News that the Toronto District School Board is considering paying poor students to stay in school and get good grades has set off a heated debate across the country. Education director Chris Spence floated the idea on Twitter last Sunday.
Spence asked: "Should we pay kids in our more disadvantaged communities to do well in school? Perhaps, as a part of a poverty reduction scheme?"
The board's new anti-poverty task force will examine the idea, Lloyd McKell, head of the nine-member group, told the CBC. Feedback has been positive so far, he added.
"This is not about bribing. This is helping students who have no resources, or very limited resources, to focus on learning," McKell told the CBC.
It's an idea that academe hotshot Roland Fryer, an economics professor at Harvard, has been working on for the past few years.
Fryer runs an "education-innovation laboratory" aimed at closing the learning gap between white and minority kids in the United States by the year 2025.
Although a number of his pilot projects in cities across the U.S. have had spotty results, one of the best, in Dallas, found that paying second-graders to read books significantly boosted their scores on standardized reading tests at the end of the year. The effects appeared to last even after the cash rewards dried up.
Could it work here? Parents, do you ever bribe your kids to read a book or do their homework?
