Here's an education reform you can try at home

From Joanne Jacobs via Marginal Revolution:

The field of education is littered with reforms designed to increase student performance - everything from the "new math," to more teachers to better pay.  Yet the most obvious reform of all has hardly been tried - pay the students to learn.  That's the simple idea of an impressive young economist, Roland Fryer (earlier I posted on Fryer's controversial work with Steven Levitt on the causes and consequences of distinctively black names).

Fryer was here on Monday and he told me of a large scale experiment he is running in 24 of the poorest performing New York schools.  Every three weeks students are tested and if they improve they are paid on the order of $20.  Control groups are also tested.  Early results are very encouraging.  No other reform has anywhere near the bang for the buck as paying the students.

It seems to me that this might work particularly well with the littler kids who need simple drilling in their addition/subtraction and multiplication/division tables.  It's hard to get them to practice their math when there are so many distractions at hand.  It's hard for the parents, too, to get that practice to the top of the priority heap.  How much easier it would be if the kid came up to the father and said, "Please, Daddy, will you practice math with me?"