For the past 12 years, a Texas program has been paying kids $100 to get passing scores on tests and to meet attendance targets. Research on the program, called Advanced Placement Incentive Program, shows that cash incentives have not only improved the number of kids taking hard tests but also improved the test results themselves.

This makes my skin crawl.

But the folks at Exxon Mobil Corp are so excited, they gathered with other private investors to replicate the program. Their “National Math and Science Initiative” has given grants of $13 million apiece to six states to bankroll cash incentive programs this school year. Massachusetts got one of the grants, presumably giving it yet more of a competitive edge over us, its struggling neighbor.

In another version, last year New York City high school students in 31 schools were offered up to $1,000 each if they got a passing score on the AP exam. A private foundation, REACH, raised the money to pay for the incentives, which successfully enticed 345 more kids than the year before to take the exam. Ironically, compared with the previous year, five fewer kids actually passed.

But even though these programs have a mixed track record at producing even immediate short-term results, the idea of paying students to score well on tests or improve their school attendance is catching on big time. The Exxon initiative is raising money to expand into 20 more states as soon as possible. And it is only the biggest of the growing number of programs offering cash, I-Pods, pre-paid cell phones and other major material rewards in exchange for desirable school behavior.

Mind you, I don’t see a problem with the modest, more typical school incentives like doughnuts, coupons or pizza parties. But $1,000? Even $100.

Apparently we’re going to bribe kids to do what they aren’t currently motivated to do. Apparently it’s less work to raise the money to buy the kids’ cooperation than it is to be honest with ourselves as to why so few kids are motivated to excel academically.

Adult behavior speaks to kids. So if you were in a high school and were suddenly offered a cash incentive to pump your own performance, what would you hear as the message? Perhaps:

We concede that for most of you, we, the adults, have not made the case that academic achievement has much payoff. Those fancy professional jobs that we constantly dangle in front of you, as the paved road to future big bucks, are just too far off to spark a gleam in your eye. We get it that school work is a drag, and that college is just more school, and that adult work holds little appeal in and of itself.

Our own stress and frustration does not make adult life look good either. But we need you to do the jobs. So we’re giving you a taste of the bucks up front to give you the satisfaction of having more consumer goods, a feeling which we believe to be the universal motivator.

We were just slow to learn that when money talks, everyone listens. With this incentive, we think we’ve got your attention at last. Welcome to the adult world, which is all about doing for money what you would not otherwise choose to do.

If that’s not the message, what is?

This movement underscores the education industry’s generally shocking ignorance about incentive and motivation. By default, people behave according to their desires and beliefs. External forces such as punishment and $100 rewards can change behavior. But the minute these external pressures are gone, the behavior reverts to expressing whatever the real desire is. So the good effects of a bribe-for-performance program will be short-lived at best, and possibly detrimental in the long run. Statistics about the success of pay-for-performance mean nothing until accompanied by stats proving that the kids stayed on track once the cash incentive was gone.

Here’s the problem: On the one hand is what the adults want. Across an enormous divide lies what the majority of the kids want. The disconnect is vast.

Then there’s what “we” want, together, kids and adults. We need to be talking about how to collaborate with kids to shape and articulate what it is we want. Like it or not, kids must grow up into our adult world. Surely we can work with them to fashion a set of mutual goals that take their interests and desires into account, and also do a better job of selling the value of a passing AP score.

I know many charter schools, and the charter-like themed and magnet schools try to do this. Magnets with an environmental theme, for example, harness the kids’ concern for their natural surroundings to pull them through more science and math than they would otherwise tolerate. But these schools are tiny, rare pockets of adult-student collaboration. Most regular schools are still trying to control behavior with punishments, and now by throwing big money at the problem.

Kids will do the right thing when they want to. How we align their desires with ours is a conversation long overdue.

In the meantime, Americans have grown so test-score obsessed that schools and districts will do anything, even bribe, to get a short-term bump in the almighty scores.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@cox.net , or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.