Paying Parents To Do The Right Thing: New York Is Smart To Look To Mexico
October 17th, 2006
An editorial in the New York Times praises Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s idea to pay parents to make sure their kids stay in school and get regular check-ups, etc. This kind of cash incentive “is based on a highly successful Mexican antipoverty program, known as Oportunidades, that is now being tried by at least 25 other countries” and resulted in bigger, healthier and better-schooled children. “Even a rich city like New York can envy such success. Mayor Bloomberg is smart to explore a brilliantly simple idea that is fighting poverty now and poverty later around the world. We hope that donors will rally to the effort.”
(Writing last month in Gotham Gazette, Heather MacDonald took the opposite view, arguing that it could set a dangerous and absurd precedent: “Not just attending classes, but refraining from hitting your teacher, not bringing a gun to school, showing up for an exam, bathing your kids and feeding them — all will be candidates for a bribe.”)
By Jonathan Mandell on October 17, 2006, 7:01 amIn category: Education, Gotham City, Health, Public Finance, Social Services | 2 Comments »


October 17th, 2006 at 8:48 am
The “reward” system not only dangerous and absurd, it seems to be a solution to a problem which has not been studied.
Cast back to the problem of non-compliant TB patients who didn’t take their complete course of anti-biotics. In that case there was an actual problem: multiple-drug resistant TB was spawned by non-compliance. And here?
Is there any data to support the claim that lower-income parents in NYC are harming their children? I have not seen it. The Commission and the Times propounding this plan offer no data to support their implied claim that there is such a problem here. Do you know of any?
Since, in essence, the plan claims that poor parents neglect their children, I would think proponents of the plan be careful to document that claim. Considering the racial and class slurs that lie at the heart of this proposal, data justifing it seems essential. If there is none, Mayor Bloomberg, his Commissioners and the Times will need to apologize to those whose parenting they are sneering at.
October 29th, 2006 at 5:56 pm
Low income or even poverty has nothing to do with parenting. It is sad that most people don’t get it. Its all about priorities, and where you place your kids in the never ending list of priorities. Its no wonder that people in 3rd world countries are higher on the happy scale than us. I was bought up in a happy family with limited resources – from food to clothing we shared our stuff.