Should Schools Pay Parents to Get Their Kids to School Every Day?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder shares his mixed feelings about incentive programs that pay parents for student attendance.
Key Takeaways
- It reveals how dire the problem is - When schools resort to paying parents, chronic absenteeism has reached crisis levels
- Incentives have short-term effects - Paying for attendance may boost numbers temporarily but doesn't address root causes
- Compulsory education needs enforcement - The real solution is enforcing existing attendance laws, not creating new incentive programs
Transcript
Should parents get a financial incentive for getting their kids to school every day?
I saw this flyer going around and I don't know exactly how often it pays out, if it's just $25 for multiple weeks or $25 for every week, but clearly there is a financial reward for getting your kid to school every day.
at the third fourth and fifth grade level and i have mixed feelings about this kind of thing i think it is worth researching but i think if we're going to try things like this we need to pay attention not just to the attendance rate but also to other effects to long-term effects there could be unintended consequences of something like this because we know when it comes to extrinsic motivation what it tends to do is it tends to drive down intrinsic motivation.
There can be reasons to give an extrinsic motivator But usually that is going to come at the expense of a more long-term and intrinsic motivator.
So perhaps we have kids coming to school but not trying.
I don't know.
I mean, I think this is kind of straightforward and for that reason, again, worth experimenting with.
But I don't love the idea and I think we need to be very careful.
One reason to consider not doing this at all is that it sets a bad precedent that you shouldn't come to school if you don't get the incentive and I think that would be an unintended consequence to really watch out for that like after the incentive period is over kids might say well that was the only reason I was going so forget school like we want kids to develop an internal habit and intrinsic motivation of going to school like there's not really any substitute for that and like yes we could pay kids 25 bucks a week to go to school forever But I'm not sure that that would actually work.
Regardless, we've got to do something.
We've got to get attendance up because clearly chronic absenteeism is still too high.
Kids are falling behind and will continue to fall behind when they're absent because they don't benefit from what we're doing when they aren't present.
So we've got to do something.
I don't know if this is it.
Let me know what you think.