Incentive System Research Paper

While paying students for good grades is a tradition that goes back many years, a formal incentive system in schools is a relatively new and controversial topic.It is believed that schools should be educating students in many ways: such as emotional and physical development, readiness for work and civic participation, as well as students’ health and safety (Hout 25). When being paid for grades, students do not get these skills as easily and can lead to practical problems in their classrooms, as well as a motivation to cheat on tests and parent to child bonding problems. (Flannery 1). Because of these reasons, money or any reward from an incentive system should not be used to promote good grades because it will “cheapen” education, will target and benefit the wrong people, and will require an ever-increasing amount of money to achieve the same result.
Incentives can be harmful to
This fluctuation of incentive effectiveness is one of the reasons that schools should not pour money into an incentive system. According to the book Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education by Michael Hout, incentives are structured around everyone reaching a set goal. This goal could be reached easier for some and harder for others, causing the incentive to encourage achievement for the opposite type of people that the incentive is trying to target while discouraging achievement for the kinds of students that the incentive is designed to encourage (Hout 27). The counterproductive nature of the incentive system, along with the unpredictability of human minds, will cause the incentive to become distorted and less effective, which will push the system to require the use of even larger rewards, to get the same