This is the seriously wrong message to send

Child 1: “I got on the honor roll…so I should get a prize!”

Child 2: “No. That’s what you’re SUPPOSED to do! I got a gift because I graduated high school. You did what you’re supposed to do. Get good grades!” 

This evening I was doing my nightly check of Yahoo to see if there was any good celebrity dirt world news before I went to bed and I stumbled upon this.

(takes soapbox out)

Since when did good grades equate minimum wage? And since when did studying become a paying job? Try NEVER. How can Newt Gingrich and his daughter think that this is a good idea? I Im’d the angel forever with this article and she agreed with me…and her JL said a serious truism-“so, it’s if you do well in science/math, we won’t reward you.”

That’s exactly it. When are people going to realize that kids listen to money, not grades. If you have your honors student, they will slack off, get bad grades so that they can enroll in the program and pull their grades up. They won’t enroll in the more difficult classes that are there because they risk not getting their pay out.

THEN, what happens when these students GET to college and they have to PAY for classes and no one’s going to pay them for their 4 hours of study time and maintaining a B in their Math and Science classes?  What are they teaching these children?

Then, look at the funding. This is privately funded. What happens when the donors decide to back out? These students could potentially be left out in the cold mid year. Where does this leave them? What does it teach them? It teaches them that it’s just fine to back out of committments.

There are better ways to bridge the achievement gap. There are proven ways that don’t involve monetary rewards. In all of the education classes that you’ll take out there, they tell new teachers to steer clear of tangible rewards, no matter what they are. You can start with them, but attempt at all times to move the student to the intrinsic rewards. You do not want a classroom full of students depending on extrinsics. This whole pay to study system is giving students extrinsic rewards for basically doing nothing.

Another thing they teach in education courses is to monitor your students’ progress. Constantly assess, formally and informally. We know how it will be formally assessed, with standardized tests, which I hate, but that’s another post alltogether. The big question here is how is this going to be monitored on a day to day level? Are parents expected to sign off? How are the students going to be held accountable for their time studying to make sure they did it? So many people are all for accountability, but I’d like to see them report how this is going to work. They probably have no clue.

Strike one more up for the people who think they know what works to motivate students, but are so far out of touch that they often stick their heads up their rears and make fools of themselves.

This is the wrong, wrong, wrong message to send to students. This sends the message that there is not a reward for doing well without being in academic trouble first, and it also sends the message that the almighty dollar trumps everything else, including the basic knowledge that you need to function in the world society today.

Stupid delusional politicians.

Soapbox over