Is Cash for Grades Really Bribery?

Roland Fryer Jr. of the University of Harvard has been an advisor to educational officials in New York who are interested in raising achievement by students in schools. the unquestioned realization as that performance for students was falling or poor in specific schools that are primarily in deprived neighborhoods. His primary response was to design an experiment in which students would be promised cash or cash equivalents in prizes that are conditions to the improvement on their grades or attendance of classes.

To the extent that I can tell, the preliminary results of this experiment has demonstrated beyond doubt that students respond to the incentives by raising their grades substantially and that this is attributable largely to the incentives scheme. Naturally, it is an experiment that some purists appear to question and the thesis of their opposition is based on the fact that this amounts to bribery of students to study because it robs education of its intrinsic value.

In the critique published here, Prof. Alex Standish seems to be unhappy with the approach and suggests that this is an extreme form of commoditization of education. I am unsurprised that a professor holds such a purist view of education in spite of the fact that states have had a longstanding problem in raising the grades and educational interest of disadvantaged youth. My hats off to Prof. Roland Fryer and I wish that the experiments go ahead because the investments in education that most societies make make it necessary to raise achievements especially for students for whom there is a high opportunity cost to staying in schools. To my mind therefore, if additional phones and calling minutes is what it takes to raise their interest in educational achievement, then Prof. Standish ought to reconsider his ideas. I suspect that education became a commodity long ago and one that racial minorities among other distinctly disadvantaged groups rightly considered costly.