Dive Brief:
- The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the education-focused organization of Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, will fund a program in Rhode Island in which students are paid for each step they take on the path to attending college, notes Chalkbeat.
- Rhode2College will give cash incentives to students who scored well on the PSAT and who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch as they complete prescribed college preparation steps, such as pinpointing schools to apply to and completing financial aid paperwork.
- The initiative, with 1,200 students presently eligible, is costing the state of Rhode Island nothing for now. CZI is fully funding the program for the first two years. If successful, the state will then pick up the tab going forward.
Dive Insight:
Poverty can have wide-reaching effects on a child's life, including health outcomes, brain development and educational opportunities. While principals and other "front-line" education professionals see that reality in their day-to-day work, federal lawmakers don't necessarily see the link between anti-poverty programs and educational outcomes.
Low-income students typically have less access to college-prep resources than their wealthier peers, so programs like Rhode2College are, theoretically, a boon. But debate around these sorts of incentive-based programs for high school students continues.
For one, targeting low-income students that score high on standardized tests may disproportionately benefit white students. And research on these types of programs are mixed. Some are successful, while others are not, and the reasons are unclear. It seems that offering immediate rewards rather than "delayed gratification" often yields better results with high school students, as does offering incentives for direct intermediate steps the student takes, rather than end results, like higher test scores. Rhode2College takes both tacts, paying out for short-term moves, such as sending in a college application, as well as longer-term ones, including improving on the PSAT score when the student takes the SAT. The program also allows for $500 of the $2,000 maximum reward to be accessed immediately (the remainder is put into a savings account for when the student gets to college.)