Sunday, May 11, 2008 | News
SP Pay for an A?

Program inspired by Newt Gingrich pays Fulton County kids to study

Former U.S. House speaker Newt Gingrich addresses the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2005, months before voicing the idea for a learn-to-earn program.
NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images

By Manashi Mukherjee

If you had been paid to get good grades in math and science, would you have studied harder? Forty Atlanta-area students can answer that question with certitude. A program that pays kids to improve their skills in math and science is being tested in Fulton County.

The 15-week pilot, called “Learn and Earn,” started in January and ends this week with a commencement ceremony on May 13. Bear Creek Middle School and Creekside High School principals each chose 20 students from the 8th and 11th grades based on test scores, grades, attendance and income level.

Students are paid $8 per hour for attending four after-school tutoring sessions per week, so they can earn up to $32 each week. At the end of the program, students can earn a bonus by passing tests and bringing their grades up to a B.

“The facts are that [current methods of teaching] math and science are not working, and we need to figure out what will work to get kids up to speed,” says Jackie Cushman, president of the Learning Makes a Difference Foundation. The LMD Foundation, a research-based group launched by Cushman and her sister, Kathy Gingrich Lubbers, in 2007, focuses on educational-improvement programs. They created the Learn and Earn program, arranged for private funding and are responsible for running it.

Cushman credits her politician father, former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, for inspiring the idea of Learn and Earn; Gingrich foreshadowed the foundation’s creation when he delivered the commencement address at Harvard University in 2005. But this is not the first program of its kind. South Dakota recently established a similar program that will pay kids to take online courses for improved scores on advanced placement tests. Other programs have offered non-monetary incentives for increased performance such as iPods or travel opportunities.

Will it work?


Dr. Karen Donaldson, professor and education department chair at Spelman College, notes that similar educational programs date back at least to the mid-’80s. She says that these programs offer “creative intelligence, but an entrepreneurial value system needs to be added into the curriculum”—a way of giving the earning power some meaning—in order for such a program to work in the long run. Students should be taught what to do with that money, or perhaps the cash should be offered as a stipend, she says.

The program could be very successful for at-risk students, Donaldson says, by helping them to focus on studying, but there are other life skills that should be analyzed: It must be clearly expressed to the students that this money is not just a handout, and students could be taught economic skills in addition to math and science.

The Learn and Earn pilot is entirely funded by a donation from Charles Loudermilk, founder, chairman and CEO of Aaron Rents Inc., but Donaldson wonders how future programs would be sustained. Would taxpayers bear the burden?

And that raises yet another question: Teaching, Donaldson points out, is already an underpaid profession. “How can we think about paying students when teachers barely make a living?”

“Education is a privilege,” she says. “We want [the students] to be competitive and democratic citizens of the world. When we begin to pay our children to go to school, what happens to their outlook?”

It’s too soon to tell. Cushman stresses the Learn and Earn program is just a test—a way to find out how a rewards-based program might work, and determine the pros and cons. A third party company, EMSTAR Research Group, will provide the data and analysis of this particular program. Study results are estimated to be available in June.

The LMD team specifically wants to see how this type of program might improve math and science scores within a certain socioeconomic group. They chose a monetary reward because of its simplicity and ease of implementation.

“There are a lot of people that are concerned with the message that this program sends. But the point is that the system is broken and we need to fix it,” says Cushman. “If it gets people to think about how we can fix it, then we’ve done our job.”

Cushman tells the story of two children she met during the after-school sessions. One child said to her, “Jackie, I was failing.”

“To me the most important thing in that sentence is the word was,” Cushman says. “He was excited that he was learning.”

Another child told her proudly, “This money is going to my family.”

The most important thing to realize, Cushman says, is that the program is providing the students one-on-one time with their teachers. More than the cash incentive, this could be a big reason for their success.
 
“In our society, we talk about school systems and structure, but we forget that for kids, they are impacted by the individual learning process. They are affected by their teachers,” she says. “They don’t care about the school system. Each person they meet can have an impact on their lives, and we forget that one person can make a huge difference.” SP