If I were King of NYC and had to fix this I'd cut the budget to 15k per student and use the balance on incentive pay. Think: 1-2k for an A, maybe 100 dollars for a good discussion on a book, couple grand for getting a 4 or 5 on an AP test - that kind of thing.
Quality education can likely be delivered for very little money. What I think we're missing is the motivation from the students, and young people are much easier to motivate with small amounts of money than adults.
Yes, teachers should be motivated by "Do your job to a minimum standard or be fired." I think kids would be really motivated by the chance to earn 15-20k a year.
A legion of motivated kids would also help root out bad teachers. Right now, kids probably like a lazy teacher - less work for them. If your payout, as a student, is based on standardized tests - you're probably going to be upset with a teacher who isn't teaching you much.
There would be corruption and cheating to balance against - but I think it's possible to strike a balance that's much better than our current system.
I’ve made a similar argument, paying students/ their families for good grades would be a huge incentive. A big aspect of cultures that seem to perform very well regardless of incomes is their focus on the importance of education, and the necessity of studying. If you tell kids you get $5k if you get an A on the state math exam, the entire family, community, school will be pushing those kids to do better on it to get the money.
> If you tell kids you get $5k if you get an A on the state math exam, the entire family, community, school will be pushing those kids to do better on it to get the money.
And punishing them if they fail.
And punishing /their teachers/ if they fail.
Do you really want to raise the stakes on something that's already stressful enough for a huge portion of the population? "If you don't get a B or better, your little brother won't get to eat" doesn't lead to disciplined focus for many people...
It depends if you want to educate kids well or not. Our current model says it's not that important to educate kids - that's why, despite tripling spending in inflation adjusted terms on per student spending since the 1970's test scores on national assessment tests have been flat. That's flat as in no improvement the last fifty years despite 3x the spending - infinitesimal gain pre-covid that was wiped out by COVID.
In our current model people care about getting more money and benefits to district administrators, union officials, and companies that provide education services, but people obviously don't care about educating students well.
I think that yes, like you describe, offering substantial amounts of money would produce substantial motivation. Better, it would produce motivation exactly where needed. The poorly family in generational poverty knows they can get 20k a year if their kid studies well. The poor family pressures their kids into studying a lot and doing well in school. Yes, that's hard on the kids but the consequences are that they're well educated and their families get needed support.
By contrast, the idea that we shouldn't pay students because their families might pressure them into doing well is a false kindness. You would make school a little easier but doom the children to generational poverty all so the bureaucracy consuming our exorbitant education budget can continue to be rich.
If the parent is abusing their child that is going to happen regardless, and the possibility of an unlikely event being loosely tied to a policy shouldn'
t stop a policy that may actually help.
Now we would have families partially dependent on little Johny and Little Jane's income screeching about unfair grading practices and agitating against hard teachers. These people elect the school board too.
Also yanking more than half the budget destroys everything and nobody gets paid anyway.
In other news part of the cost is to acquire qualified teachers who must be paid more than teachers in Nebraska because they have to be able to live in NYC.
Do you really think most of the budget goes in the bin?
Yes, I'm pretty confident most of the budget is wasted. In the past 50 years inflation adjusted spending per student is up 3x and assessment tests are flat. Other countries educate students better at a lower cost. It's fundamentally not that hard or expensive to educate children - you need a teacher, classroom, simple supplies, and a tiny bit of administration - not much else.
As for people screeching about unfair grading - yes. People screech about that now. We should make standardized tests and base the payments largely off that. Let parents get mad at schools and teachers that fail to prepare their children, that would be good.
Anyone who says insert complicated thing is very easy has abandoned any pretence of reason. Educating other people is in fact actually very hard.
Other countries eat much of the cost of health care and education. We have to pay people enough to cover both. There is also a complicated apparatus to deal with to meet federal obligations and get federal dollars that doesn't magically go away if you get test scores up.
You have started with a very large number entirely made up with no intent to justify it. There is virtually nothing to disagree with because you haven't bothered to justify it not even so far as to add up the costs of incentives and see if the cuts you propose equal the incentives you propose.
No, I said education was fundamentally not that hard and explained what I meant. You can't just declare that opinion "abandoning reason". We have been doing it, at cheaper cost, for decades as do other countries around the world. This is only an insurmountable problem because people profit off our current system and ideologues prefer siphoning state money to friendly political groups over educating students efficiently or well.
As for doing some math - of course not. I'm not in a position to make any of those changes and they would be politically impossible any way. The system will continue to fail as it has been and there's no point worrying about that. Instead of figuring out the details of proposals that will never be considered I'll just focus on making sure my kids can go to private schools.
No you wouldn't. You don't have to eliminate cheating, just keep it acceptably low.
Also, I never said the point was to maximize standardized test scores. That would be the student's incentive but not the teachers. Teachers would try to teach the curriculum and students would try to learn it so they could do well on the tests. Teachers need not receive any more pay for test scores.
As for the point - if you're abandoning measuring progress, let's just not educate kids and save ourselves a ton of money.
> You don't have to eliminate cheating, just keep it acceptably low.
Of course. I just don’t think it would be feasible to keep it acceptably low. Just look at what’s happening in countries like India. The have state wide internet shutdowns in some areas during the exam day amongst other draconian measures..
> That would be the student's incentive but not the teachers
They would align over time due to student/parent pressure to focus entirely on tests (and teachers wouldn’t have any incentive not to do that).
> As for the point - if you're abandoning measuring progress, let's just not educate kids and save ourselves a ton of money.
Tests work fine when they are used an an indicator. Prioritizing the maximization of test scores over everything else is already an issue, your suggestion would just make it much worse.
Also I entirely disagree with the whole premise of this statement. e.g. Finland for instance doesn’t have any standardized tests besides the one you take in your last year before graduating high school.
And yet.. Finland’s educational system is widely considered to be one of the best in the world.
Yeah, there’s no way adults don’t get involved if you promise $20k. This will just extend the existing test-taking/essay-writing industry from those who can afford to pay up front to those who will split the proceeds.
Modern education is already rotten with extrinsic motivations and you wanna add money in? Those extrinsic motivations are primarily mediated by the parents, imagine the impacts with 1-2K (or even less)
Pulling funds from established services would cripple the system. Consider resourcing for special needs students, programs for low income families, programs for second language learners. You cut the budget in half and many of those services could no longer function.
Im a supporter of social programs as a whole and am regularly disappointed when people completely ignore the less sexy parts of budgets as if they didn't exist. If you want to be more fiscally prudent you have to be willing to do the work and actually deep dive into the systems and budgets and people throughout the system. Slashing education with a machete is just lazy and incompetent and will hurt people. You want to convince people to actually lower costs? Do the grown up work.
Quality education can likely be delivered for very little money. What I think we're missing is the motivation from the students, and young people are much easier to motivate with small amounts of money than adults.