Earn Cash: Stay Healthy and Stay in School

March 31, 2007 — -- Do cash incentives make better parents? That's what New York intends to find out with a privately funded program focused on some of the city's poorest residents.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the program will make cash payments of up to $5,000 to parents who attend parent-teacher conferences, make sure their children attend school every day and for higher test scores. It will also pay incentives when parents and children receive regular medical checkups, including prenatal care.

"If you're serious about tackling poverty, an entrenched problem that has proved resistant to conventional government programs," Bloomberg said, "you have to be serious about trying new things."

The program will operate in some of the city's poorest neighborhoods in the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, in areas plagued by high classroom absentee rates and low test scores where the general population has more health problems than in New York City as a whole.

Bloomberg said that to qualify, families had to fall below the poverty line and have at least one child entering fourth, seventh or ninth grade. For example, a single-parent family with two children and an income under $20,000 a year would qualify.

The way it will work is that a payment of $25 could be made for exemplary attendance in elementary school. A payment of $300 could be made for a strong test score on an important high school exam. And there would be other payments.

The mayor's office said that unlike traditional approaches to poverty, a strategy that is based on incentives -- such as cash payments -- will increase participation in things that have been targeted, like health care and education. And the city's theory is that that will decrease poverty and long-term dependency on government help. What the mayor's office does not point out is that it may be cheaper for the city, because fewer social workers and truant officers will be required.