Let me perfectly honest with you. I am against paying children for good grades. Once we start down this slippery slope, you have to keep raising the stakes. And once kids get old enough to earn their own money, you lose leverage.
Not to mention that this kind of deal doesn’t always work. For high-achieving students, money doesn’t matter. And students who are underachievers fail because they’re inconsistent. So if they slip and get a poor grade, they figure that they’re not going to get the reward and give up. Even worse, parents sometimes end up paying them for half measures and the system backfires.
Paying students is not part of educational reform. It’s bribery.
Since when did we decide that we were going to teach our children to hold out their hands and expect things? And believe me, if we start paying kids at underperforming schools for their grades, that’s exactly what will happen. For the rest of their lives, they will expect someone to come behind them and give them candy, or money, for everything they do (or don’t).
So I disagree with Professor’s Fryer’s assessment with paying students for good grades.
If Detroit is serious about educational reform then let’s stop this idea of getting better people on the Detroit School Board who are going to turn this ship around. I doubt it and it’s time that we abolish the Detroit school board and allow Wayne RESA to take control of the Detroit Public Schools. If you look at other counties across the United States you will find that their Intermediate School Districts run the school system not the local boards. It is a forum of regional control that is needed in Detroit.
But the biggest reform effort in Detroit Public Schools that has not been discussed is changing the culture of our schools. I can care less about academic reform if our children are still coming into the classroom with a prison mentality, sagging their pants sporting white wife beaters (t-shirts), ladies wearing scarves and sporting 20 tattoos on their bodies and around their neck how are they going to learn. The prison culture has a vise grip around our community. Not only our children are not motivated but most of our parents are illiterate on many levels to the extent of where they cannot help their children.
We make excuses on why Detroit Public Schools have not made the grade. We do not need professors from Harvard or Robert Bobb telling us why our schools have not made the grade. It’s simple. As long as we have a prison culture running our schools no level of reform will work. As long as we have thieves, lesbian gangs, and the lack of basic skills running the front office, the classrooms and running the halls what makes you think anything will change.
We have to kill the spirit of prison culture if you want real educational reform. No one talks about this because most educational leaders are participating in the ghetto/prison culture themselves. As I have said to my urban conservative colleagues education is the #1 issue in our movement. Everything else will fall in place when we raise the bar on education.
Akindele Akinyemi is an educator and political consultant. His blog, Akindele Unleashed, can be found at whoisakindele.info E-mail him at onechoicepac@gmail.com
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