Americans should be open to radically reforming our country's educational system. The current educational system is failing America's kids. Miserably. In fact, generously funded government school systems in major US  cities have on-time graduation rates below 50%

This should be no surprise. Most kids are, after all, too feisty and "real" to buy into the PC cult-phrase of "we're all the same."  They're thus unlikely to conform to the phoniness, and be excited about learning in the left-statist ant farm of establishment public education.

On the vein of new ideas, good for Harvard Economist Roland Fryer Jr. for conducting a "politically incorrect" and creative educational experiment. Fryer paid schoolchildren to learn, with more money given to more successful students. Fryer's critics have decried his methods as contrary to the spirit of government "education" among other inane things.

The results of Fryer's study varied, depending on what activity was incentivized.  Students did much better when paid if they read more but about the same when paid if they earned better grades. But overall, monetary incentives seem to work for schoolchildren. Writes Amanda Ripley in TIME Magazine [emphasis mine]:

The experiment ran in four cities: Chicago, Dallas, Washington and New York. Each city had its own unique model of incentives, to see which would work best. Some kids were paid for good test scores, others for not fighting with one another. The results are fascinating and surprising. They remind us that kids, like grownups, are not puppets. They don't always respond the way we expect.

In the city where Fryer expected the most success, the experiment had no effect at all — "as zero as zero gets," as he puts it. In two other cities, the results were promising but in totally different ways. In the last city, something remarkable happened. Kids who got paid all year under a very elegant scheme performed significantly better on their standardized reading tests at the end of the year. Statistically speaking, it was as if those kids had spent three extra months in school, compared with their peers who did not get paid.

"These are substantial effects, as large as many other interventions that people have thought to be successful," says Brian Jacob, a University of Michigan public-policy and economics professor who has studied incentives and who reviewed Fryer's study at TIME's request. If incentives are designed wisely, it appears, payments can indeed boost kids' performance as much as or more than many other reforms you've heard about before — and for a fraction of the cost.

While I might* take exception with the fact that some stolen money was used in this "mostly privately" funded experiment, Fryer's research still demonstrates that kids, like all people, act best when given incentives. Incentives to earn money not only give kids a chance at that new skateboard or computer game, but give them a chance to compete, stand out, and be an individual.

Thus, I believe financial incentives for academic success should be included in an improved school system. And while some measures of success worked far better than others in the study, this shouldn't be used as justification for imposing the more effective incentives on all schools.

Effective educational reform, after all, would mean the end of any "one-size-fits-all" solutions to our problems. A truly free-market educational system would be diverse, because people are diverse. Kids from  one school district will not respond the same to an incentive as those from different cultures, socioeconomic statuses, and geographic areas will.  

* I only take exception with this if Prof. Fryer advocated additional taxation (i.e. theft) to fund his study, rather than using already-paid subsidies that would've been used by someone else had he not spent them.