Cash-for-tests Program Shows Mixed Results by AP - NY Daily News

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A privately funded initiative to pay students in some New York City high schools up to $1,000 for passing Advanced Placement tests is not making the grade.

According to results released Wednesday, students at the 31 schools participating in the program called Rewarding Achievement, or REACH, took 345 more tests this year than last year. But the passing rate dropped slightly, from 35 percent in 2007 to 32 percent this year.

A total of 1,161 student passed 1,476 Advanced Placement exams, earning $500 for each score of a 3, $750 for each score of a 4, and $1,000 for each top score of a 5.

"We are delighted to congratulate the REACH Scholars who earned high marks on rigorous college-level exams," said Edward Rodriguez, Executive Director of REACH.

But Pedro Noguera, a professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, said he was surprised the test scores didn't jump a bit.

"I would have thought for kids who were on the borderline that they would have seen an improvement," he said.

Twenty-five public schools and six parochial schools were chosen to participate in the cash-reward program.

The program is funded by the Pershing Square Foundation and is intended to increase the number of low-income and minority students who are prepared for college.

But Noguera said the results suggest that kids need better instruction, not incentives.

"I'd invest in tutoring before I'd invest in incentives," he said.

Advanced Placement tests are offered in various subjects in the senior year of high school. Passing an A.P. test allows students to earn college credits.

Next Question: Can Students Be Paid to Excel? by Jennifer Medina - New York Times

This is a prime example of the ridiculous things that Bloom/Klein are doing to our children and schools - it's another reason we need real educators running things at Tweed...and not corporate lawyers or this crackpot Professor Roland Fryer...I believe children should taught to learn for the love of learning new things and not for these financial rewards...

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The fourth graders squirmed in their seats, waiting for their prizes. In a few minutes, they would learn how much money they had earned for their scores on recent reading and math exams. Some would receive nearly $50 for acing the standardized tests, a small fortune for many at this school, P.S. 188 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Librado Romero/The New York Times

At Junior High School 123 in the Bronx, Jerome Johnson, a seventh-grade math student, also received cash awards.

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Part of the tally sheet that students at participating schools receive if they do well on standardized math and reading tests.

Annie Tritt for The New York Times

Masudur Rahman receives his “earnings” record from Dalia Johnson, the director of Public School 188 in Manhattan. The amount is determined by his scores on reading and math tests.

When the rewards were handed out, Jazmin Roman was eager to celebrate her $39.72. She whispered to her friend Abigail Ortega, “How much did you get?” Abigail mouthed a barely audible answer: $36.87. Edgar Berlanga pumped his fist in the air to celebrate his $34.50.

The children were unaware that their teacher, Ruth Lopez, also stood to gain financially from their achievement. If students show marked improvement on state tests during the school year, each teacher at Public School 188 could receive a bonus of as much as $3,000.

School districts nationwide have seized on the idea that a key to improving schools is to pay for performance, whether through bonuses for teachers and principals, or rewards like cash prizes for students. New York City, with the largest public school system in the country, is in the forefront of this movement, with more than 200 schools experimenting with one incentive or another. In more than a dozen schools, students, teachers and principals are all eligible for extra money, based on students’ performance on standardized tests.

Each of these schools has become a test to measure whether, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg posits, tangible cash rewards can turn a school around. Can money make academic success cool for students disdainful of achievement? Will teachers pressure one another to do better to get a schoolwide bonus?

So far, the city has handed out more than $500,000 to 5,237 students in 58 schools as rewards for taking several of the 10 standardized tests on the schedule for this school year. The schools, which had to choose to participate in the program, are all over the city.

“I’m not saying I know this is going to fix everything,” said Roland G. Fryer, the Harvard economist who designed the student incentive program, “but I am saying it’s worth trying. What we need to try to do is start that spark.”

Nationally, school districts have experimented with a range of approaches. Some are giving students gift certificates, McDonald’s meals and class pizza parties. Baltimore is planning to pay struggling students who raise their state test scores.

Critics of these efforts say that children should be inspired to learn for knowledge’s sake, not to earn money, and question whether prizes will ultimately lift achievement. Anticipating this kind of argument, New York City was careful to start the student experiment with private donations, not taxpayer money, avoiding some of the controversy that has followed the Baltimore program, which uses public money.

Some principals had no qualms about entering the student reward program. Virginia Connelly, the principal of Junior High School 123, in the Soundview section of the Bronx, has experimented with incentives for years, like rewarding good behavior, attendance and grades with play money that can be spent in the student store.

“We’re in competition with the streets,” Ms. Connelly said. “They can go out there and make $50 illegally any day of the week. We have to do something to compete with that.”

Barbara Slatin, the principal of P.S. 188, on the other hand, said she was initially skeptical about paying students for doing well. Her students, many of whom live in the nearby housing projects along Avenue D, would surely welcome the money, she said, but she worried about sending the wrong message. “I didn’t want to connect the notion of money with academic success,” she said.

But after a sales pitch by Dr. Fryer, Ms. Slatin said she was persuaded to try. “We say we want to do whatever it takes, so if this is it, I am going to get on board,” she said.

