Mayor Bloomberg is about to start paying public school students for better test scores.
Hundreds of principals have been informed during the past few weeks that City Hall is getting ready to unveil a cash "incentive" plan for thousands of low-income students who will take new assessment tests the city plans to roll out in September.
Under the unusual program, pupils in as many as 400 autonomous public schools that are part of Chancellor Joel Klein's Empowerment Schools program will be rewarded with money for results. Fourthgraders would get $25 and seventh-graders would get $50 for nailing a perfect score on a new battery of assessment tests from CTB/McGraw-Hill.
The new assessments, announced by the Department of Education last week, will be administered a whopping five times a year to all city students from the third to the eighth grades. This will be in addition to the existing high-stakes New York state English language and math tests, though the McGraw-Hill tests are not meant to determine student placement, officials say.
Under the cash incentive plan, all participating students will receive smaller amounts of money just to take the McGraw-Hill tests, according to internal Department of Education memos obtained by the Daily News.
"Every kid gets an incentive just for taking each assessment; $5 for fourth graders and $10 for seventh graders" says one e-mail sent this week to principals by Roland Fryer, the Harvard consultant Klein has hired to oversee the program.
"For each correct answer, students earn an additional reward," Fryer's note explains. "All students will earn something, but those that perform better will earn more."
You may be wondering why the city would offer money for students to take tests they are required to take anyway.
The reason is simple, sources tell me.
Principals in the 400 Empowerment Schools - about a third of the entire system - currently enjoy greater autonomy than other schools and so are free to choose alternative assessment tests. The proposed incentive plan, which also includes a $5,000 cash "gift" to every school that uses the McGraw-Hill tests, is meant to woo parents and principals from the empowerment schools.
"It's pretty horrendous that they want to pay children to get a perfect score on a test," said Jane Hirschmann, who heads Time Out from Testing, an advocacy group that opposes the growing national trend toward more and more testing.
"They could use this money to bring more resources into the schools," Hirschmann said. "It really makes clear what education under Klein has become in this city."
It was unclear why the city is going to such lengths to lure schools to the McGraw-Hill tests, which all non-Empowerment Schools have to use. Money for the incentive program will come from the city's Innovation Fund, a $150 million project Bloomberg announced recently to finance pioneering programs to fight poverty.
Top officials refused to talk yesterday about the cash reward plan.
Fryer, a 29-year-old Harvard economics professor who directs a project called the American Inequality Lab, did not return my telephone and e-mail requests for comment.
The Department of Education referred all questions about the new program to the mayor's office, while over at City Hall, a Bloomberg spokeswoman refused to confirm or deny the plan.
"We're still looking at a number of things," said City Hall spokeswoman Dawn Walker. "Nothing has been finalized yet."
The e-mails from Fryer and other DOE officials in charge of the Empowerment Schools, however, along with a meeting held this week at Frank Sinatra High School in Queens to inform principals about the project, all indicate the idea of the cash rewards is moving ahead rapidly.
"We plan to give fourth and seventh graders short term incentives to do what is in their long-term interest; crack the books and increase their achievement," Fryer wrote in a May 22 memo to principals.
