From left: Rodney Thomas, Tyreke Johnson and Malik Harris, at Burroughs Education Center in Washington, look at their payment vouchers
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The anger was not something Fryer had anticipated. "I totally underestimated how pissed off people would be because of this," he says. "This is exactly the kind of R&D education needs. I never said it was going to solve all education problems. I just thought it deserved to be tested."
The most damning criticism of Fryer came from psychologists like the University of Rochester's Edward Deci, who has spent his career studying motivation. Deci has found that money--like other tangible rewards--does not work very well to motivate people over the long term, particularly for tasks that involve creativity. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that rewards can have the perverse effect of making people perform worse.
A classic experiment in support of this hypothesis took place at a nursery school at Stanford University in the early 1970s. There, researchers divided 51 toddlers into groups. All the kids were asked to draw a picture with markers. But one group was told in advance that they would get a special reward--a certificate with a gold star and a red ribbon--in exchange for their work. The kids did the drawings, and the ones in the treatment group got their certificates.
A few weeks later, the researchers observed the children through a one-way mirror on a normal school day. They found that the kids who had received the award spent half as much time drawing for fun as those who had not been rewarded. The reward, it seemed, diminished the act of drawing. So instead of giving kids gold stars, Deci says, we should teach them to derive intrinsic pleasure from the task itself. "What we really want is for people to value the activity of learning," he says. People of all ages perform better and work harder if they are actually enjoying the work--not just the reward that comes later.
In principle, Fryer agrees. "Kids should learn for the love of learning," he says. "But they're not. So what shall we do?" Most teenagers do not look at their math homework the way toddlers look at a blank piece of paper. It would be wonderful if they did. Maybe one day we will all approach our jobs that way. But until then, most adults work primarily for money, and in a curious way, we seem to be holding kids to a higher standard than we hold ourselves.
In the fall of 2007, the New York City experiment began. Fourth-graders could earn a maximum of $25 per test, and seventh-graders could earn up to $50 per test. To participate, kids had to get their parents' permission--and 82% of them did. Most of them also opened savings accounts so the money could be directly deposited into them. Meanwhile, Fryer and his team found other testing grounds. In Chicago, Fryer worked with schools chief Arne Duncan, now President Obama's Education Secretary, to design a program to reward ninth-graders for good grades. Over beer and pizza in a South Side bowling alley, they sketched out a plan to pay kids $50 for each A, $35 for a B and $20 for a C, up to $2,000 a year. But half of their earnings would be set aside in an account, to be redeemed only upon high school graduation.