Schools for Tomorrow Blog

My friend Brian Weber, a vice president at the Stapleton Foundation, sent along these thoughts about paying students to take tests, come to school, etc., in response to my post the other day about Manual High School.

Note: Brian was a reporter for many years at the Rocky Mountain News before moving into the rarefied foundation world seven or eight years ago.
 

This isn’t the first time Manual has paid students to show up. Nor is it the first time financial incentives paid off at Manual and elsewhere.

In the summer of 1997 Manual was beginning to adjust to post-busing boundaries which meant it would become three-quarters low income and 90 percent kids of color.

Then-Principal Nancy Sutton launched for ninth graders the city’s only high school summer school. Most of the freshmen were several grade levels behind so they were required to come. Others had a choice but that was not stressed. About 250 kids were expected; but 320 of the 380 ninth graders showed up. (Source: my own story on 7/7/97 in the Rocky Mountain News where I was an education writer from 1995-2000).

And they had an incentive: students were paid $5 per day to attend the four-hour sessions, do their class work and community service; they also earned 2.5 hours of academic credit. Kids I interviewed said they’d be almost anywhere else than school in June and July without the $25 a week. (Note to Alan Gottlieb: I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that Ms Sutton got some of the money from your former employer, Piton.)

More recently I saw similar incentives work at the William Roberts E-8 School in Stapleton. In the fall of the 2006-07 year (Roberts’ first year) approximately 50 students were well behind in reading, writing or math. Nearly three quarters were in sixth and seventh grade, and the majority of all the students were low income.

I worked with the principal, Trich Lea, to organize two, six-week Saturday School sessions for those kids, one hour of tutoring for each subject. Half dozen teachers were paid to help; another 15 or so volunteers from the Stapleton neighborhood association also tutored. Letters and calls went home strongly encouraging parents to get their kids to school on Saturday.

And the kids had an incentive: my foundation gave them each a $10 King Soopers gift card every Saturday they showed up for all their assigned tutoring. Those that had perfect attendance for each six-week session, were engaged and showed academic progress also received a free bike from the nonprofit Bicycle Recycle Program which is run by Bruce Lien, a former middle school teacher from Adams County.

On average we had 35 kids attend each Saturday and 28 qualified for a bike. Teachers reported that the majority of Saturday School kids progressed more than expected, and they performed better on CSAP than their work earlier in the year indicated.

As Alan and Rob Stein and others have noted – and I would agree — such “extrinsic motivation” is not the preferred method but eventually it may lead to the more desirable intrinsic variety.

 
           

           

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 10:37 am and is filed under Accountability, Testing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.