivated, disengaged state they are in.

My View: Somebody needs to give Baltimore officials a wake-up call if they are giving cash incentives to students for achieving passing scores on graduation exams. At best they are likely to create a temporary blip in their achievement scores, but it is well known that incentives such as these have short lived results. At worst, they might even succeed in creating a "black market" for test scamming. But the real issue revolves around true learning not test scores or grades and Mr. Carter correctly points out that school officials have to get at the motivational and student engagement issues--cash is not the way to do this. Another alarming aspect of this is that students are not being engaged to develop the very skills that are likely to motivate them both in education and help them succeed in the workplace. This is unfortunately one of the dangers of a technological society, we will if we are not careful develop a caste society with the technological "haves" and the non-technological "have nots." We should also not be surprised to see a correlation between these groups and significant crime statistics. Economic studies have shown for a long time that chronic unemployment correlates in a large way to crime. What are they thinking in Baltimore? My larger concern is that Baltimore may be representative of a large percentage of school officials who are more concerned about performance on high stakes testing than on longterm educational reform.

Questions:
(1) While high-stakes testing is clearly important to measure how schools are performing and improving or regressing, how can we get the emphasis off of temporary blips in the score results, that actually game the system, and get leaders to focus on real improvement?

(2) How do we prevent the gap between the technological "haves" and the "have nots" from continuing to widen when we have large groups of young people who are unplugged, disengaged, unmotivated, and ignorant about what they are missing, so much so that officials feel they have to resort to cash payment to get them to "score" on tests?

(3) In this situation, is there any learning going on for these students? Does anybody actually care about that?