Virginia Beach High Schools Pay Students For Good Grades (VIDEO)

Gone are the days of the gold star, or the smiley-face on the graded test ... now two schools are stepping up their good-grades game by offering a more serious incentive: 100 dollars in cash.

NBC's WAVY station reports AP students at Salem and Green Run High Schools will receive the cash for each Advanced Placement exam they score a "3," "4," or "5" on. AP exams are graded on a five-point scale.

The program is made possible by a privately backed grant, and is meant to cover the cost of the exams, leaving likely only $20 for students.

Although the incentive has garnered praise among education scholars, The Virginian-Pilot reports, some are arguing the money would be better spent hiring more teachers to reduce class size.

"The incentive portion gives me pause," said Dominic Melito, president of the Virginia Beach Education Association, told The Virginian-Pilot. "To me, this seems like a back-door way to try out a policy without having public input."

School Board chairman Dan Edwards told the paper he doesn't see a problem with it.

"It isn't local money, and I don't really see a downside to it." Edwards told The Virginian-Pilot. "I'm actually interested to see how it turns out."

The program comes months after the College Board's 7th Annual AP Report to the Nation, which revealed that the number of minority students passing the exams is still disproportionately low:

"... Of the half a million students who passed an AP exam, only 14.6 percent of those were Hispanic or Latino. For black students, the statistic was even lower -- 3.9 percent."

WATCH:

High schools offer money for grades: wavy.com

Comments

[EducationBlogger]

04:57 PM on 11/12/2011

I live in Virginia Beach, and I am absolutely shocked. All this does is teach a generation of children that already lack a work ethic that achievement and success are not worthy ends in and of themselves. Apparently, doing well in school isn't something these kids should have to do anymore. We have to pay them. If these kids aren't motivated enough to achieve things on their own, then let them flop. No one ever paid me for my good grades in school. Kids should be embarrassed when they don't try their best and do well. All this does is teach them that money is the only motivator.
http://rethinkingpublicschools.blogspot.com/2011/11/why-wont-teacher-raise-my-child-great.html

[EducationBlogger]

04:53 PM on 11/12/2011

It is ridiculous to pay students to do well. They ought to have the drive and upbringing to do well for themselves. No one ever gave me a dime for my good grades when I was in school. What does this teach children? It tells them that success and achievement aren't worthwhile for their own sake, but that someone needs to give them money to get them to do what they ought to be doing anyways. I live in Virginia Beach, and I am absolutely shocked. This is wrong on every level.
http://rethinkingpublicschools.blogspot.com/2011/11/why-wont-teacher-raise-my-child-great.html

[William George Cheng]

11:39 AM on 11/09/2011

My mom gives me $100 every time i get all A's on my report card
Money is a really good motivator for most students to do well

[LeoChild]

10:25 PM on 11/08/2011

I've been giving my daughter a $$$ incentive for a few years now. Its worked wonderfully!

[raggedhand]

08:10 PM on 11/08/2011

My school district pays for exams and has the same grant program. Our AP math, science and English students get $100 for AP grades of 3 or above and the teachers get $100, too. I know of several kids who earned $3-400 from tests they took last year and teachers who reaped thousands of dollars in bonuses.

The kids and teachers who get the money are fine with it, although no one I've talked to has said they work harder because of the potential reward. The pre-AP teachers who feed in to the classes got nothing and they weren't too happy and the AP teachers in languages, arts, computer and history who got nothing were very, very unhappy, as were the students who took the non-grant classes and worked just as hard as the grant students and earned nada.

From what I see, the program as it sets now is divisive and creates first and second class AP classes and doesn't accomplish what the grant intends, which is to increase scores and get teachers to bring in more minorities to their classes. Good AP teachers work to their limits anyway and bad AP teachers won't be improved by giving them a few grand.

[Rationality4all]

07:56 PM on 11/08/2011

Prehaps there aren't as many minority students passing the exams because there aren't as many taking them. Even if students in schools in poor areas have access to AP courses, the tests are expensive, usually $90-$110 per test.

[lcr999]

07:04 PM on 11/08/2011

A little bit of money well spent to encourage achievement. Even is it is $100 to 20% of the kids, that is a whopping average of $20 per kid.....pale in comparison to the $10-20K cost of education per child.

And frankly, most of what is does is reimburse the cost of the exam, leveling the playing field. And that is good.

[Mike Hixenbaugh]

04:42 PM on 11/08/2011

Careful sourcing stories with information from TV news. This sentence is not accurate: "The program is made possible by a privately backed grant, and is meant to cover the cost of the exams, leaving likely only $20 for students."

The grant also pays half the test fee for all students who take an AP exam. Plus, in most cases, the parent pays the exam fee. The cash reward is meant to be just that -- it goes directly to the student.

[eceresa]

04:41 PM on 11/08/2011

While hiring more teachers would be a better idea, it's going to be more costly. A secondary teacher sees maybe 150, 160 student a day. Even if you figure that those are ALL AP student and that they ALL earn the $100 bonus, that still only gets you up to $16,000, and a new teacher is going to cost you around twice that.

Paying kid for their grades is a bad idea, of course. It replaces what's supposed to be intrinsic motivation with extrinsic. That said, with the horrible ideas being forced on schools in the name of accountability, I can see why they'd resort to bribing kids.

[dejapooh]

12:47 PM on 11/09/2011

If you hire a NEW teacher with no experience and pay for no benefits, you would be lucky to get someone for twice that. With benefits, it is closer $50k.

[eceresa]

07:03 PM on 11/09/2011

Wasn't thinking about benefits. As for pay, in many states you can get a first-year teacher for less than $32,000.