Two Georgia public schools are starting a program to pay students to study, if they have been doing poorly in their studies

Homeschool News & Views

Issue 55, January 27, 2008

From Homeschool Helpers

By Dan L. White

In Georgia, public school students are being paid to study.

Two Georgia public schools are starting a program to pay students to study, if they have been doing poorly in their studies. They will pay the underperforming students $8 an hour to attend study hall for four hours per week.

The 8^th and 11^th graders selected to be paid had to be doing badly in math and science. Many of these same students already have the government paying for their lunch.

Besides the hourly wage, the 8^th graders will get a $75 bonus and the 11^th graders a $125 bonus if they improve their math and science grades to a B and achieve certain test scores. For the older kids, that adds up to $605 a semester for studying.

This program costs $60,000. It is paid for by an Atlanta businessman, Charles Loudermilk, founder of Aaron Rents Company. This is the idea of Newt Gingrich and is administered by a foundation run by Gingrich’s daughters. There are several other similar programs like this across the country.

The first thing I think of with this story is –

If you are a hard working student in Georgia and you are currently making good grades, you will not get paid for that. Therefore, if you are smart the first thing you should do now is to start making bad grades. Then they may pay you to go to study hall and get B’s.

The next thing I think of is that there are so many of these students in the public school system who aren’t learning much. About 25% fail the standards of the No Child Left Behind Act, yet all the nation can think of is to throw more money into a failing system.

Homeschoolers are the top of the class in education, yet who helps them?

Is paying public school students to study a good idea? Their education already costs about $10,000 per student per year. Should we now have to pay them directly to try to get them to be educated?

The director of a private center aimed at improving student motivation said that paying kids to study is a desperate move by Georgia school officials. "They have not figured out a way to self-motivate these kids," said the director of the Center for Applied Motivation. "What really drives a person is the desire to do well and the good feeling you have after doing your best every day."

In Christian home schools, the students usually get their day’s book work done in the mornings. The system is very efficient. They don’t have to wait for a bus, they don’t have to wait for school to begin, and they don’t have to wait for the class to settle down and take roll. A parent is with them, to oversee and encourage and exhort. The students want to do well, because their parents want them to do well, and the parents are willing to spend time with them to help them do that. Nothing discourages a person so much in life as having parents who do not love them. Nothing encourages a person so much in life as having parents who do love them. Love by parents is shown by them spending time with their children.

These Christian homeschools produce students who average several grade levels above the public schools. Several grade levels!

Yet the public schools, which do so poorly, always get more money -- even from private sources! -- and free enterprise education, which does so well, gets almost nothing. Gingrich’s idea to pay public school students to study is a really bad idea, because the government socialist schools themselves are a really bad idea. The whole gimmick is just a sign of how bad the schools are.

Jay Leno has a funny segment on the Tonight Show. We do not watch the Tonight Show. Like most network shows, it is routinely obscene. Really, the only network show we do watch is America’s Funniest Home Videos, because it reminds us of our own home life. But in flipping by channels, we saw that Leno has a segment where he asks young people certain basic questions. The questions are funny because people are so ignorant.

For example, he asked the question, “What country is the Panama Canal in?” The young person could never get the answer to that question, in spite of multiple hints.

Leno ends that segment with a statement that we should pay the teachers more money.

Who is the most ignorant person on that show?

Leno is. He is the most ignorant person on his segments spotlighting ignorance. He shows how poorly public education does, and then screams for more money for public education. Smart! What country is the Panama Canal in, Jay?

I have noticed a similar thing with Project Graduation. Project Graduation is a program where a lot of money is raised from the public to keep public school graduates from getting drunk and killing themselves on graduation night.

For example, one local graduation party will give every attending graduate a door prize worth a minimum value of $25. Each grad also gets a chance to win a used car, or a lot of money, or other expensive prizes. Each grad gets a free Project Graduation t-shirt and a free professionally taken group photo. The party will have music and a DJ and free food all night long.

Most schools around the country raise thousands of dollars to bribe their grads so they won’t get drunk and kill themselves on graduation night.

Think about that. When a person graduates from a school, and receives the diploma of approval from that school, he is the sum total of what that school produces. He is the final product. He is the epitome of excellence in their education. He’s a graduate.

Shouldn’t a public school graduate have more sense than to go out and kill himself on graduation night? After twelve to fourteen years, forty weeks a year, shouldn’t an educational system be able to teach its graduates that risking killing yourself on grad night is dumb?

When Christian homeschoolers graduate, the last thing in the world they want to do is get drunk and kill themselves. Yet there are no expensive project graduation parties for them.

Of course, having an education which teaches you the meaning and purpose of life -- why you are alive and how to live – is worth quite a bit.

Last night we attended a Biblical Worldview seminar. They talked at length about how Christians are losing their Biblical worldview with the Bible as the basis for life. Yet they did not discuss at all how the public schools are the main channel for changing the country that way. I think most of the young people there were homeschooled, but the speakers did not promote homeschooling at all.

American Family Association has called for boycotts of such organizations as Disney and Ford, because those companies were or are promoting anti-Christian values, such as homosexuality. The public schools are being openly used by the leftists to sodomize America, but AFA has never called for a boycott of the public schools, and open support of homeschooling and freedom of education.

Last week I mentioned an article in the Good News Magazine indirectly supporting the teaching of evolution in the public schools by not calling for parents to pull out of that system. That same group, the United Church of God, has a sermon video on its web site by Roy Holladay titled Cultural Trends Influence Our Children. That is a fine sermon discussing the difficulties young people face today and stressing how parents should protect their children from evil. I would encourage you to listen to it. But the message never quite comes to the obvious conclusion – that parents should homeschool and withdraw their children from being taught that evil. That whole church should set up a homeschool support program to encourage parents to homeschool, but like almost all churches, they have never openly supported Christian homeschooling.

So public school students are being paid to go to study hall, yet nobody helps homeschoolers. Is there something that you or your church, your foundation, your group can do to help homeschooling? It’s about time somebody helps those who are doing the best.