Your Phone's Ringing Dude

Your cell phone; it's ringing. It's the one that you got for getting good grades. I would love to stop writing about NYC public schools, but Joel Klein keeps doing stupid things about which I feel compelled to blog. His latest and greatest: buying students off. At a price of around two million dollars, high achieving NYC middleschoolers will receive cellular phones as a reward.

Hello? Are you there, Intrinsic Motivation? It's me, Margaret.

Does anyone else get a creepy feeling about this? Maybe I'm getting old. I mean, when I read twenty books and did twenty book reports one year in elementary school, I got to go see the Red Sox at Fenway as a reward. (It was cold and they lost.) Rewards for academic performance are not new. But that example is a reward for doing something extra, above and beyond what was required. And we got to choose the prize, by a vote. In NYC they are rewarding students for plain old school. They are giving them something they believe the students might want. They are trying to make "success in school cool again."

The problem is bigger than two million dollars' worth of prepaid cell phones. The problem is the way we treat school as a society. The problem is a complete disregard for our kids. The problem is that we continually try to fix severed limbs with band aids. This is not going to work and it's a waste of two million dollars. What we need are schools in which students have agency and feel invested, feel their voices are heard and of value. If students feel challenged and in charge of their own learning they won't need to be bought off. We can't BRIBE them into "success" and expect it to mean something. There are a few schools out there that get it. Apparently, New York didn't get the memo.

Bad call, Joel Klein.

(...Yeah, I made that pun. Couldn't be avoided, really.)