Experiment: Pay students to tackle learning loss | Hacker News Reader

Experiment: Pay students to tackle learning loss

newsnationnow.com

31 pointsdoat35 comments

http://web.archive.org/web/20220620162254/https://www.newsna...

Only semi related, but when Dolly Parton noticed that her home town had 30%+ highschool dropout rates, she created the buddy program. Pair with a friend, and if you both graduate, you both get $500. Drop out rate dropped to 6%.

Yeah incentives can be gamed... But if in the process of gaming, the students achieve the outcome, does it really matter?

https://dollyparton.com/imagination_library/buddy-program/15...

It's hard for me to understand how such a small amount could have such a meaningful impact on someone's life. I suppose that says more about me though.

Edit: Dolly _personally handed them the cheque_! I could see that being more of a motivation than the cash itself

Edit 2: I would highly recommend listening to "Dolly Parton's America" - https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/dolly-partons-america

I would venture that most high school students have probably never had $500 in cash in their entire lives, especially those who are at risk of dropping out.

I appreciate the way you phrased this. In my experience, the nature of poverty in Appalachia is alien to many people (the numbers are so low, and the region is so isolated in many ways, there are many aspects of it that are unintuitive and jarring at first glance.)

Since you seem curious about poverty in Appalachia, I thought this bit of data might be interesting:

Sevierville, where Dolly Parton is from, has an average individual income of about $23,000 in 2022–which is actually a significant increase compared to just a few years ago. When you adjust for inflation and consider that high schoolers have relatively lower earning potential, the weight of $500 makes more sense.

Source: https://datacommons.org/place/geoId/4767120

$500 to a high school student can mean a lot. Source: have been a high school student.

I assume the kind of people who join this program probably are far more likely to graduate even before any incentives are given.

Dropouts rarely sign up for anything 'extra' voluntary at school.

To be confirmed, but my understanding is that the general dropout rate went from 30% to 6%, not 6% only for the people which signed up for the program (for whom the dropout rate might be 0-1% for example)

Money is different.

This is really clever.

As it stands, existing school is child jail. You didn't vote for the people telling you what you can and can't do, and they aren't paying you to be there either. The authority of the "authority figures" isn't actually built on any rational principle. If it weren't for the fact that the easiest personal option is to just wait out the clock and never look back, surely large swaths of people held in this system would openly revolt. Why does society presume adolescents to be obedient, suckers, and obedient suckers? Take their time, pay them for it. That simple.

> The authority of the "authority figures" isn't actually built on any rational principle.

If you don’t come to school we’ll put your parents in jail is an eminently rational principle.

To defend school for a moment it’s one of the least awful places many children experience on a regular basis. The adults don’t really care but they don’t hate the children. They’re not going to hit them. It’s a reasonable temperature. They often get food. I was horrified hearing one of my colleagues describe teaching in the UK. It mostly sounded like being an ersatz social worker. But it’s not like education is first or second in school’s priorities. Child minding is higher, why not social work?

>If you don’t come to school we’ll put your parents in jail is an eminently rational principle.

That's not a principle, that's a mugging.

>Take their time, pay them for it.

We're having issues that a lot of children don't receive education because they can't pay for it. Education is a privilege that many never experience in the world.

Would you rather they work in a coal-mine and get paid for their time?

This sounds like a fantastic way to smother creativity and imagination.

Anybody who has ever worked on open source projects should know that incentives are not always additive.

https://commoncausefoundation.org/michael-sandel-on-the-corr...

The interviewee addresses that:

> All the stuff where incentives destroy incentive, motivation are things that you like to do in the first place...

> These are, frankly, inner-city schools with low achievement. We were trying to foster a love of learning, getting them to try it and see that they can excel at it, not the other way around. We also did all the measures of intrinsic motivation, we found no effect on it whatsoever. So we didn’t foster it, and we also didn’t hurt it.

Considering the baseline "incentive"/"justification" for going to school in the first place is "because I said so", the incentives here are certainly additive because x+0=x.

This would be a great deal more impressive if most contributors to the largest and most subsection OSS projects weren’t paid.

I think all students should be paid, it s entirety logical. It would massively rearrange education, from school to university

Since richer students tend to have more educational progress, this would be a great way to fund the rich ;-)

If you pay for effort, not achievement, as in the study under discussion there would be higher motivation among the less well off.

I think it's a good idea, but I also envision a lot of cheating just to get free money. If they can tailor this so that cheating isn't possible then I think it's a great idea for some areas of the country.

The obvious solution is to pay everyone when they reach the achievement levels, not just the people who fell behind and then caught up.

Having worked with kids before: Kids and young people will game the hell out of any incentive structure put in front of them with terrifying efficiency. If anyone gets the idea that they can make some money by falling behind and then catching up later, a significant number of students will start falling behind so then can execute whatever catch-up maneuvers get them their payout.

So sidestep the issue completely and pay everyone when they reach the achievement threshold.

"pay everyone when they reach the achievement threshold"

They're paying people for activity (input) not achievement (output).

After a certain point, cheating at scale is just studying.

Financially it's the same as just giving everyone free money, but then fining the people who fail to graduate.

But mentally that feels very different.

Why would the site be blocked in the EU? GDPR?

Edit: I used archive.org to read the article and copy-pasted it here: https://gist.github.com/SkyfallWasTaken/55b9787a7bda35f839a0...

Too dumb to setup cookiebar, I guess.

Or too dumb to just not use tracking cookies in the first place?

I honestly feel like comments like this come from people who have never run a marketing team. Analytics cookies are very useful.

Because server side tracking isn't sufficient? I've heard from numerous people that it definitely is. Tracking cookies are a massive privacy invasion for what is minimal, if any, benefit

Even if your site is set up well to support it there is objectively less data you get back. Like it's hard to figure out where are the trigger points that increase or decrease conversion all that stuff. Or if people leave and come back. And it's a lot harder to run your own analytics (coming from somebody who does) even if you are just hosting somebody else's solution.

At that point what are you actually optimizing? If someone wanted to visit your site they would

Too dumb to understand why so many websites use these :)

Setting up all the random shit gdpr requires (downloading and deleting data, protection officer blah blah blah) takes a lot more than a cookie bar. It's expensive and if the site doesn't make much money from europe, why the hell would it waste money on doing that?

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