Seattle Times: Should Learning Be its Own Reward?

katonahmom
Fri, 24 Nov 2006 07:10:10 +0000

Growing up, I heard the adage “you learn something new until the day you die” time and time again - for the young at heart, (and that is part of the reward, too) the desire to learn and grow is a life long endeavor inside and outside of school.

I can’t resist posting this article from the Boston Globe: “Cars now the ultimate prize for going to school”.

"Public schools commonly reward excellent attendance with drawings for movie tickets, gas vouchers and iPods. But some diligent students like Kaytie are now hitting the ultimate teenage jackpot for going to school – they’ve won cars.

Kaytie won a red 2006 Chevrolet Colorado crew cab pickup truck worth $28,000. If you thought that winning an iPod was cool, check out her truck’s MP3 player.

Freedom is a standard option.

“I take it everywhere. To work, school. I don’t know, anything I do, I have it out with me,” she said. “I pay attention to where I park it, though.”

So does bribing students with the possibility of winning a car or truck actually get them to think twice about staying home from school? Hard to say.

A junior with a 4.0 grade point average at Natrona County High School – Dick and Lynne Cheney’s alma mater – Kaytie said the drawing last spring wasn’t what motivated her to go to school nearly every day last year. She just didn’t want to fall behind.

And while some educators say their car giveaways have boosted attendance, those claims tend to be anecdotal or based on limited figures.

Kaytie won the first Natrona County School District truck drawing. Besides raising attendance, district attendance officer Gary Somerville hopes to reduce the district’s 29 percent dropout rate.

Somerville blames the dropout rate in part on Casper’s economy, which has thrived along with booming gas and oil development across much of Wyoming.

“These kids can go out and earn, $15, $16, $17 an hour swinging a hammer. It’s kind of hard to keep them in school past their 16th birthday,” he said.

In northeastern Wyoming, the Campbell County School District in Gillette will hold its first attendance drawing – for a Pontiac G6 – this spring. School districts in Hartford, Conn.; Pueblo, Colo.; South Lake Tahoe, Calif.; and Wickenburg and Yuma, Ariz., are also giving away vehicles in attendance drawings this school year

But only Hartford has been doing its drawing, for a car or $10,000, long enough to draw reliable conclusions. The results there aren’t exactly encouraging.

“I can’t tell you that it’s increased attendance,” district spokesman Terry D’Italia said. “But what it has done over the years is just kept a focus on it and kept it at the top of kids’ minds.”

A couple thousand students and parents turn out for the Hartford drawing in a riverside park each spring. In five of six years, the winning family has chosen the $10,000 instead of the car.

Sure, in a perfect world, every student would skip off to school every day for the pure reward of learning. But educators say times have changed.

“My mom had the three-B rule,” said Jack Stafford, associate principal at South Tahoe High School. "There’d better be blood, bone or barf, or I was going to school.

“That’s not the case now.”

This will be the second year Stafford’s district has given away a car in an attendance drawing. He said attendance increased slightly last year, and has been up slightly again so far this year…

“The kids all come around and say, ‘Man, that’s the truck I’m working for,’” he said.

Only 98 students out of 3,200 eligible had good enough attendance to qualify for last year’s truck drawing. The contest was open to students at four high schools, and they could have no more than one excused absence – and no unexcused absences.

Somerville said the number of qualifiers this year would show whether attendance has risen in the Natrona County School District."