New York City decides to pay students cash for test scores

Rather than investing money in improving the learning and teaching conditions in schools or addressing the systemic economic and social inequalities that are the root of the so-called “achievement gap” in schools, The New York Times reports today that the NYC school chancellor Joel Klein and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have decided to move forward with a pay for test score scheme in New York City Public Schools that could pay out as much as $500 a year to individual students.

The announcement came on the same day the University of California, Berkeley released a study finding that high school grades are the best predictors of academic success in college. The study by Saul Geiser and Maria Veronica Santelices notes that “high-school grades provide a fairer, more equitable, and ultimately more meaningful basis for admissions decision-making” than standardized tests like the SAT.

Geiser and Santelices found that:

• HSGPA is consistently the strongest predictor of four-year college outcomes for all academic disciplines, campuses and freshman cohorts in the UC sample;
• surprisingly, the predictive weight associated with HSGPA increases after the freshman year, accounting for a greater proportion of variance in cumulative fourth-year than first-year college grades; and
• as an admissions criterion, HSGPA has less adverse impact than standardized tests on disadvantaged and underrepresented minority students.

The NYC plan is based on the work of Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer, who has been meeting with NYC school officials pushing the program. Fryer has turned is research into a new job as the NYC Department of Education’s “chief equality officer,” a member of the chancellor’s senior staff.

The pay for test scores scheme is part of a larger antipoverty incentive program that Bloomberg has instituted, which also includes other cash payments, all raised privately ($53 million), to influence behavior and reduce poverty. Those in the pilot plan can earn up to $5,000 a year by meeting criteria related to health, education, and work, including: $150 a month for keeping a full-time job; $50 a month for having health insurance. Families will also receive as much as $50 per month per child for high attendance rates in school, as well as $25 for attending parent-teacher conferences.

See Sandra Mathison’s “Bribes for Tests” for a critique of the pay for test score strategy and Alfie Kohn‘s Punished By Rewards on why carrot and stick approaches in education are wrong-headed.

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