In 1996, P.S. 188 was considered to be failing by the State Education Department, but it has improved dramatically over the last decade. In the fall, it received an A on the city’s report card. Still, fewer than 60 percent of the students passed the state math test last year, and fewer than 40 percent did so in reading.

Teachers at the school said that this year, they had noticed a better attitude among the students, which they attributed to the incentive program. One recent day, fourth graders talked eagerly about the computer games they have been playing to get ready for this week’s state math exam. During the school’s recent winter break, dozens of students showed up for extra tutoring to prepare.

“My teacher told me to study more, so I study,” said Jazmin, who had already taken eight standardized exams this school year. “I did multiplication tables. I learned to divide.” When asked why she took so many tests, Jazmin replied earnestly, “To show them we have education and we learn stuff from education and the tests.”

The students spoke excitedly about their plans for the money. Several boys said they were saving for video games. Abigail said she would use it to pay for “a car, a house and college,” apparently unaware that the roughly $100 she’s earned this school year might not stretch that far. Another little girl said she would use the money simply for food. When asked to elaborate, she answered quietly, “Spaghetti.”

Changing the attitudes of seventh graders seems to be more complicated. At J.H.S. 123 in the Bronx, for example, a seventh-grade English class was asked one morning if there were too many standardized tests. Every hand in the room shot up to answer with a defiant yes. But at the same time, the students all agreed that receiving money for doing well on a test was a good idea, saying it made school more exciting, and made doing well more socially acceptable.

“This is the hardest grade to pass,” said Adonis Flores, a 13-year-old who has struggled in his classes at times. “This motivates us better. Everybody wants some money, and nobody wants to get left behind.”

Would it be better to get the money as college scholarships? Shouts of “No way!” echoed through the room. “We might not all go to college,” one student protested.

So is doing well in school cool? A few hands slowly inched up. But when their principal, Ms. Connelly, asked what could be done to make being the A-plus student seem as important as being the star basketball player, she was met with silence.

For teachers, bonuses come with ambivalence. So toxic was the idea of merit pay for individual teachers that the union insisted that bonus pools be awarded to whole schools to be divided up by joint labor-management committees, either evenly among union members or by singling out exceptional teachers.

Still, nearly 90 percent of the 200 schools offered the chance to join the teacher bonus program are participating, after a vote with each school’s chapter of the teachers’ union. At many schools this year, including P.S. 188 and J.H.S. 123, a decision has already been made to distribute any money they get across the board, and they are trying to include secretaries and other staff members as well.

No teachers were willing to say the rewards were unwelcome, but few said the potential windfall would push them to work harder.

“It’s better than a slap in the face,” said Ms. Lopez, who has taught at P.S. 188 for more than a decade. “But honestly, I don’t think about it. We’re here every day working and pushing; that’s what we’ve been doing for years. We don’t come into this for the money, and most of us don’t leave it because of the money.”

Newer teachers seemed more positive, saying the bonus was a rare chance to be rewarded.

“I tell my students all the time that I can sit in the back and hand them worksheets and get the same amount of money as I do if I stand in front of the class working with high energy the entire time,” said Christina Varghese, the lead math teacher at J.H.S. 123, who is in her 10th year of teaching. “What’s the motivation there? At least this gives us something to work toward.”

It will be months before Ms. Slatin and her teachers know whether they have earned the bonus, but initial test scores are promising. On one test designed to mimic the state math exam, 77 percent of fourth graders met state standards. Roughly half of those who did not were just below the cutoff, making it possible that more than 80 percent of the students would pass the test this year — a virtual dream for the school.

“We want to believe it, but it makes me nervous,” Ms. Slatin said. “Those are not numbers we are used to seeing.”

NY Daily News - Education Job Titles Stump Parents by Erin Einhorn

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Once upon a time, educators had easy-to-understand jobs: teacher, principal, superintendent.

Not anymore.

Five years into the tenure of Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, a major administrative restructuring of the city schools has brought the wacky culture of corporate job titles to the Tweed Courthouse.

There, among the ranks of top school officials working for Klein is a chief accountability officer making $196,000, a chief knowledge officer making $177,000, a chief talent officer making $172,000 and a chief portfolio officer making $162,000.

There's also a chief equality officer, but he's working for free this year.

Then there are all the corporate titles, in spades. Several divisions each have a chief executive officer, there's a product manager for knowledge management, a demand research manager, a director of virtual enterprise and dozens of senior achievement facilitators.

There was someone called the director of restructuring and human capital, but he's now the senior director of sustainability, at $123,000.

Parents say it's enough to make them dizzy.

"It's a whole mess," said Anastatia Davis-John, the parent association president at Brooklyn's Public School 135.

"It's totally confusing. They switched from districts to regions and now they've switched back, and half the titles you don't know what they mean. ... It's especially difficult for parents who can't speak English. They don't know who is representing what and who is doing what."

Teachers are still called teachers, of course. And principals are still principals - though under a new system that gives principals more autonomy and Klein often calls them "school CEOs."

During the previous restructuring, superintendents were redubbed regional instructional specialists. Now they're back to more familiar titles - superintendents - though they have less authority.

