My uncle promised my brother a Nintendo if he got straight As (this was in 7th or 8th grade, around 1990). He got it. We attended private school and always knew that good colleges were available to and expected of us (I went to an Ivy League school and he to one of the service academies), but as a boy of 12 or 13 he couldn't think in abstract future terms. Nintendo, he could understand. My parents would often bribe him and my other siblings with more TV time or video game time or a trip to Pizza Hut or whatever for getting good grades. I knew more than one classmate whose parents would pay them for grades: $10 for an A, $5 for a B or whatever. Some parents buy their kids a car if they get a scholarship to college. Basically, children are children and sometimes they need a more immediate reward than the promise that all doors will be open to them. This just externalizes and democratizes a system that some middle-class and upper-middle-class families have used for a long time. Like so much of what public education is having to do, it's also taking the place of apathetic parents and putting the state into that role. Which we should probably be OK with because an ounce of prevention (i.e. being paternalistic while they're in school) is worth a pound of cure (i.e. supporting them and their offspring for life or dealing with crime, etc. arising from their economic disenfranchisement due to the terrible state of our public schools).