Paying for test scores: Anti-social, bone-headed perversity?

Check out the scathing critique in the Huffington Post by Diane Ravitch, contributor to this blog, of the Mayor's proposal to pay students for getting library cards and good test scores, as well as their parents each time they show up for parent-teacher conferences. An excerpt:

It demeans the poor parents who do meet their children's teachers; who do have library cards; who do care desperately about their children's schooling. And it insults the kids who are trying their best but having trouble because New York City has the most overcrowded classrooms in the state of New York.... The pay-for-behavior plan is anti-democratic, anti-civic, anti-intellectual, and anti-social.

There have also been negative columns in the New York Post from the Manhattan Institute's Nicole Gelinas here (called "Mayor Mike's Poverty Perversity") and from Andrea Peyser here, who writes that it is the " the most insulting, bone-headed plan ever cooked up. "

We now have an unusual consensus of the Huffington and NY Posts, which rarely agree on anything, that this proposal is morally repugnant. Too bad our Mayor doesn't appear to have the same scruples.