"They keep changing jobs and changing titles, and to me it doesn't make sense. Why don't they stick with what works?" asked Thea Schatzle, a Queens parent leader with kids in three schools.

Schools spokeswoman Debra Wexler said the titles "reflect the job responsibilities of the individual holding a particular position."

Chief Accountability Officer Jim Liebman, for example, heads Klein's accountability initiative to measure the success of schools. He spearheaded the new A-F school grading system.

Asked to guess what he does, though, most parent leaders interviewed by the Daily News were stumped.

"Does he make sure all the chancellor's [regulations] are in order?" asked Carlton Richardson, an elected parent leader.

"Is that the person that everybody else reports to?" Davis-John asked.

Chief Portfolio Officer Garth Harries once led the department's Office of New Schools, but his title changed when his office expanded its scope to include a portfolio of "school choice" options.

Asked what he does, most parents said they couldn't even guess.

"I have no idea," Schatzle said. "If people knew what they were doing, then they could be held accountable [to parents]."

eeinhorn@nydailynews.com

Chiefly confusing

Deputy Chancellor for Organizational Strategy, Human Capital and External Affairs / Chris Cerf $196,575 / Oversees administration, personnel, lobbying and communications

Chief Accountability Officer/ Jim Liebman $196,575 / Oversees school measurement including quality reviews and A-F letter grades

Chief Knowledge Officer / Photeine Anagnostopoulos $177,114 / Oversees development of a system for schools to share ideas about teaching

Chief Talent Officer / Amy McIntosh $172,247 / in charge of recruiting, evaluating and retaining good teachers and principals

Chief Portfolio Officer / Garth Harries $162,000 / Creates new small schools, charter schools and other student options

Chief Family Engagement Officer / Martine Guerrier $150,000 / Oversees outreach to parents and families

Chief Equality Officer / Roland Fryer $0 this school year, up to $195,000 next year / Develops strategies to better distribute resources throughout the school system

Ed In The Apple: Does Klein Sound Like GW43? Is Joel “Spinning” the DOE? Can We Believe DOE Press Releases?...

Original blog entry...

Is Joel Klein sounding increasingly like GW 43?

Even leading Republican senators are beginning to call for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq - everytime Bush praises our troops and points to progress in Iraq, eyes roll …

As Klein spins out press release after press release lauding his own efforts he is beginning to sound more Bush-like.

Claims of increasing ELA and Math scores and higher graduation rates mirror claims of the success of the “surge.”

Bob Gordon and Roland Fryer, Klein latest “generals” seem to be the DOE equivalent of General Petreus.

Fred Smith , a retired Department data analyst, quoting an audit of the ELA test found that scores were inflated. Teachers in small high schools mark papers of their own students. Are the scores inflated? Only an outside audit can allay suspicions …

Diane Ravitch , a leading scholar, calls the Klein/Fryer “pay for performance” plan “unethical and immoral.” Her analysis of the ELA test scores is far less promising than that of the Klein administration.

Sol Stern , a resident scholar at the Manhattan Institute has been a continuing critic of the Department approach to teaching reading.

If we take a closer look at the high school graduation rates -if we look at college readiness we should be quite concerned. The City University of New York (CUNY) has a college readiness rubric - it uses grades on Regents Examinations and the number of Regents passed - it concludes that a diploma with advanced designation is the baseline for college readiness.

What percentage of high school graduates are “college ready”?

The answer of that in most schools less than half of graduates are “college ready” using the CUNY college readiness rubric, and, in some schools fewer than a quarter are “college ready.”

No surprise … the Department is selective in the data it releases. In overwhelming numbers high school graduates are only ready for non-credit remedial classes in college.

The latest Department “innovation” is “unique and different” summer schools. Principals are encouraged to offer summer schools that give “credit recovery” programs - ways to get around the State Ed Department requirement that a credit bearing course requires 54 hours of instruction. The message from Tweed: a wink and a nod …

There is an irony that GW43 is credited with the phrase , “…the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Hopefully the recent Carnegie Foundation College Readiness Grant will override Klein cynicism.

As the 08 Presidential election approaches GW43 will probably begin to extricate us from Iraq and as mayoral control sunset also approaches one wonders whether the school system will adopt a more student/parent/teacher friendly policy, i.e., Randi Weingarten’s speech at the Edustat Summit?

New York Times Op-Ed Contributor: Money for Nothing by Barry Schwartz...

Philadelphia

NEW YORK CITY has decided to offer cash rewards to some students based on their attendance records and exam performance. Diligent, high-achieving seventh graders will be able to earn up to $500 in a year. The plan is the brainchild of Roland G. Fryer, an economist who has been appointed as “chief equality officer” of the city’s Department of Education.

The assumption that underlies the project is simple: people respond to incentives. If you want people to do something, you have to make it worth their while. This assumption drives virtually all of economic theory.

Sure, there are already many rewards in learning: gaining understanding (of yourself and others), having mysterious or unfamiliar aspects of the world opened up to you, demonstrating mastery, satisfying curiosity, inhabiting imaginary worlds created by others, and so on. Learning is also the route to more prosaic rewards, like getting into good colleges and getting good jobs. But these rewards are not doing the job. If they were, children would be doing better in school.

