Get an A, get a cellphone
Thursday, November 1st, 2007
The New York City public school system has been on record for a few years as being against students carrying/bringing cellphones inside the school building. However, times have changed, and kids rely on cellphones just as much as their parents do. This has been an incredibly controversial issue, with Mayor Michael Bloomberg firmly against schoolchildren having cellphones and parents groups saying that kids need them because that is an important method to keep in touch with them.
Depsite the City Council allowing kids to have cellphones, many city education officials are not completely sold on them. However, they may relent a little bit with the idea being brought forth by the Education Department’s chief quality officer, Roland G. Fryer, is looking to implement a program to give cellphones to students and reward them with free minutes if they do well in the classroom.
The idea is to motivate students to do well, but a number of officials and other interested parties have expressed their concerns that this incentive program will only have students concentrate on getting the phone and the minutes and not really learning the material being taught to them.
This certainly is something that needs to be investigated further and possibly tested in a controlled environment. Obviously, most families can afford to give their school-aged children cellphones, but the kids do have to learn to use them responsibly, which is not always easy to put across. Can a program like this work? The old “carrot on a stick” theory keeps popping up here.
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