Word: fryer
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...Eventually, Fryer and his team got 143 schools to sign up. About half would be randomly selected as a control group, meaning the kids would not be paid. In the other half, students would earn money for their performance on 10 routine tests given throughout the year...
...summer before the experiment began, a New York Daily News reporter heard about the plan. The story, headlined "It's a Cash Course," quoted an antitesting activist who called the plan "horrendous." One of Fryer's other funders pulled half a million dollars. Fryer got kicked out of the schools again, he says. This time, Klein took him to a Yankees game. A few days later, Fryer was allowed back in the schools. But he started waking up at 3 a.m. to check the newspapers...
...anger was not something Fryer had anticipated. "I totally underestimated how pissed off people would be because of this," he says. "This is exactly the kind of R&D education needs. I never said it was going to solve all education problems. I just thought it deserved to be tested." (See the 10 best college presidents...
...most damning criticism of Fryer came from psychologists like the University of Rochester's Edward Deci, who has spent his career studying motivation. Deci has found that money - like other tangible rewards - does not work very well to motivate people over the long term, particularly for tasks that involve creativity. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that rewards can have the perverse effect of making people perform worse...
...principle, Fryer agrees. "Kids should learn for the love of learning," he says. "But they're not. So what shall we do?" Most teenagers do not look at their math homework the way toddlers look at a blank piece of paper. It would be wonderful if they did. Maybe one day we will all approach our jobs that way. But until then, most adults work primarily for money, and in a curious way, we seem to be holding kids to a higher standard than we hold ourselves...