The logic of the plan reveals a second assumption that economists make: the more motives the better. Give people two reasons to do something, the thinking goes, and they will be more likely to do it, and they’ll do it better, than if they have only one. Providing some cash won’t disturb the other rewards of learning, rewards that are intrinsic to the process itself. They will only provide a little boost. Mr. Fryer’s reward scheme is intended to add incentives to the ones that already exist.

Unfortunately, these assumptions that economists make about human motivation, though intuitive and straightforward, are false. In particular, the idea that adding motives always helps is false. There are circumstances in which adding an incentive competes with other motives and diminishes their impact. Psychologists have known this for more than 30 years.

In one experiment, nursery school children were given the opportunity to draw with special markers. After playing, some of the children were given “good player” awards and others were not. Some time later, the markers were reintroduced to the classroom. The researchers kept track of which children used the markers, and they collected the pictures that had been drawn. The youngsters given awards were less likely to draw at all, and drew worse pictures, than those who were not given the awards.

Why did this happen? Children draw because drawing is fun and because it leads to a result: a picture. The rewards of drawing are intrinsic to the activity itself. The “good player” award gives children another reason to draw: to earn a reward. And it matters — children want recognition. But the recognition undermines the fun, so that later, in the absence of a chance to earn an award, the children aren’t interested in drawing.

Similar results have been obtained with adults. When you pay them for doing things they like, they come to like these activities less and will no longer participate in them without a financial incentive. The intrinsic satisfaction of the activities gets “crowded out” by the extrinsic payoff.

An especially striking example of this was reported in a study of Swiss citizens about a decade ago. Switzerland was holding a referendum about where to put nuclear waste dumps. Researchers went door-to-door in two Swiss cantons and asked people if they would accept a dump in their communities. Though people thought such dumps might be dangerous and might decrease property values, 50 percent of those who were asked said they would accept one. People felt responsibility as Swiss citizens. The dumps had to go somewhere, after all.

But when people were asked if they would accept a nuclear waste dump if they were paid a substantial sum each year (equal to about six weeks’ pay for the average worker), a remarkable thing happened. Now, with two reasons to say yes, only about 25 percent of respondents agreed. The offer of cash undermined the motive to be a good citizen.

It is as if, when asked the question, people asked themselves whether they should respond based on considerations of self-interest or considerations of public responsibility. Half of the people in the uncompensated condition of the study thought they should focus on their responsibilities. But the offer of money, in effect, told people that they should consider only their self-interest. And as it turned out, through the lens of self-interest, even six weeks’ pay wasn’t enough.

Obviously, the intrinsic rewards of learning aren’t working in New York’s schools, at least not for a lot of children. It may be that the current state of achievement is low enough that desperate measures are called for, and it’s worth trying anything. And we don’t know whether in this case, motives will complement or compete.

But it is plausible that when students get paid to go to class and show up for tests, they will be even less interested in the work than they would be if no incentives were present. If that happens, the incentive system will make the learning problem worse in the long run, even if it improves achievement in the short run — unless we’re prepared to follow these children through life, giving them a pat on the head, or an M&M or a check every time they learn something new.

Perhaps worse, the plan will distract us from investigating a more pertinent set of questions: why don’t children get intrinsic satisfaction from learning in school, and how can this failing of education be fixed? Virtually all kindergartners are eager to learn. But by fourth grade, many students need to be bribed. What makes our schools so dystopian that they produce this powerful transformation, almost overnight?

Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, is the author of “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.”

Queens Chronicle: Money For Merit Program Unveiled For NYC Schools by Colin Gustafson...

Over $300 for middle-schoolers who boost their test grades; $600 for high-schoolers who pass a Regents exam; and $25 for parents who review their child’s test results and meet with a teacher to discuss it.
In one of his most controversial moves since assuming control of the New York City public school system, Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a pilot program this week that will pay poor students up to $500 per year for posting stellar test scores.

