Merit pay for students

The programs are the brainchild of Roland Fryer, the youngest tenured professor of economics at Harvard University, himself the product of a broken home. His own life experiences and doctoral work helped him form the concepts behind these programs, now the premier research project at Harvard’s Education Innovation Laboratory. The programs and related research is funded predominantly through private foundation support, including the Broad, Gates, and Ford Foundations. The programs’ rigorously monitored results – reviewed in this recent Time Magazine article — have varied, depending in part on the kinds of behaviors and results to which the payments are tied. Overall, students appears to respond better to payments for behaviors they can easily control (like reading books) that to payments for results which are harder for them to control (like test scores). Early findings suggest that rewarding best practices that ultimately lead to better test scores is a key component of success of such programs.

The idea of performance pay for students also has its skeptics and negative reviews. Some say the cash incentives cheapen the learning process, while others worry about the implications of the money running out.

The Harvard team and the participating school districts are hoping to move beyond pilot programs and to forging “the beginnings of a theory of incentives in urban education.” While paying students for performance is uncommon in Latin America, the program is in many ways similar to conditional cash transfer programs, which pay families for keeping their children in school and for attending medical check-ups, and now operate in over a dozen Latin American countries.