Toronto school board considers paying students

The Toronto District School Board is considering paying students to attend class as part of an anti-poverty initiative. So far, it’s not clear what kind of program the public school board is studying—only that it’s looking at the idea that students could be promised “some kind of financial benefit… to help you with your basic needs,” according to a TDSB official, and that the funding for such a program would have to come from “community partners.” Similar experiments in the U.S. have met with mixed results: in New York, students who were given $50 for doing well on a series of tests didn’t perform any better; however, elsewhere, students’ reading scores improved after they were promised a flat $2 fee for every book they read.