Beginning in the fall, the pilot program will offer low-income fourth- and seventh-graders from across the city cash incentives for acing statewide exams, the city Department of Education announced on Monday.
On the low end of the pay scale, fourth-graders will get up to $25 for a perfect score on each of 10 standardized tests taken throughout the academic year, as well as $5 just for showing up for the exam. On the high end, seventh-graders can earn as much as $50 per test — totaling up to $500 per year for a perfect record. They will receive $10 for simply taking the test.
An estimated 9,000 students from 40 schools will participate in the pilot program, which was designed by private consultants and professors to test whether small cash incentives help close the achievement gap for the city’s poorest pupils.
Education officials are currently trying to lure principals across the city, who can sign up for the program in late June. The department has yet to release a list of participating schools that shows which sites in Queens will be participating.
Under the pilot program, consultants will monitor each school’s progress for two years, eventually using students’ test results to decide whether to renew or expand it.
The ambitious incentive program is the brainchild of Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who was recently hired into the upper ranks of the Department of Education as “chief equality officer.” From that post, the professor will advise the mayor and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein on how to boost the persistently low scores and graduation rates of poor black and Hispanic students.
Last week, city officials hailed Fryer’s academic credentials after announcing the new program. “He is extremely well respected and has an incredible background and list of accolades,” said Debra Wexler, an education department spokeswoman.
Fryer’s plan to dole out cash for good scores comes as part of the mayor’s broader antipoverty initiative — intended to influence low-income adult behavior and promote better longterm decision-making, officials said. Key markers for success in the program will be holding a full-time job, maintaining health insurance, making regular doctors’ visits and boosting academic achievement.
The privately funded effort targets three groups — families, students and adults in Section 8 housing — and is modeled after a program in Mexico that has boasted considerable success in reducing severe rural poverty. Already, the mayor has attracted enough private donors to raise the $53 million needed for the effort, even ponying up his own funds to get the ball rolling.
In addition to Fryer’s incentive program for students, the mayor’s initiative will also feature a family-based component that, among other things, rewards parents up to $25 for attending a parent-teacher conference and $50 per month for each child who posts a 95 percent attendance record.
High school students can earn $50 for taking the PSAT exam, and will share $600 with their parents for annually accumulating 11 credits, officials said. Additionally, families will receive a $400 bonus for each child who graduates high school.
About 2,550 families from Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan are expected to participate in the family-focused component of Bloomberg’s program. City officials said they would likely enroll Queens families in the future, if the proposal gets renewed and expanded after its two-year trial phase.
In touting this ambitious plan, advocates cited gains made in other cities that have adopted cash incentive programs — including Chelsea, Mass., and Dallas, where some pupils get $2 for every book they read.
Still, some parents were heavily critical of the new program. At a parent’s forum in Fresh Meadows last week, Robert Caloras of Little Neck blasted the mayor for imposing what he called an incentives-based business model on public education.
By handing out money for good grades, Caloras said the program will undermine the value of learning for love of the topic or the satisfaction of getting a good grade. “Frankly, I find the idea a little repulsive,” he told Deputy Schools Chancellor Chris Cerf. “Some people work hard without ever getting a bonus. Why do they continue? Because they love their jobs. That’s what we need to be teaching our kids.”

Amsterdam News: Paying Kids to Take Tests by TananGgachi Mfuni...

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will pay low-income Black and Hispanic public school students for taking tests. The initiative is part of a cash incentive program, Opportunity NYC, geared towards reducing poverty the mayor and Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Linda Gibbs outlined last Monday.

Education advocates had a mixed reaction to the student portion of the program which begins this fall. The city would give fourth graders at participating schools $5 for taking tests and seventh graders $10. For scoring top marks, fourth graders would receive $25 and seventh graders $50. If they score well on all ten tests given throughout the year, fourth graders could receive as much as $250, and seventh graders $500.

Harvard professor Dr. Ronald G. Fryer, Jr. will oversee the incentive plan for the DOE. Fryer, 30, has also been named the Department of Education's chief equality officer. The Black economist advocates cash incentives for students as a means of narrowing the much documented achievement gap between Black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian counterparts.

City Council Education Chair Robert Jackson supports the plan. Jackson said it gave kids "an immediate incentive" and would cause students to have more "self esteem" and get "better grades."

However critics like Medgar Evers education professor Dr. Sam Anderson disagrees.

"I'm not a believer in these kinds of financial rewards for intellectual development. It feeds into the capitalistic structure," said Anderson, who argued the incentive program encouraged students to be materialistic.

"We should not continually instill in our young people that the pursuit of money is the pursuit of all happiness," he said.

Moreover, Anderson said the amount of money being distributed was too little.

"The little bit of money that's paid out is a joke," Anderson said. "You don't buy educational excellence by bribing kids with chump change." Anderson suggested putting money towards college fund instead.

The 40 schools the DOE plans to implement the cash incentive program in this fall are not yet determined. A spokeswoman for the DOE said Dr. Fryer has sent letters out and conducted meetings with principals interested in the program. The program would also give $5000 to schools that participate.

The Opportunity NYC is being paid for by private funding that will come from several non-profits including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Starr Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation as well as Mayor Bloomberg.

The education chair said he might have had second thoughts about the program had it depended on public funds. �I don�t know I would allocate public funds to do this,� Jackson said.

Other features of the Opportunity NYC program give cash rewards, in some cases several hundred dollars, to families if they maintain their health insurance, hold a full time job, send their kids to school, and ensure their kids take and pass tests like the state-issued

NYC Public School Parents: Paying for test scores

NYC Public School Parents: Paying for Test Scores

Harvard Professor Roland Fryer who intends to experiment on our students by giving them cash awards if they score high enough on their interim assessments is going to become "chief equality officer" at Tweed, according to the NY Times.

So much for these supposedly "no-stakes" exams.

The results of this experiment will be monitored by Fryer.

So much for independent evaluations.

Read entire original posting...

NY Times: His Charge: Find a Key to Students’ Success by Jennifer Medina...

Roland G. Fryer, who was hired by Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein to advise him on how to narrow the racial gap in achievement in the city’s schools, made his professional name in economics by applying complex algorithms to document how black students fall behind their white peers. But his life story challenges his own calculations.

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Prof. Roland G. Fryer Jr. will try to narrow the gap in achievement between black and white students in the city’s public schools.

