Oh, yes they did! From Topher Sanders at the Florida Times-Union:
Students in Northeast Florida have been offered gift cards, parties, even cars for their performance on the FCAT. Continuing that long history of incentive programs in the state and Northeast Florida, KIPP Impact Middle School is offering $20 to students who reach specific learning gains scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. If all of the school’s 160 students reach their targets for learning gains, KIPP Impact would pay out about $3,200 in private funds to the students.
KIPP Impact, which is a national network of public college preparatory charter schools that targets underprivileged students, earned the six-county region’s lowest FCAT score last year.
Local and national KIPP officials stressed that the school isn’t paying for grades, but rather just incentivizing good choices and good effort.
“We believe that it’s important to teach kids that we you make good choices in life you can earn rewards,” said Tom Majdanics, executive director for KIPP Jacksonville. “As adults when we make good choices in life good things happen, as college students we make good choices and good things happen. Those are the good choices we’re trying to promote for our kids in the fifth and sixth grade.”
A national KIPP spokesman called the FCAT incentive at KIPP Impact Middle School’s program a pilot initiative.
Students can get $10 for reaching individualized targets in reading and another $10 for obtaining individualized targets in math. The school offered a similar incentive to students earlier in the year on a national exam KIPP official used to determine whether to proceed with opening another school.
During that test, the MAP exam, student could earn a total of $10 for learning gains in math and reading. KIPP Impact paid out about $1,200 in December for students’ performance on the MAP exam. The money used for the MAP and that will be used for the upcoming FCAT are private funds, Majdanics said.
Really? Didn’t Rick Scott sign SB736 at a KIPP school? And attend a charter school pep rally last month with a bunch of charter school students all decked up in yellow shirts? Didn’t he and Michelle Rhee stage the same kind of show last August?
There couldn’t be a more glaring example that shows Floridians that there are two sets of standards for Scott, Jeb Bush and their enablers in the legislature. Yes, to charter schools and no, the public schools whom have served so unselfishly for decades.
