Cash incentives versus case management: Can money replace services in preventing school failure?

Monetary incentives given to clients have the potential of providing a simpler and less-costly means of achieving behavioral change goals than traditional service programs, but the effectiveness of such payment approaches remains to be demonstrated. This article describes an experiment in which adolescent girls at risk of school failure were randomly assigned to three groups: (1) a payment program in which girls received a monetary incentive of $50.00 a month to improve grades or attendance by a stipulated amount; (2) a case management program in which the service delivery unit was a team consisting, in most cases, of a social worker, a teacher or other school staff, the student, and one or both of her parents; and (3) a control group that received no special intervention. Both the payment and case management interventions proved superior to the no-intervention control group with respect to positive changes in grades and attendance. The case management program showed much stronger effects, clearly surpassed the payment program with respect to grades, and was much more positively evaluated by both the girls and their parents. In addition, self-esteem scores increased for the girls in the case management program but declined for the girls in the payment program.