“In some sense, I am an anomaly,” said Dr. Fryer, who grew up poor and rose to become an assistant professor of economics at Harvard before he was 30. But he quickly corrected himself and added, “I am not sure.”

The way he sees it, there are thousands of students in New York’s schools who have the potential to be as successful as he is. His job as the system’s “chief equality officer,” he said, is to find, in his research, the keys to motivating them.

An affable man with a tendency to be self-deprecating, Dr. Fryer seems comfortable mocking his new job title, with its acronym of C.E.O.

“I didn’t come up with it,” he said in an hourlong interview on Tuesday at the Tweed Courthouse, the headquarters of the city Education Department. Looking across the table at one of the chancellor’s press assistants, he laughed and pleaded for some help. “This is your part.”

Next year, Dr. Fryer will work for the department three days a week, without a salary, while commuting from Boston, where he will teach two classes at Harvard. For the 2008-9 school year, he will work here full time. City officials said his salary had not been determined but would be between $170,000 and $195,000.

As befits an academic, Dr. Fryer said it was impossible for him to begin his new job with a set of definite plans. In the interview, he said four times that he was “still figuring out the questions” he wanted to answer.

His first job, though, he said, will be to mine data — from graduation rates to test scores to demographic information — to find out why there are wide gulfs between schools. Why, for example, does one school in Bedford-Stuyvesant do so much better than a school just down the block? And he will monitor the pilot program to pay fourth- and seventh-grade students as much as $500 for doing well on a series of standardized tests. That program will begin in 40 schools this fall. He hopes to find other ways to motivate students.

“I don’t know what it is, but I will tell you what it can’t be,” Dr. Fryer said. “It can’t be what happened when I was in schools, you know, people come and say, you know, ‘Go to school and get a good job.’ ”

Words like that, he said, were not enough, because “this dream that we are all talking about is less tangible to people who have not actually seen someone making the dream real.”

Most of Dr. Fryer’s work until now has been theoretical. He has published studies of how, by the time they are in second grade, black children are months behind their white counterparts. In another paper, he looked at the ways that high-achieving black students in racially integrated schools are less popular with their black peers and are accused of “acting white.”

In 2005, Dr. Fryer’s work gained widespread attention when it was extensively highlighted in “Freakonomics,” a best seller by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt.

Dr. Fryer, 30, was born in Daytona Beach, Fla. His mother left him when he was young, leaving him with his father, who later became an alcoholic. During the school year, Dr. Fryer lived with his father near Dallas, and spent the summers in Daytona with his grandmother, a schoolteacher.

She motivated him, Dr. Fryer said, by telling him she would race to see who could make the beds faster. And if he was really well behaved, he would have a chance to sell the cans she had collected throughout the year — a small fortune of about $13 for a 10-year-old.

(These days, Dr. Fryer said, when he talks to his grandmother about his research, she exclaims, “They pay you for that?”)

Chancellor Klein said Dr. Fryer’s ideas acknowledge that children are motivated in different ways.

“We know that children are in different environments, with different passions and fears and consequences,” he said in an interview. “We have to figure out what gets them to learn. How many kids got an extra dollar or two in their allowance for getting A’s?”

Chancellor Klein has long supported Dr. Fryer’s ideas for incentives for schoolchildren, inviting him to try them out in several city schools in 2004. That effort was rejected by several schools, but tried in others on a small scale.

Mr. Klein met Dr. Fryer at a dinner party given by Lawrence H. Summers, then the president of Harvard.

“Roland is an evidence-driven guy rather than prejudice, instinct or tradition, and that’s clearly what is needed now,” Dr. Summers said in an interview yesterday. “So much of the research in education has been decades behind — it has consisted more of platitudes and rhetoric than serious rigor and challenges.”

Dr. Fryer is not lacking in ambition — he once said he aspires to be someone akin to W. E. B. DuBois — and said he was interested only in pursuing “path-breaking” plans in New York’s schools.

But he will face hurdles in the labyrinth of the system. Teachers and have already raised questions about the effectiveness of paying students for high test scores. Other academics are privately saying his inexperience may be manifested in naïveté.

But Dr. Fryer does not seem to be a man with doubts. The moment he knew he wanted to work directly in schools came two years ago, when a principal in Queens asked him to talk a fifth grader out of joining a gang. A few hours later, he was at a seminar at Harvard, arguing over the third decimal point in an equation.

“I didn’t know if I had done anything for that kid, really,” he said, “but all I could think was, ‘Today has shown me a lot.’ ”

New York Times: Schools Plan to Pay Cash for Marks by Jennifer Medina...

New York City students could earn as much as $500 a year for doing well on standardized tests and showing up for class in a new program to begin this fall, city officials announced yesterday. And the Harvard economist who created the program is joining the inner circle of Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, according to an official briefed on the hiring.

The economist, Roland G. Fryer, who has published several studies on racial inequality in public schools, met this month with school principals around the city to push his program, which uses money raised privately.

Both Mr. Klein and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg have been eager to hear Professor Fryer’s thoughts on how to reverse the persistent lagging of poor and minority students, who make up most of the city’s public school enrollment. But educators have been skeptical, saying students have to love learning for its own sake, not for cash prizes.

