Management consulting firm EY said it will reward employees who demonstrate human skills, such as business acumen and judgment.
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Detroit pays kids $1,000 to attend class; E&Y sets aside $100 million to reward niceness.
As it ran on the front
Detroit Public Schools will pay students up to one thousand dollars for attending class. E&Y will distribute one hundred million dollars in bonuses to employees who demonstrate people skills. Both figures are confirmed, both programs are real, and both answer a question nobody at either institution seems to be asking out loud: what does it cost, in dollars, to get someone to do the thing they were already supposed to do.
Let's run the numbers side by side. Attendance, historically, has not required payment; it required a school being open and a student being present. That is the entire transaction. The one-thousand-dollar figure sits on top of that transaction as a new line item, and new line items come from somewhere. In this case, from a district budget, which means every dollar paid for a student's presence is a dollar not budgeted for what happens once the student is in the room — the actual lesson, hon.…
…(cont) E&Y's hundred million sits in a different ledger, a private one, and rewards something the firm calls people skills, which in most workplaces is a baseline expectation of employment rather than a bonus category. That pool tends to land disproportionately among employees already positioned for discretionary bonuses, because that is who is positioned to receive discretionary bonus pools. This is not an accusation. It is a distribution.
What these two programs share is a structure: an institution facing a shortfall in ordinary behavior — showing up, being pleasant — solving it with cash instead of with whatever produced the shortfall in the first place. Nobody is asking why a teenager needs a stipend to walk into a classroom the state already requires him to attend, and nobody is asking why professionals need a bonus pool to speak to each other decently. Those are the two questions the money is standing in for.
The reconciliation is simple. One hundred million and one thousand times an unspecified number of students both went somewhere. Neither went to the thing that was broken. File under: behavior, purchased; problem, deferred.
“They found a hundred million for grown-ups to remember to smile and a grand a head for teenagers to show up to a room they're legally required to be in anyway. Must be nice to have money for the bribe but never the actual lesson.”
“This is workforce development, plain and simple, you incentivize the behaviors you want to — well, attendance isn't usually a behavior you have to pay for, that's — the point is Detroit is being innovative here, and E&Y is investing in soft skills, which is — I'll come back to that.”
The receipts
Detroit public schools have an absolutely hideous rate of chronic absenteeism. Their solution? Pay kids to show up.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.