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It seems like a no-brainer: Offer kids a reward for showing up at school, and their attendance will shoot up. But a recent study of third-graders in a slum in India suggests that incentive schemes can do more harm than good.

The study, a working paper released by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, looked at 799 boys and girls. The kids, mostly age 9, were students in several dozen single-classroom schools run by the nonprofit Gyan Shala in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city of Ahmedabad.

I almost felt badly about what we had done. That in the end, we should not have done this reward program at all.

- Sujata Visaria, an economist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Gyan Shala's program is free and has a reputation for offering decent quality instruction in language, math and science. Still, attendance rates are no better than the average for the region. On any given day, about a quarter of students are absent. Gyan Shala's administrators believe many opt to stay home and play if, say, it's a festival day or a sibling who attends a different school is off or simply because they're not in the mood for class.

So the researchers challenged kids in about half of the classes: Over a designated 38-day period, show up for at least 32 days — that's 85 percent of the time — and get a special gift: two pencils and an eraser.

That might not sound like much. And it's not as if these kids couldn't get a pencil or eraser some other way, notes Sujata Visaria, an economist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a co-author of the study. Still, such items are a treat in the slums where these kids live, Visaria says.

And the erasers weren't run-of-the-mill. "We spent a lot of time trying to make sure what they got would be a little unusual," she says. "Not a plain, drab erasers but something colorful and shaped like an animal."

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The kids could inspect sample erasers before the 38 days kicked off. The prospect of winning the prize certainly provoked interest. The students were nearly twice as likely to attend class during the 38 days. The effect was particularly pronounced among kids whose attendance level had been the lowest before the reward program began. They were now 2.3 times as likely to come to class. By comparison, kids whose attendance level had been the highest before the reward program also improved their attendance, but by somewhat less: They were 1.8 times as likely to come to class.

So far it all seemed logical, says Visaria. As an economist, she would expect a reward program to be most effective with students who don't already have some existing, intrinsic motivation for going to school — like finding class fun.

After the 38 days, rewards were handed out to those who qualified in a special ceremony in front of the rest of the class. The researchers checked back on the kids two more times. And that's when things got surprising.

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The researchers looked at three different categories:

• Kids whose attendance rate was highest in the class before the reward program. They reverted to their baseline level.

• Kids whose attendance rate was lowest but managed to up their attendance enough to win the prize. After the program was over, these kids also reverted to their lower baseline level.

• Kids whose attendance rate was lowest to start off with and who did not improve enough to qualify for the reward. In other words, they failed the challenge. More than 60 percent of the lowest attenders fell into this category. For them, the aftermath was grim. They were now only about one-fourth as likely to show up for class as they had been before the reward scheme was introduced.

What happened? Visaria speculates that for these low-attending students, the incentive program underscored how poor their attendance was. So they may have lost what little motivation they had to begin with. Other findings in the study bolstered that theory. After the reward program concluded, the kids with lower original attendance rates were less likely to feel confident about their scholastic abilities than before.

Visaria says this result was not just unexpected and cautionary but disheartening. She and her fellow researchers had been prepared for the possibility that the reward program would not prove particularly helpful, or that any positive effects would not last. But they never expected it to leave children worse off.

"I almost felt badly about what we had done," she says. "That in the end, we should not have done this reward program at all."

school attendance

Education

India

Just a few years ago, downtown Hamilton, Mo. looked a lot like a thousand other forgotten, rural towns. Abandoned, forlorn buildings marred the main drag.

But in recent years, an explosively fast-growing start-up business in rural north western Missouri has shaken up a staid industry, producing a YouTube star and revitalizing a town with a proud retail history.

That's why Dean Hales, who's lived here 77 years, is so delighted now.

"I've lived here most all my life, I can't hardly believe what I'm seeing," he says. "When you've got people coming from all over the world to a little town of 1,800 people, you've got something pretty special. And we do have."

They've got Missouri Star Quilt Company. Just seven years after its launch, fifteen freshly-remodeled buildings in Hamilton now house fabric, sewing machines and customers.

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Missouri Star Quilt Co. co-founder Alan Doan explores a long-vacant space the company is remodeling in downtown Hamilton. This building was formally owned by J.C. Penny, who got his first retail job in the shop downstairs in the 1890s, and made it his 500th J.C. Penny's store in the 1920s. Frank Morris/KCUR hide caption

itoggle caption Frank Morris/KCUR

Missouri Star Quilt Co. co-founder Alan Doan explores a long-vacant space the company is remodeling in downtown Hamilton. This building was formally owned by J.C. Penny, who got his first retail job in the shop downstairs in the 1890s, and made it his 500th J.C. Penny's store in the 1920s.

Frank Morris/KCUR

Della Badger drove here from Victorville, Calif.

"I just looked on my map and asked Siri, How do I get to Hamilton, Missouri," she says. "But, it was my dream to get here and see Jenny."

