Rooted School paid students $50 a week to fix attendance (interview with its founder)

In an NPR interview, Jonathan Johnson, founder and CEO of the Rooted School Foundation, says the study began in 2020, when attendance at its schools dropped from 85% to 60%. When the schools asked families why, he says, the answer was money: students were staying home to work or care for siblings. So they tested what he calls the simplest solution, giving them money.

According to NPR, the study in New Orleans and Indianapolis gave $50 a week with no strings attached to a few hundred low- and middle-income high schoolers, about $2,000 over 40 weeks. Rooted helped run it in two of its charter schools. Johnson says treated students attended 1.23 more days of school per semester (self-reported in the interview).

Because payments went on debit cards, researchers could see spending. Johnson says about 45.8% went on essentials such as food, roughly 12% on transport, and students saved an average of $300 by the end of the program.

Treat the cause families named, money, as the intervention: give students cash with no conditions and test it with a randomized trial.

The families themselves had named money as the reason for absence, so the trial tested a stated cause.

No conditions were attached, so the payment did not require students to do anything other than be in the program.

Debit cards let researchers observe how teenagers spent and saved the money.

A randomized control trial gave the result evidence behind it; Johnson notes few state or local interventions have one.

If families say money is why kids miss school, an unconditional transfer is a direct test, and card data shows what the money did.

Johnson says there was no statistically significant improvement in GPA, but notes the study mostly covered one semester and that a year or multi-year study would be needed. He argues the program offers good value for money; the interviewer raised the question of whether $2,000 per student for 1.23 extra days a semester is the best use of funds, and the interview offers no third-party cost comparison.