Does Paying Kids To Do Well In School Really Work Summary

The general argument made by author Arianna Prothero, is that Does Paying Kids to Do Well in School Actually Work? Is that some schools using bribes to motivate their students to do well in school may be effective or may not. In some cases the students getting rewarded can have a good effect on their test scores, but sometimes there could be no impact at all and the students could just not try any harder to get better grades even with bribes. More specifically, Prothero argues that it really just depends on the incentive that bribe gives the students to do better in school and how it can help them want to do better in school and get better test scores. She writes “Technically, anything that motivates a student to do something is an incentive.” In this passage Prothero is suggesting that sometimes bribery or paying students to do good in school does not always work but sometimes it could. Livingston says “Incentives are also more likely to work for students who only need a little improvement to earn a passing grade on a test.” This is basically saying if a student is far behind in school, no matter what you bribe them with they will be less likely to get passing or better grades on tests and such. …show more content…
She states facts throughout the article on how incentives can benefit students in achieving higher test scores and passing grades. But she also throws facts in why incentives may not have any benefit on students at all because they just do not have time to bring up their grades or they just do not want to. Livingston talks about how even if students are motivated to do better is does not necessarily mean they know how to and they might not be able to improve their test scores that easily. Sometimes incentives can have a negative impact on schools, and things such as cheating on tests can occur in schools and nothing is really being