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Paying to learn seems odd lesson
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
American CEOs and educators are divided on the question of whether it's a good idea to pay school kids for good grades, according to a recent story in USA Today. I have no idea why CEOs are interested in that topic, but maybe thinking about it gives them something to do while they're waiting to find out how many billions of taxpayer bailout dollars they're going to get for mismanaging their companies.
More than half of the 74 company CEOs, chairmen and presidents surveyed said paying for learning is a good idea.
"Incentives are the tools we use to generate self-motivation," one is quoted as saying.
"All the mushy e-mails and letters of praise aren't worth anything," agreed another, who admits her parents paid her to take piano lessons.
Others disagreed.
"Any school district that is actually contemplating paying for grades should be destroyed," one CEO countered. Her opinion was supported by a CEO and father who argued that education should not have a "coin-operated incentive plan" and that teaching kids to say "What are you going to pay me to learn?" didn't sound like good strategy.
Educators sent similarly mixed signals.
In a separate survey of 450 high school principals, only 15 percent thought that paying for good grades is a smart idea. On the other hand, foundations funded by Exxon, Bill Gates and Michael Dell are paying high school students in seven states $100 to $200 for scores on exams that are high enough to earn them college credit. So far there are no reports of the students, or the schools, rejecting the money.
Most parents, I suspect, would like to think that their kids feel that education is its own reward and that once they discover the joy of learning they will immediately throw away their cell phones and stop texting so they can spend all their free time reading Shakespeare, calculating calculus and learning Mandarin Chinese. And I'm sure there are some kids like that, although I've never been related to any of them.
At the very least, we'd all like to believe that our kids would understand that studying and getting good test scores will pave the way to succeed in life and have rich, rewarding futures. Which is a nice thought, even though it ignores the reality that, for most kids, the future is what's going to happen in the next two hours or, at the very latest, this weekend.
As neither a CEO nor an educator, I can see validity on both sides of this question. So I asked the CEO of our family, who has been an educator for 30 years, for her opinion. In theory, she agreed, kids should not have to be paid to want to get good grades. But she did not flatly reject the concept, either.
So I'm still not sure if paying kids to get good grades is a good idea.
In fact, I'm still trying to understand how CEOs are qualified to have an opinion on the subject at all. What with government bailouts, golden parachutes and multimillion dollar severance packages, most of them seem to get pretty well paid no matter how lousy their grades are.
Contact this writer at (937) 225-2439 or at dlstewart@DaytonDaily News.com.
