The Japaneses do not have to pay students and patents to participate in school. That is why they created HDTV and we didn't.

They could reimburse babysitting fees, I suppose, but that is it. This cycle of ignorance/indifference towards education in the richest country on earth is inexplicable.

I am from a family of four siblings. My parents had rules: start reading/writing at 3 years-old (French and English), no more than 1/2 hour of tv per day.
It worked splendidly for all of us.

Reason #49513 why my offspring will attend private school if they're raised in the U.S. If schools have such miserably low expectations of parents, God help our children.

I'm not sure about the parents aspect, but I don't see the harm in paying children for good grades.

Obviously the current motivators aren't working. If a child starts to relate academic success to financial success as an early age, I can see quite a few positive implications.

Oooh, my mom is going to be pissed. She might even send the NYC Public School system a bill for 2 parent-teacher conferences a year for 17 years…hmmm, I estimate they owe her about $850 in back fees. Oh wait, my dad went too! Does he get paid separately? Rackin' it up pretty quick here…

Americans are dumb as hell. I just came back from Germany and let me just say, I feel embarrassed to be American.

i forget the details, but in dc they are paying some middle school students to attend school. it's a program that harvard's education school started, i think in ny. harvard and dc are going to share the cost of the program and they roll it out in a handful of middle schools this fall. the thought was that middle school is where things break down and they would start incentivizing school success. ok, i simplified- they're not paid for attendance- as lauren mentioned, they're paid for attendance in conjunction with grades, participation, etc. i still think it's horrible. this isn't a totally new thing for dcps, though, as students were paid (as part of the dc summer works, summer job thing) to attend summer school and summer enrichment programs (even if they were mandatory and the child would fail without it) as long as they were 14 and up. imagine how this hurt my entering 9th grade cousin whose birthday was not until the fall.

i've rambled. initially, i thought it was a horrible thing and exemplified everything that's wrong with dc schools…from overprogramming with no results to just the wrong focus, etc. however, i've heard some counterpoints that i respect. for example, i went to private schools, never wanted for anything, and even if i was not specifically paid for good grades, i did receive everything i wanted and sometimes my father would say a particular new acquisition was in return for some of the tests i took or what have you. so anyway, my mom's point was that a lot of these kids aren't in a position to get the very same things i got all along, and this was just one way of leveling the playing field. i'm not saying i agreed 100%, but it did make it seem slightly less ridiculous than what i initially thought.

sorry, i started typing before i'd thought the post, through…so it's definitely not to the point.

adding to the long post, qui, that was another point i've heard. i mean it would be great if people valued education for education's sake, but if not, how about valuing education as something that will ultimately lead to a paying job. i went to law school, and while i enjoyed learning, that was really what i was there for, so maybe there's no harm in teaching the kids that lesson. who knows. in any case, finding solutions for the dire straits of these schools is no easy task.