Harvard economist study on paying children to do better in school: How do you get nightmare children to study and perform well in school? Pay them. Yes, pay them — isn’t school supposed to prepare children for the real world? In the real world, would you work or expect someone to work for no paycheck, but rather the promise of some incredibly abstract goal years and years down the road? Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. set out to test this idea in a study (pdf) of 18,000 students in Chicago, Dallas, and New York spanning 400 schools over two school years to analyze the effects of paying children a salary to do well at school, in what was “one of the more rigorous studies ever on anything in education policy.” (Read Should kids be bribed to do well in school?)