Paid to make the grade

The Leader-Post, Regina

Thursday, September 11, 2008

In a few places across North America, a controversial experiment is taking place in hopes of keeping students from high-risk backgrounds in school.

It involves paying them to show up for class -- and to do well.

It's a radical idea. For centuries, society has believed that you study for both its intrinsic value and for the delayed payoff: the well-paying or interesting job you'll get after you graduate.

But a few educators wonder if this approach still works.

On the Long Plains First Nation west of Winnipeg, the elementary school principal oversees a modest pool of money provided by the band's administration for payment to Long Plains students who attend high school in nearby Portage la Prairie. They get $50 each month for showing up regularly and a $1,000 bonus (and a community feast) if they graduate from Grade 12. The program is young, but the results so far are encouraging.

In Washington, D.C., the school board has partnered with Harvard University for a program that pays students an average of $50 every two weeks. Called patronizing to blacks, racist and demeaning, it has drawn the wrath of many critics, none of whom offer a better way of encouraging young people from troubled families to get the education that will lift them into a better life. Perhaps it should be tried here.

Many working-class and middle-class parents already supplement their homework help with promises of money, gifts or family trips if their children do well. What's taking place in Washington and Long Plains is merely moving this outside the family -- for many families in marginalized areas have collapsed and cannot help bright young people with potential. The Saskatchewan Ministry of Education's Web site says only 30 per cent of First Nations and Métis peoples aged 15-24 years have completed high school or higher.

Legally, school boards probably cannot make such payments themselves. As public bodies, payments to students in one school or neighbourhood (but not others) would bring cries of racism and a quick lawsuit under the Charter of Rights' equality provisions. But it should be much easier, legally, for tribal councils, corporations or service clubs to adopt individual schools or students and offer incentives that could be administered by teachers and principals -- who know better than anybody else who needs encouragement.

The best reason for experimenting with such a program in Saskatchewan is this: existing systems for getting First Nations students to graduate clearly aren't working.