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Comment by phasehosiery | Hacker News Reader

What if universal income was distributed to parents based on their kid performance in school? For example, if your kid gets straight As you get $500 a month. If your kid gets straight C's, you get $100 a month.

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What if the kids with lower performance are the ones who could stand to benefit the most from a more financially stable household?

In many (if not most) cases, their lower performance is directly attributable to the socioeconomic status of their parents, and their parents’ ability to be present and proactively supportive, rather than in a constant state of reactive anxiety over housing and grocery expenses.

Or their access to, for example, food, showers, and so on.

I'm not sure non-teachers fully grasp the poverty that a surprisingly large percentage of children in the United States experience.

An interesting idea, but children from poor families already statistically do worse in school. They are less likely to have a stable home environment, access to good learning resources, parents with higher education, among other things. So this system would reward families who are already doing fine. Not to mention it sounds a bit like child labor...

There is no reason they could not adjust for that. Poor parents get a handicap so to speak.

Then why bother at all?

Because it would help the kids do relatively better?

Sorry, maybe too snarkily expressed... My point was, why make such a complicated system? Just give the benefit to everyone and raise taxes on higher earners. Universal benefits are more durable. Sure, some well off people would get an undeserved benefit, however there's way fewer of them in number.

That’s…so cruel. There’s plenty of wonderful children who just don’t work well with the traditional schooling model. Not to mention that’s so much pressure on the child to do well. That’s not fair to the kid.

I didn't intend on this to be a cruel suggestion. I should've put in more context to the suggestion. As someone that grew up in a poor household, I was working unofficially babysitting, pet sitting before 10 and a real job at 13. The thought was rather than forcing kids into side hustles to help out at home, make school their income.

How is it cruel? What the poster is describing is, in its most essential form, a merit-based scholarship.

I see it akin to having everybody run a race and giving them cash according to how they place. Except what about this kid who's in a wheelchair? Or the kid who has cerebral palsy? Or the kid who's staying up all night to help run his parents' restaurant and comes to school exhausted?

There's plenty of people who don't get good grades for reasons outside of their control.

Weird that you want to apply this horrible idea to the poorest strata of society. Maybe we should try it on the richest and see what happens?

Or we drop the idea that parents should be responsible for their child’s academic performance; moreso when they’re struggling with low wage jobs and scraping by.

The idea that parents are not responsible for their children's education is why American education is a failure despite spending the most per capita.

We should look to Asia for a good model. The culture promotes parents taking an active role in education and schools publicly rank students to motivate achievement. The results show in international competitions, college admissions, and grad school admissions.

I come from an Asian country and I would argue that parental involvement is not that much different than the USA. Parental pressure and resultant stress is much worse though, so it’s not really a good thing. Ranking and comparisons are also very demotivating at the same time.

Some parents have time and others don’t - just like the USA. The main difference is the style of education itself, and the way that children are taught.

While I don’t have a solution to the USA problem, it’s definitely not because “parents are uninvolved”.

Every student would be straight A's soon after. No person with a heart would want to deprive people of free money.

Collusion would be a problem but you could involve compliance along with loss of access to the program if a violation is found.

I mean we can use statistics effectively to suss out cheaters.

You are no doubt correct about finding cheaters. My point is that the entire system would eventually normalize around maximizing the amount of free money given to children. There would be no hero's made of those who took the money away.

Maybe. In reality not passing kids means their prospects in life are slimmer. Obviously once they hit the job market an inflated grade would be detected in many industries but not all.

Ah, yes, the old "punish people for responding rationally to perverse incentives" schtick.

There is absolutely no pragmatic way to manage this, and it would be politically nuclear.

The notion of 'money for grades', while a neat idea for discussion, is definitely macabre, just another version of 'Squid Games'.

A small child bonus, maybe a bit means tested, but not enough to perversely incent people to want children for that reason (some people think like that), would be worth it.

In fact it's probably one of the best ways to spend surpluses that we have. Early childhood education and formation is really foundational and the marginal value of a few extra dollars for those who materially need it can go a very long way.

It'd be political tennable if the Left were not in a civil war between traditional leftist and progressives, and the right were not at war between populists and the groups of traditional republicans.

It seems we abandoned the vision for greater good that we had in the seventies: EPA, endangered species, Title IX. Nixon gets maligned but he pushed through some good regulations back then.

I would suspect that the stress of kids risking their family's income is not conducive to better learning or social outcomes, especially for kids with learning challenges or non-traditional strengths (said as a B-C level elementary school student now PhD).

Teachers, parents, or caseworkers don't need that stress either.

So rich parents who can afford tutors get the most money, and poor parents who can't feed their kids get none? What problem is this meant to solve?

Then you have private schools charging more for a straight A education that is guaranteed and suck the cash.

So transparently a bad idea its amazing you wrote it

why?

Other comments have explained the problem already but basically its just setting up a lazy moral judgement against the poor who will inevitably make up the majority of the "failures."

That would needlessly create classes within kids. It would also send the wrong incentives to parents and put the burden of livelihood on the children.

School is not work and should not be rewarded based on productivity.

why shouldn't school be more like work? IMHO, we get educations so we can get a job and live well.

You may end up with very happy or very unhappy teachers

Agreed, this would push parents against teachers even more.

You'd get the same argument that marginalized groups in bad areas will ultimately get paid less because of systemic racism.

Goodhart's law would apply.

That wouldn't be universal

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