The Beginning of the End

Well, not really. The beginning of the end already started – but this is more of the kind of thing that will ultimately end in the ruin of Public Schooling. Can you imagine if incentives – paying students to go to school, paying them to get good grades, paying them to pass tests, paying them to graduate, etc. – continues?

I’ve already written about teacher incentives and charging parents if their children don’t come to school or if they miss a parent teacher meeting.

I’ve also written about the different incentives being used on young people: enticing them with iPods, breakfast, paying third graders and paying $5 per A, $4 per B, etc. and offering the enticement of a car for graduating.

Here’s another article along these lines:

A $250 incentive for passing an AP exam
A group of educators and business executives will offer some D.C.-area Advanced Placement students and teachers $250 for each passing score on science, English and math tests. In Dallas, where a similar program launched more than a decade ago, the number of passing AP scores in 10 targeted high schools increased from 71 in 1995 to 877 in 2006. The Washington Post (3/9)

The reason I was saying this is the beginning of the end is because if this continues and one school finds out about some incentive another school has; or schools in one state find out about something going on in another state; the only logical outcome of all this is an escalation of this kind of thinking with the need for greater and greater rewards being offered.

This is NOT SUSTAINABLE!

Another External Motivator