Word: experimental
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The early feedback was promising. Principals were lobbying to get their schools switched out of the control group and into the treatment group. Parents began using the paychecks as progress reports, contacting teachers to find out why their kids' checks had gone up or down. In Chicago, Duncan discovered that...
In Washington, the kids did better on standardized reading tests. Getting paid on a routine basis for a series of small accomplishments, including attendance and behavior, seemed to lead to more learning for those kids. And in Dallas, the experiment produced the most dramatic gains of all. Paying second-graders...
Similarly, in Chicago, kids were paid for grades - a result they could not always control. There, the findings were mixed. Kids who got paid did indeed get better grades, and they also attended class more - a week and a half more over the school year. That is a big deal...
So what happens if we pay kids to do tasks they know how to do? In Dallas, paying kids to read books - something almost all of them can do - made a big difference. In fact, the experiment had as big or bigger an effect on learning as many other reforms...
It may also help that the kids in Dallas were the youngest in the experiment, making them more receptive to reforms. It's hard to know for sure. Another caveat is that the Dallas model worked differently on different kids. Most (including Hispanic kids and poor kids) did better when...