When a school experiments with paying students for their good grades or attendance, as Coby suggests a school should if its leadership so chooses, it makes not simply a pedagogical or policy decision but an ethical one, too. Part of the trouble with handing out cash to 11-year-olds is that it puts parents uncomfortable with the action in the even more uncomfortable??arrangement of either a) allowing it or b) disallowing it and conspicuously rendering their children among the several who don't receive payment for??time served.
Parents have a right to a public-school education for their children that is unencumbered by controversial incursions unrelated to teaching and learning. Parents do not have a right, for example, to dictate that evolution, which may offend them, be forbidden from science class because evolution is an indubitable part of science and should therefore be taught. They can reasonably object to having their children exposed to a culture of cash payment for achievement, though, which is not indubitably part of learning and completely restructures the culture of achievement??to which??we so desperately cling??as the hope for inner-city schools. ??
We can debate whether or not paying kids to show up to class works, is a good idea, sets up good incentives, etc. We cannot debate that it has ethical reverberations that may not jibe with those parents wish to inculcate in their progeny. As such, it's a policy/pedagogy/ethical decision best left??alone.