In of high school reform, schools are supposed to get four to help struggling students: tutoring, refresher courses, "personalized ... Among the many issues that pervade the public debate, there is one whose answer is far from clear how students will respond if the schools help more? Will they seize this opportunity and work more? Will they instead take the assistance they provided to work a little less?
Economists are well used to this issue since it has a very simple formula in the vocabulary of game theory. Imagine comparing the two players which we are: the student and the school. The student would like to get the best possible results with minimum effort. The school would like to see students succeed in the best possible while minimizing costs. Both players therefore have a common goal, but must share the effort.
In this simple model, what happens there when the school is increasing its "effort", for example by establishing a mentoring system cost? Does the student will work more or less going to work? The answer is: we can not know a priori. If the action taken by the school increase the effectiveness of student work, it will work more. However, if the efforts of the school tend to "replace" some of the work of the student, it will attempt to work less. Theoretically, we can not know. The only solution is to conduct an empirical study.
This is done three researchers using data on British students. They discover that more schools and teachers are making efforts for students, fewer students work . Obviously, this is only an average. It is likely that the measures taken by schools do not all have the same effect. But this result is nevertheless very interesting because it shows that policies aimed at helping students may, despite all the goodwill that accompanying backfire. So be extremely careful when putting them into place.
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