wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

i find the proposal for student incentive pay provocative, and i am undecided as to whether it is worthwhile. rather, i find the moral indignation of its consideration hypocritical and transparent.

learning for the sake of learning? give me a break. very few of us, regardless of social class we were brought up in, were born with such personal enlightenment about education. as we enter high school and eventually college, it's not about the love of learning. it's about competition and survival -- getting into a good school, getting a scholarship, and eventually getting a good job/career.

if we pride ourselves for living in a so-called meritocracy, why are we so uncomfortable about indoctrinating those standards in our children? is it because this is geared toward lower-income families, who are expected to once again pull themselves up by their bootstraps [when they have no laces?]. if they lack models in their own family to exemplify the results of education, the cycle must be broken somewhere. and in the children is where it can happen.

more important than excellent teachers, we need a drastic change in our youth's culture and attitude toward education. maybe it's a bribe. or maybe it's a catalyst. it will lead to more discipline and accomplishment, even if they are approaching their education with a new attitude of expectation and entitlement.

and rich kids do that all the time.

Students already (should) have a motivation to do well. It is called "parents". A student's parents should be the motivator to do well or at least the disincentive to do poorly. This can be anything from an allowance to being able to go out Friday night. I would bet there is a strong correlation between students who need third party incentives and the level of a parents involvement in the student's education.

Money for education is not the problem. New York state had the second highest spending per student in the nation (http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/economic_surveys/006685.html) and still is not the second best performing system. There has never been a study that showed causality between money and performance in education.

As for merit pay for teachers and teacher getting stuck with a "bad" class, simply start from the beginning and phase it in. Start in first grade, so only first grade teachers are eligible for merit pay. The next year, you include second graders, the third year, third graders and so forth. This allows the teachers not interested in participating, to move to higher grades or find another job. It also allows interested teachers to get in at the beginning of the policy change and be part of something new.

Where is the money coming from?!!

Improve the environment (bldg quality, water quality, etc.) so that students feel comfortable enough to absorb what is taught to them.

And why pay for grades?! Are students going to be paid for effort? Or just good scores? What about the journey of learning?

Merit pay for students? It's like a Monty Python skit. What next... you give a kid a quarter whenever he says "thank you"? Does learning have to be considered that much of an ordeal? Society has an obligation to educate its constituency and the members of that constituency, if they want to be respected as active members, have an obligation to be educated. Yes, it's important that we make learning as engaging a process as possible but students should not be given another incentive to learn; it is simply the wrong kind of reward.

Brian just made a crucial mistake. Individual student learning is not the current standard. NCLB measures the percentage of students passing or failing, not the individual student's improvement. Until we fix this system, merit pay is problematic at best.

why should only low-income families be eligible for merit pay? if you're going to reward students to work hard (or maybe not hard at all if one is smart) to take a regents test or graduate high school, should it matter what the social status or income level of the family is?