Along with all the other problems our schools are suffering from these days, we have a serious problem with attendance. When I was a kid, my friends and I took it for granted that we would go to school every day unless we were sick in bed -- or had a very creative excuse. But the attitude that saw students in school 179 days out of the 180 is gone. On a given day, a teacher can expect to find one student in ten missing from class. And it's by no means uncommon for students to be absent 20 or 30 days in the course of a school year -- in other words, four or five weeks out of the standard 36-week school year. So many school systems and some states, worried about poor student attendance -- and the correlation between frequent absences and dropping out - are instituting incentives for attendance.
You've probably heard about some of the negative incentives like tying a family's welfare payments to their children's school attendance. In some jurisdictions, parents of habitually truant students have been fined or even threatened with jail. But now, the state of Maryland wants to see what can be done with the carrot approach to student attendance, and it is requiring every school district to come up with a plan for improving student attendance that includes positive incentives for the students themselves. The bylaw requiring these positive incentives was passed only last summer, so most of the school districts are still experimenting to find what seems to work. But incentives range from the principal's personally thanking students who have good attendance records or entering them in an "Attendance Hall of Fame" to the $1,000 lottery that students at Governor Thomas Johnson High School in Frederick will be able to enter if they have missed fewer than four days in the course of the school year.
Some of the attendance incentive programs involve partnerships with businesses. For example, Washington County middle schools and local McDonald's restaurants are cooperating to offer various levels of prizes for good attendance - one set to students who have perfect attendance, another to students who have missed one day or less and a third to students who have significantly reduced their absenteeism. Prizes include free hamburgers and cokes ( of course), tee shirts, hats, mugs, notebooks and free games at a local video arcade.
No one can tell yet whether positive incentive programs will raise pupil attendance in the long term, but I can hear people saying that, even if these incentives work, it's a big mistake to reward kids for doing what they are supposed to do anyway. According to this argument, offering prizes for attendance might encourage students to come to school while the contest is on, but it will not have any permanent effect on their behavior -- when the hamburgers are gone, the youngsters will be too. So instead of dangling some prize in front of their noses, we should be teaching kids the importance of coming to school so the idea becomes part of their own standards. We should be encouraging them, as current terminology has it, to internalize the value of good attendance.
Maybe so, but I don't think we should be so quick to dismiss the usefulness of incentives in encouraging desirable behavior. Our economic system operates on incentives, and most adults go to work regularly and on time because of an elaborate system of incentives that are as external to their work as cokes and hamburgers are to school attendance. School report cards, too, were designed primarily as carrot-and-stick incentives to encourage student to work consistently and well. (It's true they're not doing their job for most students these days, but that's beside the point.)
So whatever we'd like to think, incentives are not an anomaly; they're responsible for encouraging much of our good behavior at work and school -- and probably at home. Moreover, people who begin behaving in a certain way because of external pressure can grow to enjoy or value the behavior on its own terms. That's what the philosopher George Santayana was talking about when he said that everything has a natural basis and an ideal fulfillment. Human beings, Santayana pointed out, first went fishing because hunger drove them to find food, and they used, as hooks, anything they thought would catch a fish. But then they found that fishing was pleasurable in and of itself, and the elegance and beauty of fishing hooks, rods and lines became part of that pleasure. What people had done out of necessity became a sport.
My parents -- like many other parents before and since -- were acting according to this principle when they offered to buy me something I really coveted if I got a good report card and threatened to ground me if I got a bad one. Their incentives helped get me started, but as I studied and learned, the pursuit became valuable and important to me for its own sake.
We're too solemn -- maybe even puritanical -- about the question of offering incentives to encourage children to behave in ways we want them to. It's true that we ultimately want kids to develop a sense that appropriate behavior is worthwhile for its own sake, whether we're talking about coming to school regularly and on time or reading Shakespeare. But the first step toward that sense can be a little external incentive -- and we're foolish not to offer it.