Posted on 04/19/2010 7:55:00 AM PDT by bs9021
Cash Fails the Grade
Deborah Lambert, April 19, 2010
If you think a couple of hundred bucks might motivate young students to hit the books, you might be in for a big surprise.
It appears that “Spark,” a much-touted program in the New York City public school system that paid as much as $500 a year to fourth and seventh graders who aced math and reading exams, did nothing to boost students’ standardized test scores, according to the New York Post....
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
You can’t buy intelligence....stupid is as stupid does!!!
They make a lot more selling crack on the corner.
How much crack will $500 buy? In terms of the work involved, isn’t this sort of like offering a prostitute a nice minimum wage job with benefits at McDonalds if she quits her current line of work?
Righto.
Wasn’t there a big deal a year ago or so by Newt Gingrich’s daughter having some sort of not-well-thought-out program to pay kids to do their homework. It was really touted as the next best thing in the media. I wonder what the results were.
When I did not do my homework I got grounded and my allowance cut. It worked.
If the child lacks the basics, you could offer them a MILLION dollars and it still would not produce higher standardized test scores.
I will give two examples:
My husband and I tutor the Hispanic kids of our church's denomination in our county. **ALL** of the children lack the most basic knowledge of phonics. For instance they do not know “ing”,”str”, or the “silent e” rule. Their parents can't help them with this since Spanish is far more straight forward with its phonics than English.
When I attended school ( back in the Dark Ages) the nuns taught phonics to all new immigrants and kept the kids back one full year while they learned English. In our county, all immigrants are placed in the grade that corresponds to their age ( regardless of whether they can speak English) and NO CHILD ( Anglo or Hispanic) learns phonics. If the Anglo child learns to read it is because his parents have taught him to read in the home.
A few weeks ago I was helping a 12 year old girl with her math homework. It was a about 40 problems of adding and subtracting mixed fractions. This girl:
** had no idea what the numerator and denominator represented.
** added and subtracted using her fingers
** needed help drawing groups of dots so that she could multiply and divide.
** did not know any addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division math facts.
** Did not know any algorithm for multiplication or division.
** When subtracting and adding could not carry the value of 10 from the 10’s column to the 1’s column.
In other words, her teacher was pushing this girl off an educational double black diamond when she wasn't even able to manage the educational bunny trail!
So?...Offering $500 to this girl, expecting it to improve her standardized test scores, is a sad and painful joke.
Who the h3ll cares?! The government has no business trying to influence my kids, nor does it have any business using my tax dollars to influence other people's kds.
It is my job to make sure my kids grow up to be self-supporting adults with the values I want to instill in them. Not the governments!
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