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“The math scores showed about a three-quarters of a grade improvement, which is nothing to scoff at.” It’s possible, the researchers say, that different study conditions might produce better results, but so far the evidence doesn’t support the benefits of enticing children with money. The modest improvements, where they occurred in both sets of experiments, says Bettinger, should not be completely dismissed. In randomized experiments in which children were either rewarded with money or not in over 200 urban schools in three cities, Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist, reported in the Quarterly Journal of Economics that “the impact of financial incentives on student achievement is statistically zero in each city.” Another long-term study of a “pay for performance” program in an Ohio elementary school, reported by Eric Bettinger, an education policy expert at Stanford University, reported slight improvements only in math scores. Enticing kids with monetary rewards for reading books or performing well on tests is certainly tempting for parents, especially if their children are game.īut the latest studies on paying kids to do academic tasks like reading more books, or to improve test scores found a negligible to zero positive effect on their standardized test results, and other measures of academic performance. Follow talks, right? So why should kids be any less susceptible to what the dollars are telling them?

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