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How can we keep kids' eyes on the prize?
© St. Petersburg Times The idea that you have to promise a child a prize to get him to try hard on a school test goes against everything I believe. I was raised to believe that hard work in and of itself had value. Weren't you? Wasn't everybody? Now before us is an object lesson in how quaint such thinking is. Teachers are offering goodies to encourage good performance in school. This is especially true now, during the FCAT. In one Hernando County high school, a used car is up for keeps. Motivation can be such a problem that at Dixie Hollins High School in central Pinellas, kids get coupons to redeem for ice cream bars in the school cafeteria merely for regarding the test seriously enough that they show up and take it. This isn't to malign Dixie Hollins. At Pinellas Park High, as the Times reported this week, top FCAT scorers get limo rides. It's unclear how widespread is the practice of giving kids goodies in connection with the FCAT, but the practice reveals much about the dilemma faced by schools. Too many kids simply lack the internal motivation to do well. They don't want to work. Parents certainly deserve some of the blame. Overworked and pressed for time ourselves, we don't do enough to reinforce at home the values of study and work. But it's hard for a parent to override the twisted notion of a work ethic kids are bombarded by, in which success is defined by celebrity. Next to the life in lights of stars like Michael Jordan and Britney Spears, an ordinary day's work looks downright irrelevant, if not useless. You need a special talent, a lucky break, a winning lottery ticket -- that's what success means. Kids bring this thinking to school. What's a teacher to do? Some work hard to hold onto the old way of doing things. Irene Betancourt, principal of Tampa's Mitchell Elementary, spends her time in classrooms, talking to her kids, urging them on. She even had her kindergartners, first-graders and second-graders write letters of encouragement to the third-, fourth- and fifth-graders who were taking the FCAT this week. Her approach is very basic. Betancourt said that if she had the money for limo rides, she'd use the cash to buy classroom computers instead. But you can only fault schools so much. The schools where prizes are awarded are only doing to students what the state is doing to them. Every school that rates an A for its FCAT performance, and every school that does one letter grade better one year to the next, gets a cash award of $100 per student from the state. The pressure on the schools is enormous. Who wants the embarrassment of being labeled a bad school? What school wouldn't jump for the extra money? School administrators are doing to their students what has been done to them. You could argue that a domino style game of manipulation is being played, in which everyone from homeroom teachers to the kids in the last row is getting squeezed. Steve Knellinger, vice principal for curriculum at Dixie Hollins, suggested to me that the big incentives are unnecessary. The kids who win the big prizes for high scores would have scored high anyway, he said -- because they're the kids who are self-motivated. The job for teachers, he said, is to reach the rest of the kids, who have not grasped the serious idea that school is the work of childhood. But how do you get them to discover the best of themselves and put it to use? Who are we kidding to think that movie passes and restaurant gift certificates are the means to this end? -- You can reach Mary Jo Melone at mjmelone@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3402.
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Times columns today Mary Jo Melone Gary Shelton Tampa Uncuffed From the Times Metro desk |