Now Professor Fryer will be the Department of Education’s “chief equality officer,” a member of the chancellor’s senior staff. The title is meant to reflect his primary focus — to improve the performance of black and Hispanic students.

The school incentive program is part of the mayor’s wider antipoverty initiative, which also includes other cash payments, all raised privately, to influence behavior and reduce poverty. Details of the various incentive programs were announced yesterday by Linda Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services, at a briefing at City Hall. The incentive programs are expected to attract more than 2,500 families in Harlem; Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn; and the Morris Heights and East Tremont sections of the Bronx, she said.

Cash incentives for adults will include $150 a month for keeping a full-time job and $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.

The city has already raised much of the $53 million it needs for the program, Ms. Gibbs said. The effort, which officials said was the broadest ever tried in this country to pay poor people to develop good habits, is modeled in part on one in Mexico.

Although Professor Fryer helped devise some of the broader incentives like the payments for high attendance rates, his main proposals involve payments to children for doing well on tests.

Under his plan, fourth-grade students will receive up to $25 for a perfect score on each of 10 standardized tests throughout the year. Seventh-grade students will be able to earn twice as much — $50 per test, for a total of up to $500. Fourth graders will receive $5 just for taking the test, and seventh graders will get $10.

Officials expect up to 40 schools to participate this fall, with a total of 9,000 students, in the pilot phase of the program, which will be monitored by Professor Fryer. After two years, they said, they will evaluate it for possible expansion.

Principals in the system’s empowerment initiative — who have more autonomy to run their schools — can choose to join the program.

Similar, smaller programs for cash incentives to raise schoolchildren’s performance have been put in place elsewhere in the country. In Chelsea, Mass., for instance, students can receive $25 for perfect attendance. And in Dallas, some schools hand over $2 for every book a child reads.

Despite the criticism of the program from some teachers and principals, some community leaders praised Professor Fryer’s idea yesterday as an inventive way to encourage students to do well in school.

“I’m willing to say let’s see what works,” said Darwin Davis, the president of the Urban League. “We are in a capitalist society and people are motivated by money across race and across class, so why not?”

But Mr. Davis also cautioned that the amounts of money being offered were relatively paltry in New York.

“I wish $50 could be enough for an insurance payment, but that’s not going to be the case,” he said, wondering aloud how many tests students would need to pass to buy the latest video game.

Sol Stern, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, called the idea a “insult to every hard-working parent.”

Mr. Stern has said he would support paying teachers more to work in low-performing schools.

But he cautioned against giving too much credence to the notion that money would prod students. He said the mayor was being a “sucker for the market system.”

New York Times: A Plan to Pay for Top Scores on Some Tests Gains Ground by Julie Bosman...

Roland G. Fryer, a 30-year-old Harvard economist known for his study of racial inequality in schools, is back in New York to again promote a big idea: Pay students cash for high scores on standardized tests and their performance might improve. And he has captured the attention of Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

Across the country, educators have been experimenting with cash incentives. A program in Chelsea, Mass., gave children $25 for perfect attendance. Some Dallas schools pay children $2 for each book they read.

But the idea is controversial. Many educators maintain, among other objections, that children have to learn for the love of it, not for cash.

Until now, Professor Fryer’s idea of cash for performance has had no serious takers. Three years ago, he tried to implement a pilot program in New York City charter schools that would have given students cash in exchange for good test scores.

“They kicked us out,” Professor Fryer said of the schools that first considered the program. And some Department of Education officials were not enthusiastic, either, he said. “They laughed in my face.”

But Mr. Bloomberg has recently shown interest in using payments, raised from the private sector, as a way to change behavior and reduce poverty.

In September, he proposed giving cash to poor adults to encourage them to do everything from keeping their children in school to seeking preventive medical care. And so, he said yesterday at a news conference, he was receptive to Professor Fryer’s idea. “If we aren’t looking at everything,” he said, “shame on us.”

This week, Professor Fryer met with a group of school principals who are considering participating in his incentives program. Information about the program was first reported yesterday in The Daily News.

Education Department officials said that putting the program into effect has a long way to go. “We are still at a preliminary stage,” Debra Wexler, a department spokeswoman, said yesterday. “Neither the mayor nor the chancellor have approved any program details.”

Professor Fryer said that under his program, fourth graders and seventh graders who take the new round of mandatory standardized tests that the city is introducing in the fall would be rewarded with at least $5. They would get more money for high scores, with a cap of $25 for fourth graders and $50 for seventh graders. In addition, each participating school would receive $5,000.

Money for the payments will come from private backers, Professor Fryer said, because there would be no public money available for them.

The prospect of cash introduced into the classroom has made some local educators uneasy.

“It makes me really nervous,” said Maggie Siena, the principal of Public School 150 in TriBeCa. “I suspect paying kids for achievement in any way tends not to work.”

Ernest Logan, the president of the principals’ union, also expressed concerns. “We are troubled by additional pressure being placed on children to achieve perfection,” he said. “What really matters in education is continued student progress, not perfect test scores.”

Professor Fryer and other educational scholars have argued that some children, especially those from impoverished backgrounds, lack the foresight and role models to be self-motivated.

