Roland Fryer and Joel Klein are back at it again, trying innovative approaches to help students in the New York City schools learn.
Fryer, who is a tenured professor at Harvard, a frequent co-author of mine, and Chief Equality Officer in the New York City school system, was the driving force behind a pilot program now ongoing in New York City that gives kids financial incentives for doing well in school.
Yesterday, the 2 of them rolled out a new program which will put special cell phones into the hands of select students. Rewarding good performance and behavior with cell phones and minutes is just a small part of the overall goal, however. Another part is using these cell phones to communicate with the kids. Teachers and students can text back and forth about homework assignments. Celebrities (or everyday success stories like graduates of the high school who have gone on to be doctors) can send positive messages over the network.
Perhaps most importantly, the hope is that linking school performance to access to the hottest new technology will make excelling in school cool, or at least less stigmatizing than it otherwise seems to be in many schools.
My prediction: it will not be long before a bunch of NYC high school students are emailing the Freakonomics blog to complain about our partial RSS feed.
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I sympathize with the challenge of teaching, but I don’t understand how people choose the career and then complain about the low pay, hard work, and time commitment.
It’s like a garbage man complaining about the smell.
If you didn’t understand what the job entailed before selecting that path, then I don’t know if you are qualified to teach my children.
Giving the good students cell phones that enable them to contact their teachers for extra help seems slightly counterintuitive to me. Wouldn’t it be better to develop some kind of cheap reliable method of connecting teachers with the students that do not excel? Perhaps even a completely anonymous service. Example: My old high school operates online forums for general discussion and help with school work. No one needs to know that the guy asking for help is the starting quarterback, or other steretypically ‘cool’ subject of the high school environment.
In short this is somewhat like providing the best cardiologist to a person with no heart illness.
I’m not saying rewarding good results is bad…just this sort of reward seems a bit backward.
@ Leland – It’s not so much the complaint of the time involved. A teacher knows that going in. It’s the fact that the time involved changes. Every new contract has the teacher coming in earlier and/or staying later. Teachers now have to come in before Labor Day (in NYC at least). This wasn’t the case for many teachers when they started.
The problem with our education system to today is how students are being taught to learn. Teachers are only concerned with the aspect of memorizing facts then actual being concerned with practices in the real world. All students have to do is purge and dump facts which is not really learning. The majority of students end up learning nothing by the time they graduate because the majority of the classes are only about memorizing certain dates and facts. Technology could help students become interested again but I believe that teachers need to reform the way kids are being taught!
Leland,
As a teacher, I take serious offense to your statement, and I am curious as to whether or not you truly understand what the job of a teacher actually entails. I won’t comment further because that’s not what this article really is about, but I encourage you to talk with a teacher or to go and spend a day (and night because work doesn’t end when the kids leave) and perhaps you’ll appreciate more deeply how intense a teaching job is.
Often times, I cringe when I read/hear about incentive plans such as this one. Are we really targeting the factors that are disabling these children from being engaged and successful, or are we simply just dangling a worm in front of the canary in the mine? While there are definite parenting responsibilities, it’s not always due to the parents’ fault that their students are not doing well in school. when we get rid of programs in schools that gave an avenue through which disinterested (and sometimes learning disabled) students can find a connection (thanks, NCLB), we end up further marginalizing and turning away these students.
Oh phooey. As if allowing students to bring cell phones to school isn’t enough, now we have to reward them with cell phones and minutes? Cell phones are distractors of learning and studying — every teacher knows that! If I chose to be plugged in after school, I could help my students using instant messenger services (Trillian was my choice; meebo is probably the new popular favorite). Cell phone and texting just aren’t the solution. In fact, if I could get away with it, I would line the walls of my classroom with chicken wire and cut off all RF transmissions!
Leland: Personally, I think it’s very important to keep hammering away at those facts – low pay and long hours – because they are ultimately determined by voters deciding what to pay for education. Too often, people have a disconnect between what they expect from public education and what they are willing to pay for education (Don’t worry the teachers will absorb the burden!). Perhaps a private education system would do a better job of rewarding good teachers, but when that happens everybody will be too busy gawking at all the flying pigs.
As a teacher who did leave the profession after one year of teaching(but is still invovled in public education), this seems to be just another hare-brained scheme.
If you examine educational research, the factor with the greatest correlation with student achievement is parental education level. If you are the child of parents who value education, chances are you will do pretty well in school.
Far too many kids, especially African-Americans, come from broken families where education is not valued. I remember reading recently that while over 75% of white, asian, and latino children live with two adults, only about 30% of African-American children do.
If you want to solve the problem of low achievment among African-American kids, first you have to solve the socialogical problems that often leave them living with a single adult, who in most cases is poorly educated and not home when the child gets home after school.