Paying Children to Attend School

This is just...pathetic. Schools across the country are now paying students to attend school -- often at taxpayer expense.

A couple questions immediately come to mind: one, if these incentives are encouraging troublemakers who don't want to be in class to show up, that makes learning harder for everyone else. Two, this encourages sick children to attend school, or penalizes children who are ill and shouldn't be anywhere but home in bed.

When my younger children were still in school, I found the push for ill children to at least show up for morning attendance extremely annoying. (Schools in California receive state funding based on daily attendance.) As a parent, the last thing I wanted was for other sick kids to show up and pass their bugs on to my children, and if my kids were sick I sure wasn't going to send them to school just so the school would get a few more dollars in the budget.

Paying children who regularly show up at school anything from iPods to toys to automobiles raises so many more questions I hardly know where to begin. My thoughts circle back to my idea that parents should keep their tax dollars that go toward public education and use that money to educate their children where they see fit. Somehow I think the "need" to pay children to attend school would vanish.

(Hat tip: Spunky Homeschool.)