Murphy Educational Consulting (MEC)

Should students be paid to do well in school?  It’s an idea that I’ve hear posed in many meetings by teachers and administrators who don’t know what else to do.  There is enormous pressure for students to do well on tests that they don’t see as relevant and therefor don’t always do their best.  But no one ever says pay, they use the nicer word ‘incentive’.  Compelling arguments are made against mainly that wanting to learn should be an intrinsic quality.  And compelling arguments are made for, especially for students that may be helping to support their family and have no choice but to choose working over studying.

But until today, I hadn’t heard of a successful initiative that paid students to study.   In Atlanta, 35 students that were barely passing school were paid $8 an hour to study. Click here to learn more.

What do you think about paying kids to study?  For or Against?  Why?  Were you ever paid for your grades?

My name is Nora and I am the founder of Murphy Educational Consulting.  Murphy Educational Consulting is newly formed as of April, 2008 and as an organization on a path of discovery, trying to find our niche in Chicago, IL.  But each of us on the team have been on our individual research and evaluation paths for many years.

I am interested in educational research and evaluation because teaching is how I began and it’s my passion.  I started working at camps for children who were victims of abuse when I was 17.  I didn’t know that this was the beginning of my career path and tried to major in Pre-Med Biology.  But teaching kept calling me back and I graduated from Earlham College with an interdisciplinary major degree in Education (sociology, psychology & philosophy) and a minor in Biology.  After graduation I spent a year teaching high school math in rural New Hampshire and two years teaching high school math & science in Washington DC.

I transferred my love of teaching and my enthusiasm for the outdoors to the non-profit sector where I was a program manager for four years with the Student Conservation Association (SCA).  With SCA I started and grew an environmental stewardship program for high school students in Pittsburgh, PA.  The program was transformative for the youth involved and for the land we served.  While working with SCA, I was fortunate enough to be the point person for an external evaluation.  And that was the turning point for me!

I realized that there were systematic ways to acollect data that would allow me to answer the questions that I had… about attendance, community perceptions, impact, etc.  It was truly exciting.  In fact I was so excited and energized, that it became clear that this was the next turn on my career path.  I enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh’s Research Methodology program in the School of Education, with a concentration in Evaluation.  And that’s how I came to love research and evaluation.  I saw how much it changed me and my ability to run a successful program.  I experienced first hand the power of data when making decisions about a program that I cared about deeply.  I realized that data helped me better serve our students.

Have you had first hand experience research or evaluation and its impact on an organization?  If so, please share!

-nora