District Administration - March 2009 - (Page 25)

Shaw Middle School students receive a check for good work presented by, from left to right, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, Roland Fryer, and Chancellor Michelle Rhee of the District of Columbia Public Schools. ner of a new car. In New York City, the Million program, which was piloted last year and is no longer in place, rewarded good students with free cell phones and minutes or text messaging, depending on how well they did. (Ironically, cell phones are banned in the classroom.) Although Arne Duncan, the new U.S. secretary of education, had adopted programs that use private money to reward students for improved grades when he served as chief executive officer at Chicago Public Schools, it is Roland Fryer, an economics professor at Harvard University and chief equality officer of the New York City Public Schools, who is considered the visionary behind many of these pay-for-performance programs. Fryer has implemented many of these programs in large, urban school districts, such as New York City’s Million program, Chicago’s www.DistrictAdministration.com Green for Grade$ program, and the District of Columbia Public Schools’ Capital Gains program. The Controversy Previous pay-for-performance programs have been steeped in controversy. Some critics feel it is wrong for schools to reward students for being students. They argue that children and young adults must learn for the love of learning. Peter A. Spevak, director of the Center for Applied Motivation in Washington, D.C., is among them. Spevak believes the desire to do well and the positive feelings that result from doing your best every day are the true motivator, not a cash reward. Teachers, he explains, must help to empower and inspire their students. But this can only happen if teachers set expectations and model the behavior they expect from their students. Similarly, Barry Schwartz, a cognitive psychology professor at Swarthmore College, believes “the object of education is to get kids to become a different kind of person: one who is open, curious and learning all the time. Forget incentives. If you successfully turn work into play, you don’t need to give kids rewards. Pay-forperformance programs make it harder to produce the kind of attitude toward learning that we are trying to cultivate. Not impossible, but harder.” Schwartz believes that monetary incentives could ultimately diminish a student’s intrinsic desire to learn for nonfinancial reasons. Other critics of the pay-for-performance approach fear that once the monetary incentives dry up, previously unmotivated students will lapse back into apathy. Loveless counters that maybe March 2009 25 http://www.DistrictAdministration.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - March 2009

District Administration - March 2009
Contents
Editor’s Letter
News Update
Health & Fitness
Online Learning
Conversations
District Profile
Administrator Profile
The College Promise
Do Economic Rewards Work?
The SIFication of America
Disciplining Students with Disabilities
How Well Does This Web Site Work?
Tech Disruptions
New Products
Product Focus
New Books
Research Center

District Administration - March 2009