About two weeks ago, I wrote about parents who pay for good grades. We had a lively discussion on its merits, although half of you -- including myself -- thought it was a bad idea. We felt that students should want to do well in school without payoffs from mom and dad.

I recently conducted more research on a New York City pilot program, which is doing just that: paying, in this case, low-income children in select schools to do well on assessment tests as part of a larger anti-poverty initiative by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The idea, founded by Harvard Professor Roland Fryer who is overseeing the school component of the program, is to bridge the achievement gap between African American and Caucasian students -- another popular topic here at MT. While no data is yet available as to whether the cash incentives actually work -- the program has been around only two months -- at least anecdotally, some of the city’s least motivated students are better preparing for the tests and actually carefully checking their answers before handing them in, encouraging good study habits and test-taking skills, according to a NYC Department of Education spokeswoman who spoke on background about the program. Here is the skinny:

The program is funded privately and not by taxpayer dollars.

There are 9,000 students -- 4th and 7th graders, largely African American and some Hispanic -- out of 1.1 million public school students participating in the program.  While parents had the option to opt out of the program, at least to the knowledge of the education department worker I spoke to, no one has actually declined the offer of payment for good test scores.

The 4th graders receive $5 for each assessment test they take -- 10 total (5 reading and 5 math). The 7th graders are paid $10 for each of the assessment tests. Additional cash is doled out on a merit pay scale. For example, a 4th grader who scores an 80 on the test, would receive 80 percent of $20 per test. The 7th graders can earn up to $40 per test, not including the initial $10 fee.

Fourth graders can earn up to $250 per year and 7th graders a possible $500.

These tests, BTW, are not state or national standardized tests like No Child Left Behind. They are internal citywide assessment tests that help teachers understand what the academic strengths and weaknesses are of each student.

Via the Angry Black Woman Show with Sunny James: For those of you who live in East Bay, I am stunned at the scumminess displayed by the former owner of the now defunct Your Black Muslim Bakery.

Apparently, its late respected owner, Yusuf Bey, who used to receive business awards and congratulatory letters from local politicians, was a pedophile and involved in an elaborate welfare scheme. He took in as many as 100 young “wives,” impregnated as many as 46 of them and had them collect welfare. He would tell them not tell anyone he was the father of their children. As a result, he raked in thousands of dollars per month on the dole, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

This is disappointing not only because his establishment’s tofu burgers were delicious -- I scarfed down too many to count! -- but I could see every conservative wag his finger at this story and try to revive Ronald Reagan’s fabricated Cadillac welfare queen.

Let me assure you that Bey’s scam is an anomaly as I was reminded by this sensible Salon piece. Writer James Hannaham showed how racial inequality is, indeed, real, which makes the behavior of Bey -- who used to hold himself up as an example of black self-empowerment -- all the more disappointing and depressing.

Children of black parents earning in the middle 20 percent of all families in the late 1960s had a 69 percent chance of earning less than their parents, the study found. For white children, that chance was just 32 percent."

Disillusionment may hold some middle-class blacks down, but poorer folks still get caught in circumstances beyond their control. In 2002, University of Wisconsin sociologist Devah Pager (now at Princeton) demonstrated that white men with criminal records can get low-wage jobs more easily than black men who have never been incarcerated. Another experiment reported on in the WSJ demonstrated that people whose résumés sported Anglo names were 50 percent more likely to receive interviews than were those with black-sounding ones. It's almost funny to imagine some human resource department comparing identical résumés from Ashley Weston and LaQuinda Mae Bullock and trying to rationalize poor LaQuinda out of a job. But to say that LaQuinda's responsible for her unemployment because she used her real name on her résumé is to miss the point.”

This, in particular, was an excellent point:

Shouldering the have-nots with all the responsibility for their downward mobility also reassures those who are better off that they have achieved their prosperity through hard work, which keeps them from feeling guilty about their indulgences. Believing the poor are simply lazy or have "underclass values" allows comfortable Americans to feel superior to the less fortunate, and to smugly promote a strict work ethic as the only tonic for indigence while avoiding the truth about wealth transfer. A number of scholarly studies are finding that one of the biggest reasons for the persistence of the immense economic gap between whites and blacks isn't rap, absent fathers or Ebonics, but unearned income and equity. Call it the "parent economy," as described by Brandeis law professor Thomas M. Shapiro in his 2004 book "The Hidden Cost of Being African American." Essentially, says Shapiro, inheritance, gifts and financial backing create a safety net for middle-class white people that does not exist for the majority of blacks. Shapiro found that in 1999, only 25 percent of white families lived in "asset poverty" (which he defined as having a "private safety net" of less than $4,175 for a family of four), whereas 54 percent of blacks did. Shapiro also found that blacks were more likely to take care of their parents than to receive an inheritance from them.

Liberal whites tend to feel guilty about receiving gifts or "free money" from parents and, if they accept these benefits, don't consider them "real" income, as Shapiro notes. People with trust funds rarely speak openly of their existence, let alone their premiums. So this segment of the economy goes largely unacknowledged. This isn't to say that whites should reject inheritances and parental gifts -- salaries aren't allowing any workers to save the way they used to -- but merely that ignoring or denying the difference that factors like unearned wealth make in the racial gap distorts everybody's perception of economic inequality. What's more, even underprivileged people of color who try to address the equity gap head-on risk being misled by check-cashing services, credit card companies and subprime-mortgage lenders.

Wow. I found this piece eye-opening. Not just for the breath of research, but I never considered how inheritance was helping maintain the middle class in this country. If your only safety net is a day job, for most people that is not enough to pay the rent, student loans -- if you have them -- food and savings. I can see that being a hole for low income Americans in general.