“Pay for performance” and “merit pay” are among the most loaded phrases in the education reform arena, right up there with “teaching to the test”, “unfunded mandate”, and “school choice”. The two phrases are synonymous, and refer to the notion that teachers ought to be paid in accordance with some measure of their effectiveness, as opposed to following strict salary schedules negotiated in contracts by teachers unions that are based on seniority and advanced degrees.

The concept of merit pay has long drawn the ire of rank-and-file teachers and staunch union supporters who argue that teacher performance is impossible to judge in any objective, unbiased way. Recent advances in value added measurement (i.e. the use of standardized tests to discern year-to-year gains in student achievement that can be attributed to how well a particular teacher has taught) have softened the playing field such that a number of districts and even a couple of states (with varying degrees of support from the unions) have instituted pilot projects to determine whether pay for performance incentives actually improve student learning.

My conversations with students, parents, and school reform experts leads me to believe that merit pay for teachers is controversial because of the intensity with which unions have historically opposed it. These other stakeholders are far less likely to object to the idea that teachers should be rewarded, praised, and paid more when they do a good job and should be recommended for further training or let go if they do a poor job, similar to how other professions evaluate human resource decisions. But if the concept of pay for performance for teachers is controversial because the teachers object, the notion of pay for performance for students is a controversial among virtually every stakeholder.

Yet this is exactly what a pilot project in Coshocton, Ohio has done for the past two and a half years as a part of a three-year study to determine whether paying students who do well on their standardized tests—as much as $100 for youth in grades 3-6 who earn advances scores on all five state tests—actually improves the performance of these students.

Objections to this research project, which is run by a Case Western Reserve University economics professor, cite long-standing research in developmental psychology about the harms that external rewards can have on students when associated with learning since such rewards have been found to undermine a student’s tendency to develop a natural love of learning for its own sake.

But the early results from the Coshocton study seem to run contrary to the conventional wisdom. Students selected to participate in the pilot project have demonstrated increase attendance, and the school district itself has even shed its “academic emergency” label since adopting the initiative even as the district has had to cut teachers and other support staff due to budget shortfalls—though it’s not clear that these are the direct result of the student payment system. One thing, however, is certain: the students love the idea, not just because they get their external rewards in cash (which have a more compelling ring than a homeroom pizza party, it would seem) but also because local merchants who are eligible to cash the rewards (which are given out as vouchers to these stores instead of in actual cash form) have complimented the students who use the vouchers on their hard work in school.

Personally, I have never been a huge proponent of the liberal pedagogy camp that holds extrinsic rewards to run counter to the purposes of schooling. In my opinion, the most important thing that our schools can do in this day and age is prepare all of its children to become successful citizens in our society in democratic, social, and economic terms. I would rather have a student go to college because they know it will lead to a better financial and civic future than risk losing students who would otherwise succeed because we want them to go to college if and only if a “love of learning” is their sole motivation.

So I, for one, will be watching closely when the final results from the Coshocton study are released this summer, not because the idea necessarily holds the key to all our woes in school reform, but because an unspoken, critical piece of the reform puzzle is that achievement will only rise to the degree to which we can motivate students to succeed. And who knows? Can you imagine a day where a fair, progressive merit-pay system were implemented that paid students who increased their achievement by more than one grade level each year using value-added systems just like new teacher merit pay models, but with a variable for need? What would have a greater impact: throwing an additional $500 in per-pupil expenditures into the bureaucratic giant of a large city school system, or offering that $500 as a cash reward to disadvantaged students who, year-after-year, work their tails off in school?