After three years of renovation, Rose Hardy Middle School in Georgetown reopened its new, bright blue doors on Monday. Along with the physical improvements, Hardy may be one of the schools used as a testing ground for a new program in which middle school students are rewarded for academic success.
Under the pilot program, dubbed Capital Gains, middle school students in the District may earn up to $100 per month for demonstrating good behavior, such as turning assignments in on time and attending classes. The implementation of Capital Gains and renovations of schools like Hardy are just two of the changes that District residents have seen in their schools since Mayor Adrian Fenty (D) and Chancellor Michelle Rhee took charge of the District of Columbia Public Schools a year and a half ago.
Parents have greeted the building improvements enthusiastically.
“We think it’s fabulous,” said Joe Daley, a parent of two students at Hardy. “It’s really hard to believe.”
Some bulldozers still lie scattered on the as-yet-unfinished outdoor track, but Tony Robinson, Director of Communications at the Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization, said in a telephone interview yesterday that the job is almost completely finished.
“Rose Hardy was a full, gut rehab,” he said. “The school is brand new on the inside.”
Robinson said that Hardy had suffered two to three decades of neglect, in which no real maintenance had occurred. He said that part of the mayoral takeover of the District’s public education was aimed at addressing such failures.
“That was one of the reasons why our agency [the Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization] was created… to ensure adequate maintenance,” Robinson said.
The Capital Gains project has met with a more mixed response. The initiative was developed in cooperation with Harvard University Professor Roland Fryer, co-author of the popular economics book Freakonomics, who has been involved in similar projects in New York and Chicago.
Alfie Kohn, author of Punished By Rewards, said in an e-mail yesterday that incentives like those offered in the Capital Gains program only nurture students’ interest in the rewards, not in learning itself.
“[R]esearch has repeatedly shown that the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward,” he said.
Jennifer Calloway, spokeswoman for DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee, said that the pilot program will be run for one year in randomly selected middle schools across the District. Schools will track improvement in attendance, academics, and three other areas to be determined by each community. If the program is judged to be a success based upon these data points, it could be extended.
But some parents of students at Hardy say they are very happy with the Capital Gains pilot project. Mozell Brown, who has a sixth grader at Hardy, said that linking rewards to performance will teach students valuable lessons.
“It would encourage them to continue to do better, and it would help them in life,” she said yesterday.
