Incentive-based After-school Programming Posted on January 28, 2008 Margaret Beale Spencer (bio) shares her experience with a monetary-based incentive program.

We looked at kids who were A, B students who were high-performing students, but low resource, and we looked at kids who were C, D students, but the same economic low resource conditions. And we wanted to ask, we asked the question for economically- compromised students, "What impact would monetary resources provide for persistence of A, B or high performance?"

So of course you can't give money to low performing students, because obviously it's not working for them period in terms of education achievement. So what we did was to provide them with monetary incentives, but also after-school programming. So we mentored them. So we provided the stipend to high performing students and the feedback was just: whatever you're doing is working, just continue to do it.

They ranged as a function of the child's year in school. They ranged from about $60.00 to about $75.00 a month.

Providing incentives was very controversial. In one community, the local paper wrote an article that said that researchers are paying students to come to school. So the superintendent and I went to pay a visit with the editor of the local paper to talk with him and said, "Well you know you give your own children allowances, do you not? Well in some families there's no money to provide allowances, and adolescents cost money. And it's a good thing to teach them how to manage their own money. And it's a good thing to say that we recognize your high performance, and we're giving you an incentive."

What's important also about the incentive-based programming for this sample of low resource youngsters is that we found, counter to what the local newspaper assumed, these youngsters — the boys in particular — were using money to pay a light bill each month. That was their job.

They decided that to stay in school was a huge commitment they felt, watching their parents work on these very low paying jobs and was a single mother, watching his mother work one or two jobs to keep everything together. For a fellow in particular the idea that he would have resources to say, "Don't worry about it, mom, I can do certain things for the household," gave him a sense of accomplishment that allowed him to feel better about himself as a contributor and not just a taker, and that's how they viewed it.

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