So Soon Surrender: Rhee and Co. Use Paycheck to Write Off Students

From Marc Fisher's blog, Raw Fisher

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

Despite her 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: Last week's announcement of a deeply cynical effort 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 to be rolled out in October 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 in bank accounts in each student's name.

No reasonable person expected Rhee to produce better test scores in such a short time. So why would she and Fenty embrace an unproven and depressingly classist, bordering on racially condescending, tactic like "Capital Gains," the city's name for a program it first introduced as -- egad! -- "School Is Money."

( H old 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? Fryer, who has implemented versions of his plan in New York and Chicago, offers this defense: "We have incentive programs in our suburbs. Kids get shiny red cars at graduation." For a Harvard economist to offer that silly stereotype as justification for treating inner-city students as if they are incapable of absorbing 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 by talking about instilling in young Washingtonians that love of discovery. That's why she's fought the narrowing of curriculum forced onto school systems by the No Child Left Behind test mania. That's why she's recruited a new generation of teachers to replace those who believed that "these kids" -- the mainly low-income black students who account for nearly nine in 10 D.C. students -- cannot learn.

So how does she now justify paying kids to take school seriously?

Washington's middle school students are failing in spectacular fashion. In national test scores, the District ranks last among all urban districts, with only 12 percent of eighth-graders proficient in reading and only 9 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. But here's Rhee's rationale for 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."