Paying the Future

Re-re-refutation time. I feel that I may be too hard on the idea of putting billions of dollars into education. Even if I have never seen a specific plan for what the money is to be used for except ‘reform’. The first and largest recipient of money is Tennessee at $500 million. I wonder if they have a plan for how to allocate all that money because after reading this time article I believe I may have found a way to improve kids reading skills at the least. To read up on the evidence I’m citing I recommend reading the article Is Cash The Answer? Bear with me on the title here.

Long story short this Harvard educated guy paid $6.3 million to 18,000 kids to see how it worked in different contexts. The experiments that showed the best results were paying second graders to read books at $2 a pop and paying sixth, seventh and eighth graders for five different things like attendance and behavior. Who would have ever guessed that you just had to pay kids to get them to read! According to Wikipedia Tennessee has about 6 million residents and I’m just going throw out another number saying that there are about 2 million children that Race to the top is trying to effect. That $500 million could easily go to just simply paying the children to do what we want. Why should we waste money on reforming a system at the prospect of possibly making change rather than just throwing the money at the children? Hell, $500 million could easily pay for every kid in the United States to at least read one book. Reading is shown to help improve reading comprehension. I think we found our reformation, paying them. It is just so simple that it can’t possibly be misinterpreted.