Matt Zeitlin

Ta-Nehisi riffs on paying kids to perform in school:

Parents–who can afford to–offer rewards all the time to their kids when they do well. I don’t think it much matters that school authorities will take over that function.

Here’s where my skepticism lies–the program assumes that the major problem with getting kids to function better in school is a lack of interest. Certainly that’s part of the problem, but pre-high school, I don’t think poor kids are much less interested in school than rich kids. The difference is the flood of distraction that weighs on poor black kids. Chief among them–getting your ass kicked. It’s all well and good to give a kid $500 for acing a standardized test, but that doesn’t do much for the constant violence which children in these neighborhoods are exposed to. When I was going to school in Baltimore in the 80s and early 90s, fully a third of my brain was occupied with the task of getting home safely. Another third was occupied with girls. The last third was an even split between (you know me now) the Dallas Cowboys, Rakim, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, and school. You can imagine how my scholastic career went.

And violence is just a part of it. It’s coming home and not having an environment in which people are reading. It’s the habits of your peer group and the unliklihood that they’re a particularly studious bunch. It’s the fact that study-habits are learned and not inbred, and that you need people around you who are interested also. I really hope this works, but the older I get and the more I read, the more I feel like we, as a society, aren’t really set up to fix these problems. We can barely face up to big looming threats like energy consumption. How can we really hope to do anything at all for a troubled minority of citizens?

First off, speaking anecdotally, I don’t think that giving kids cash rewards for doing well in school is really prevalent among middle class and upper middle kids. It especially isn’t prevalent among kids who actually do well (that goes without saying, but still). But I think that gets to the core problem with educating poor kids. Not only are their innumerable distractions – like threats of violence – but it’s hard to do well in school if your home life and social life isn’t oriented around doing well in school.

For me, it was simply expected that I do well in school. I wasn’t offered any rewards for good grades, that’s just what was supposed to happen. At the same time, my parents would always make allowances if they were for the sake of completing school assignments or studying for tests. Education was always priority number one.

Even if poor, urban parents feel that way, there are certain human capital shortfalls – not too mention massive distractions – that really prevent the type of environment necessary for doing well in school from coming about. And so why I think we ought to try anything that could work – payments among them – but we really shouldn’t expect them to solve what is an all encompassing and systemic problem.

For more background, check out Roland Freyer’s Education Next piece on acting white.

PS – One reason why everyone who isn’t a Cowboys fan hates the Cowboys is that, for some reason, every kid who didn’t have a local football team to love (like Baltimoreans between 1984 and 1996) liked the Cowboys. And considering that during the 80s and 90s, the 49ers were more fun to watch and better, it’s doubly infuriating.