Following the Money

Last week Washington D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee announced plans to offer students cash for academic achievement. To be sure, this is a proposal that grows out of desperation. As the story notes, "school officials have used detention, remedial classes, summer school and suspensions to turn around poorly behaved, underachieving middle school students with little results." But whatever its eventual outcome, this pay cash for learning gambit signals the death knell for the apparently quaint and antiquated notion of learning for the sake of learning.