Word: getful
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...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 the program affected kids in ways he'd never expected. "I remember going to schools and seeing how excited the kids were when they got their checks. They were like pep rallies - but around academic success!" he says. Fryer appeared on The Colbert Report and CNN to talk about the experiment...
...tend to assume that kids (and adults) know how to achieve success. If they don't get there, it's for lack of effort - or talent. Sometimes that's true. But a lot of the time, people are just flying blind. John List, an economist at the University of Chicago, has noticed the disconnect in his own education experiments. He explains the problem to me this way: "I could ask you to solve a third-order linear partial differential equation," he says. "A what?" I ask. "A third-order linear partial differential equation," he says. "I could offer...
...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, since nearly half of Chicago's high school kids drop out before they graduate and the kids who skip school and fail courses as freshmen tend to be the ones who drop out. We won't know until 2012 if the experiment lowered the dropout rate, but we do know...
...Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), one of the most successful charter-school networks in the U.S., has been doling out financial incentives for 15 years, using a model that happens to align perfectly with the results of Fryer's study. KIPP students get paid for actions they can control - getting to school on time, participating in class and having a positive attitude - with "money" they can redeem for supplies at the school store. Over the years, KIPP leaders, who now run 82 schools nationwide, have learned a lot about which rewards work and which do not. They have found that...
...Just like grownups, kids need different kinds of incentives to get through the day, some highbrow and some low, some short-term, some longer-term. And money and other external rewards can be a gateway to more substantive motivators. KIPP fifth-graders get a lot of prizes like pencils; high school kids can earn freedoms - like the privilege of listening to their iPods at lunch. "Our ultimate goal is to get kids to be intrinsically motivated," says Joshua Zoia, who founded the KIPP Academy in Lynn, Mass. "But we have to get kids hooked in. We have to meet them...