Dollars For Deeds

Each time Lisa Jones arrived at an East Baltimore, Maryland, health clinic for a pregnancy checkup last year, the 19-year-old was given a yellow voucher worth $10. After 10 visits, from which she improved her diet and learned how to take care of an infant, she gave birth to a healthy baby daughter. “There a lot of girls out there who are naive,” Jones says. “The vouchers are a good way to get them to come in.”This program is part of a larger national trend toward offering schoolchildren money and other prizes to notch up their performance. Some schools are fighting truancy by awarding students “warrior bucks” for getting to class on time, which can be exchanged for televisions, CD players and 10-speed bikes. Perhaps the most controversial plans reward schoolchildren for informing on one another. The “Better Kids, Better Dollars” program pays students up to $50 for turning in other youngsters carrying weapons or drugs to school. Many teachers, parents and behavioral psychologists love these programs because they seem to work quickly.In Norman Rockwell’s America, good behavior was its own reward. Accepting cash for performing a civic duty or taking care of one’s own health would have been embarrassing, of not downright degenerate. But that is exactly the approach that is being championed by a growing number of people desperate to reverse the social trends of the past 20 years.Taking a lesson from the business world, they have discovered the power of incentives. Critics call it bribery. But proponents argue that they are only being realistic. In many U.S. cities and suburbs, a culture of violence and drugs has crashed young people’s hope for life’s rewards. Hundred of thousands of students drop out of high school each year. Many young girls find their only source of self-esteem in motherhood. “We can pierce the disillusionment a lot of kids have by providing clear, concrete incentives,” says Michael Carrera, an adolescent sexuality expert in New York City. “Maybe our means wouldn’t’ have to be so dramatic if this were the 1940’s or 1950’s. But this is the 1990’s, and we have to be daring.”