By Raw Fisher
Tuesday, August 26, 2008

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."

Really? I asked the chancellor if that's her motivation for her tireless work in the schools.

"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, no one who does creative or enterprising work is in it solely for the bucks. At every level, whether executive or clerk, the energy put into the job is determined far more by a sense of pride, belonging or achievement. That doesn't mean money isn't a factor in job happiness. But money is at best a short-term, superficial motivator.

School, as Rhee has often said, should not be a grim, bottom-line enterprise. If you can get kids to discover the satisfaction of mastering new material, you have them hooked. Paying them is the ultimate expression of surrender.

Fryer does not claim to have evidence that his program works, though he hints he will have data this fall indicating some success. But early reports from another New York City pay-incentive program show no such luck: High school students offered up to $1,000 if they scored well on Advanced Placement tests were indeed more likely to take the exams but actually scored lower than those who took the test before pay incentives took effect.

Must 3,000 D.C. students really be subjected to this degrading experiment? We live in impatient times, and Mayor BlackBerry and his dynamic schools chief want to get there right now.

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

Join me at noon today

for a discussion of efforts to lower the drinking age, on "Raw Fisher Radio" at

http://www.washingtonpost.com/rawfisherradio.