School for Money

Here is a poster story of incentives (courtesy of KVOA News)*:

"More than 20,000 Arizona teens dropped out of the class of 2006. To fight the problem, 75 students from low income families at Amphi High and 100 from Rincon high were picked for the new program. The students will get $25 a week as an incentive to stay in school. A local nonprofit will pay for the project."

Is monetizing a reward for attending mandatory school the best--or even good--answer? While it may be rewarding to the number of students in the program, it does not serve as any sort of long-term educational system fix. One can't really blame local officials, given their limited arsenal of tools. Even so, throwing money at a problem will--at best--keep something temporarily static.

Stepping back, we can see a bigger picture. Take a look at these statistics:

[1] Spending - when one converts international education expenditures into equivalent units, U.S. "education expenditures as a percentage of GDP" for primary schooling in 2000 was 3.9%. Germany: 3.4%. Japan: 3%. France 4.3%.**

[2] Results - "U.S. 9 and 13-year-olds performed at a level higher than most of their peers in other countries in reading, roughly the same in science, and lower in mathematics."***

Even if this point on spending and results is at all misguided because spending in this country tends to support administrative ends and not necessarily teachers and materials, then perhaps the over-arching lesson to be learned is that we must necessarily adapt the school system instead of simply attempting to increase funding. More studies need to be done to determine if current changes such as charter schools or other programs have merit.
--------
Sources: [*] WorldNow & KVOA [Ed Tribble]. [**] & [***] United States Department of Education - Institute of Education Sciences.