“The fundamental problem with education and motivating kids to learn what they need to learn is that the payoffs are so distant,” said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning research organization. “So it’s very hard to motivate students to do well. Good students get that motivation from somewhere — from peers, their parents, how they’re raised — but the kids who are unmotivated have a very hard time understanding that what they do today pays off decades from now.”

Eric Nadelstern, the chief executive of the school system’s empowerment initiative — which gives principals more autonomy to run their schools — lauded Professor Fryer in a recent e-mail message to principals. “He has my enthusiastic support,” Mr. Nadelstern said. “I encourage you to give the program serious consideration.”

Professor Fryer, who is black, has explored racial issues in education extensively. He has written studies on the gap in test scores between black children and white children, the economic effect of “acting white,” how the mental ability of young children differs by race, and the causes and consequences of attending historically black colleges and universities.

Professor Fryer, on his Web site, americaninequalitylab.com, calls the program “Incentivising: An Experiment in NYC Public Schools.”

In a near-empty cafeteria at Frank Sinatra High School of the Arts in Queens on Wednesday, Professor Fryer promoted the plan to a dozen principals with an informal speech about poverty, the test score gap, his professional experience and personal history and his grandmother’s suggestions for the plan.

He persuaded at least one principal to change her mind about the program. “Prior to going into the meeting, I wasn’t in favor of it,” said Crystal Simmons, the principal of the Academy for Social Action in Harlem. “But now I think it could work if it is established in the right way. There should be some financial-literacy element, for instance.”

After the meeting, Professor Fryer said in an e-mail message to the principals that more than half the available spots in the proposed incentive program had been filled.

Mr. Loveless of Brookings said that though cash-incentive programs tend to make people uneasy, he believed the proposal was worth considering. “I would take it seriously,” he said. “I don’t think we should let our queasiness over directly awarding kids with cash prevent us from experimenting. We need to find out if this works or not.”

The National Review - The Spine: Cash for reading by Marty Perestz...

An opposing view to mine...

One fact is certain, and it is that there has been no truly successful program to overcome the academic gap between black kids and white. And between other educationally under-performing groups and Asians or Jews. Some people purport to have a solution. Like teaching Harlem kids to play chess. OK, maybe. But everybody has an excuse for why, since much attention and at least as much money has been devoted to the goal of raising performance of minority children in school, the effort has failed.

A year ago, at a party at Larry and Lissa Summers's house, I met a very young Afro-American economist, Roland G. Fryer (I'm told the youngest member of the Harvard faculty ever, even younger than Summers was), who had made this congeries of problems his problem. He told me about one program he'd organized in Dallas where targeted children are paid to read, finish and write about books they'd otherwise never had even seen. Another program in Chelsea, Mass. rewarded children with perfect attendance a $25 prize.

An article in Friday's Daily News and another in Saturday's Times reported that Fryer has caught the attention of Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein (a friend of mine and of TNR) and he has proposed paying students cash for high performance on standardized tests.

"Feh," some of my readers might say. Not nice. But maybe material incentives are just the right answer. I know one reason why I did well at school. Because my mother made me feel that I'd be thought a dunce if I didn't. It's not such a more elevated motive.

Of course, some people are repelled by any nexus between cash and education. Except when they are measuring the expenditures between Scarsdale and Harlem. But the fact is that there is more per capita money spent in Harlem than in the Westchester suburbs. I'm all for this new experiment. Fryer persuaded me last year. I'm glad he persuaded Bloomberg and Klein this year.

Take a look at Fryer's web site: Americaninequalitylab.com

wcbstv.com: NYC Considers Rewarding Good Students With Cash - Mayor Keeping Details Of Program Close To His Vest...

NYC Considers Rewarding Good Students With Cash

Mayor Keeping Details Of Program Close To His Vest

Watch video report...

(CBS) NEW YORK Mayor Mike Bloomberg says New York City is currently working to raise money for a plan that will give cash incentives to students who perform well on exams.

Cash incentives are one of the ideas being considered by the city in an effort to raise the graduation rate, which is currently at 60 percent, according to the NYC Department of Education.

One student welcomes the idea.

�I think honestly, money would motivate kids to get better grades,� said seventh grader Abbey Finer.

Some parents feel differently.

�My daughter has always wanted to do well for other reasons,� said Marianne Skolnick. �Not for money. I�m not in favor of that.�

The President of the Teacher�s Union, Randi Weingarten, feels incentives should not be limited to exam performance, but also include other things like attendance and literacy.

�Why don�t we have incentives for things like reading 25 books,� said Weingarten. �Literacy is important. Why don�t we have incentives for great attendance?�

Bloomberg told CBS 2 the cash incentives idea is a possibility but did not talk in detail about this plan because it is a work in progress. He said he�ll be prepared to talk about it more when the details are fine-tuned.

CBS 2 has learned the cash incentive will be available to students in the city�s empowerment schools program. The program is for fourth and seventh graders who will be taking the city�s new assessment tests beginning this fall.

There are talks about paying every test taker, and for a perfect score the reward is greater -- $25 for fourth graders and $50 for seventh graders.