$If you are a second grader in an underachieving Dallas (TX) school for each book you read you will get paid $2.
And it is this last item that I want to elaborate because schools have become reformers’ favorite targets for cash incentives to change student and teacher behavior that go well beyond the business involvement I described in Arlington (VA) in the 1970s and 1980s. The “creep of marketplace reasoning into public schools” is the unexamined use of these cash incentives in current school reform efforts to solve larger national problems -producing skilled graduates to strengthen U.S. economic competitiveness and reduce inequalities in the U.S.