Mixed Results on Paying City Students to Pass Tests

New York Times ^ | August 19, 2008 | Elissa Gootman

[reaganaut1]

Offered up to $1,000 for scoring well on Advanced Placement exams, students at 31 New York City high schools took 345 more of the tests this year than last. But the number who passed declined slightly, raising questions about the effectiveness of increasingly popular pay-for-performance programs in schools here and across the country.

Test Dollars Students involved in the program, financed with $2 million in private donations and aimed at closing a racial gap in Advanced Placement results, posted more 5’s, the highest possible score. That rise, however, was overshadowed by a decline in the number of 4’s and 3’s. Three is the minimum passing score.

The effort to reward city students for passing Advanced Placement tests is part of a growing trend nationally and internationally, and one of several new programs in New York, to experiment with using financial incentives to lift attendance and achievement.

The results, scheduled to be formally announced on Wednesday, are likely to be closely examined by both enthusiasts who herald such programs as groundbreaking innovation and detractors who deride them as short-sighted bribes that threaten broader educational progress.

“I’m just dumbfounded that they can regard this as an achievement or as a great improvement or as something worth spending the money on,” said Sol Stern, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, who had expressed cautious support for the Advanced Placement program when it was announced last fall. “I’m surprised that that kind of money, that kind of incentives, doesn’t produce better results. It sort of undercuts the argument that the problem is the question of motivation.”

[reaganaut1]

If the problem is not motivation, maybe it is the Bell Curve of intelligence.

[AnAmericanMother]

Getting a 4 or a 5 on an AP exam is already a big plus.

You can "AP out" of a bunch of freshman level college courses, thus saving a good deal of time and money, especially if you're at a state school where you pay by the course hour. You can graduate a year early if you're so inclined. Alternatively, you can spend more time taking courses in your major.

So the kids who had a good chance on the APs were already taking them.

The marginal kids, who may have decided that it wasn't worth their while to take the test and just get a 1 or a 2, are the ones who are signing on to get the money.

That's why the test scores went down. It ain't rocket science.

More liberal foolishness, due to their stubborn refusal to recognize the very existence of differences in intelligence/motivation.

[PGR88]

The exact opposite is true. High school should be made more selective, more expensive, and less available to average or below average students.

It seems cruel, but very simply, if an education is not valued, then offering it is useless.

[workerbee]

Remember when the “financial incentive” to attend school and pass tests was called “You’ll Get A Job and Be Able To Eat”?

[workerbee]

“Frankly, rich kids get paid for high grades all the time and for high test scores by their parents,” Ms. Haycock added. “So this isn’t so different.”

Nope, no different at all -- not for libs whose goal it is to indoctrinate the class warfare mentality in their future permanent underclass.

[AnAmericanMother]

I missed the class warfare angle while thinking about AP scores.

Middle class kids don't get "paid" "all the time" . . . maybe some rich kids do, but I doubt it. Some parents do try to bribe kids to achieve, but if the kid's not motivated, throwing money at the problem won't fix it -- whether he's rich OR poor.

[GladesGuru]

Said the educrat, “In a written statement, the city Education Department said that officials were still evaluating the results but that “the success of an innovative program like Reach, which insists that every student can succeed, has never been more imperative.””

What the educrat really means is that “innovative programs” are essential to the continuance of present public funding of the failure mode public school system which supports the educrat.

Such educrats would starve if they had to depend on a private school to offer them a job. Only a public school system and the teacher’s union make possible the continuation of jobs for failed teachers.