Is it smart to pay for good grades?

By Liz Pulliam Weston

I was a straight-A student who sailed through school without much effort.

By contrast, school was an ordeal for my husband, who's dyslexic.

So guess which one of us wants to offer our daughter cash as a reward for good grades? Hint: It's not me.

Plenty of parents do give money in exchange for A's and B's -- often $5 to $20 for top marks or $100 for a straight-A report card.

Cities are getting into the act as well. New York City rolled out a pilot program last year to reward kids in poor neighborhoods for good test scores. Fourth-grade students in select schools can receive up to $25 for their performances on each of 10 standardized tests, according to The New York Times, while seventh-graders can get up to $50 per test.

But the trend disturbs many experts on parenting and money.

"Rewarding good grades with money is really a gray area," said attorney Jon Gallo, a father of three and co-author with his therapist wife, Eileen, of "The Financially Intelligent Parent: 8 Steps To Raising Successful, Generous, Responsible Children." "Some psychologists believe that paying for grades is a bad idea because it substitutes an external reward -- money -- for an internal sense of satisfaction and therefore interferes with developing a work ethic."

Janet Bodnar, the deputy editor of Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, a mother of three and the author of the book "Raising Money Smart Kids," agreed.

• Talk back: Do you pay your kids for grades?

"You really want them, by the time they're 16 or 17, to be doing (well) on their own for the internal satisfaction of a job well done," Bodnar said.

When Bodnar expressed these views in recent columns, though, she got plenty of flak from parents who pay for grades. Many made the argument that going to school is a child's job, making it appropriate to link pay with performance.

Bodnar has another perspective: that going to school is the child's role in the family, just as her role as a mother is to plan meals for her kids.

"It's not something I expect to get paid for," Bodnar said. "It's what I do as part of the family."

Here are the major arguments against paying for grades:

It may not be effective

The research so far is mixed. One study by Johns Hopkins University researchers said paying for grades and attendance seemed to improve both among low-achieving students.

Attorney Gallo pointed to another study of high school students' motivation for doing well in school. The research, conducted by the nonpartisan research group Public Agenda, found the kids rated being paid for grades seventh behind such factors as their own sense of satisfaction and pleasing their parents.

Anecdotally, results seem to be all over the map.

Psychologist Gary Buffone, the author of "Choking on the Silver Spoon: Keeping Your Kids Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise in a Land of Plenty," said his two now-grown daughters did well on their own in elementary school but responded to payment for grades for a few years in junior high and high school.

"All kids don't need this," Buffone said. Some respond to external praise from parents and teachers or to the good feeling they get from their accomplishments. "But some kids need more to get them focused and working harder toward some far-off goal. Money can be a good motivator, not unlike the real world, which explains why most people show up for work."

Several parents on the Your Money message board, and at least one former paid-to-succeed student, agreed that money is an effective prod.

"If I had children, I would consider paying for grades because it did help me," wrote poster "mardavtwo." "High academic performance was expected of me, (and) the money was just another form of positive reinforcement. I believe it helped me make a link between performance and compensation."

Others disagreed. "Berzerk," a 19-year-old poster who was paid for good grades, said it didn't work.

"It didn't make me any more motivated to do any better in school, and all of the kids that I knew that were being offered money and got good grades (did) it because they had a good work ethic and a (desire) to do well," Berzerk wrote. "Money had nothing to do with it."

The Gallos tried paying their own kids for grades with mixed success.

"Money did motivate one of our kids for a while. It didn't work at all with the other two," Jon Gallo said. "If we had the chance to do it over, we wouldn't pay for grades."

It may not be fair

Even if my parents had wanted to use their limited funds to pay us for grades, it would have been a horrible idea in our household.

While I barely broke a sweat in school, at least before college, my sister struggled for every B. Rewarding my natural ability and punishing her lack of it by paying for grades would have been cruel.

I thought about that when poster "leopardgirl" related her childhood experience of being paid for grades:

"When I was in school in the 70s, my parents paid us $1 for each A and 50 cents for each B on our report card, plus $20 in the bank for college," leopardgirl wrote. "I was always happy on report card day because I usually got straight A's. My brother (got) mostly B's, and my younger sister mostly C's. She would start to cry on the school bus on the way home on those days, because she really did try to do well."

Continued: Focusing on a child's strengths

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