This week in the New York Times national edition I read what for me was a rather disturbing article about paying students real money based on performance on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) state mandated tests [Next Question: Can Students Be Paid to Excel? by Jennifer Medina, March 5, 2008]. I thought surely I must have misread the headlines but no, I had not. New York City and several other cities around the country are in fact experimenting with monetary compensation as a motivator for children to do well on standardized tests.

Why do people continue to believe that throwing money at a problem will always fix it?

I hate NCLB. I hate it with a passion. Standardized testing is one of the worst systems I can think of in education. As a past college instructor I can tell you that the advent of standardized testing greatly correlated (in my anecdotal opinion) with a remarkable drop in the ability of students to work their way through problems and solve them. Thinking has been replaced with test taking strategies and memorization. Schools will deny that they teach to the test, but if you corner teachers off campus and ask them off the record, many will freely admit to doing just that. Students have certain things they “must” learn and that leaves little time to cover anything else.

NCLB does in fact leave children behind. If you cannot pass the high school exit exams you do not graduate. What is that if not leaving children behind? The tests don’t care if students can’t get enough food to feed their brains so they can concentrate. The tests don’t care if kids come from broken homes. The tests don’t care if kids are exposed to environments that detract from their ability to learn.

Didn’t pass the test? So sorry.

Maybe you should switch schools. The whole notion of changing schools if yours somehow isn’t “performing” however only helps the rich. If you don’t have a car to drive your kid someplace else, you don’t get to go. If there is no room, you don’t get to go. If you can’t make up the delta between a voucher and tuition, you don’t get to go. And so on. Maybe it is the teacher’s fault. Unlikely. Sure there are probably some bad apples out there but most teachers I know are working their butts off. They can’t, however, take the test for the students. Learning is a 2 way street.

Into this mess some schools now want to throw money. If you score “X” on your test, you get “$Y”. This is patently absurd. Pay kids to learn? What happened to having kids learn because they want to learn? That would be a nice motivation, don’t you think? But regardless of this, how can you justify what amounts to economic discrimination? Good students will get money, poor students will not. Many poor students are already poor students because of poverty issues and excluding them from the payment system will only increase an already ugly divide. The thought is “well, but they will try harder because of the money”. Some kids ARE trying their hardest and they still can’t succeed because they aren’t being given the right tools. How much more do you need to rub their noses in it? And for the ones who do get money, what message does that send? Will they do everything for money? Will that be the final death-knell for altruism?

Even more sinister, what happens when Johnny doesn’t bring home the cash? There are already stories you hear about kids being punished or beaten for poor grades. Money is a much uglier motivator. Money can be spent on lots of things. Just because you pay the child the money for performance doesn’t mean they will get to spend it. What happens when someone else comes to expect that money and then doesn’t get it?

In the article, the children were asked what they would do with their test bonus. Some said they wanted to buy toys or video games. One little girl said she would buy food for her family.

I thought child labor was outlawed years ago?