Badger's talking about someone she knew only through YouTube, Jenny Doan, of Missouri Star Quilt Company.

Doan's how-to quilting videos have drawn millions of views.

"It's some crazy thing like that," Doan laughs. "I can't hardly use the bathroom in a restaurant without someone saying, 'I love your tutorials!' "

Jenny Doan's DIY quilt tutorials have drawn more than 50 million views.

Doan says it's because she takes an easy-going approach to what traditionally can be a daunting and tedious craft.

"Quilting has always been something that's like, for the elite," she says. "It's kind of a hard thing to do, you know, everything has to be cut perfectly. And I'm like, 'Just whack up, we're going to put it together, this is going to be awesome!' "

She says women from around the world visit Hamilton, or write to thank her for getting them into quilting.

"This has absolutely been the sweetest, most serendipitous thing that has ever happened to me," Doan adds.

And this business would not have happened if she had been a better financial planner.

"My parents have always been bad with money," says Alan Doan, Jenny's son.

He says the recession cost his folks most of their savings, and threatened to take their house.

"Me and my sister were looking at it and said, 'We've got to put something together, so that mom can make a little extra cash,' " Alan says.

So in the fall of 2008, Alan and his sister took out loans and set their mom up with a business sewing other people's quilts together. Customers kept asking for fabric, so Alan built a website to sell it.

"World, we're open! And you expect somebody to care, right? And so we launched the website," Alan says. "I still have my Facebook post, I went and looked at it the other day, it's like, 'Hey I launched this quilt shop for mom, you guys should check it out.' It's [got] like, two likes."

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Doan was selling, or trying to sell, a relatively new product: pre-cut fabric. The pieces come bundled together from the factory in a pack with different, complementary, prints, making it much easier and faster to make good looking quilts.

But one year in, business was terrible.

Jenny says, "Alan came to me and said, 'Mom, are you interested in doing tutorials?' I said, 'Sure honey, what's a tutorial?' I mean, had no idea. I had never been on YouTube.' "

Well, the videos, featuring pre-cut fabrics, eventually took off. Sales exploded and now Missouri Star Quilt employs more than 180 people to sew, staff stores and, like Mindy Loyd, ship thousands of packages a day from the company's huge new warehouse.

"This one's going to Australia," Lloyd says. "Isn't that neat?"

Alan's savviness helped build the foundation of a large business.

"We had to learn how to do this from like watching YouTube videos on how Amazon does it, or something, right? We built this warehouse, and I just called all the smart people I knew and said, 'How do we do this?' " he says.

Success has pushed the company into publishing, even food service. They're renovating more buildings and by mid-summer they plan to double the number of quilt shops in Hamilton, and even add a "man's land" to give their customer's husbands something to do.

The Doans aren't the first people from Hamilton to make it big in retail.

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Alan Doan likes the fact that Missouri Star Quilt Co. is following in the footsteps of fellow Hamilton native J.C. Penny, but Doan's never been into an actual J.C. Penny store. Frank Morris/KCUR hide caption

itoggle caption Frank Morris/KCUR

Alan Doan likes the fact that Missouri Star Quilt Co. is following in the footsteps of fellow Hamilton native J.C. Penny, but Doan's never been into an actual J.C. Penny store.

Frank Morris/KCUR

James Cash Penny Jr. landed his first sales job here almost 120 years ago. Penny left Hamilton a teenager, but came years later, and opened his 500th J.C. Penny store here.

It's not likely the Missouri Star Quilt Company can match that, but it has so far transformed this once sleepy little town into a quilting mecca.

hamilton, mo.

missouri star quilt company

quilt

YouTube

Missouri

On a sunny day in the remote Chienge district of Zambia, hundreds gathered for a celebration that was the first of its kind. There was singing, laughing and no shortage of dancing. The village chiefs and government officials came dressed in their finest clothes while volunteers sported bright green T-shirts that read, "We use a toilet ... do you?"

The daylong event celebrated a milestone in Zambia, where the practice of defecating in the open is all too common. In April, Chienge, in the northernmost province of Luapula, became the first district in Zambia to be declared free of open defecation by the government. According to UNICEF, it's also the first district in southern Africa to fully abandon the practice. That means every household has at least one private latrine and a place to wash your hands.

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"It means the community has decided they don't accept [defecating] in the bush or outside," says Philippa Crooks, a UNICEF volunteer from Australia, who helped run the campaign in the district of some 40 villages and 134,000 people.

An estimated 6.6 million people in Zambia alone don't have a proper toilet, and 4.8 million people live without clean water, according to UNICEF. Residents often drink water from nearby a river and lakes, which have been contaminated with feces. And because hand-washing isn't a regular practice in every district, bacteria from human waste can end up in people's food, spreading diarrhea and cholera. There, the two diseases are among the major causes of death in children under age 5.

Zambia wants to make the entire country "open-defecation-free" within the next five years. And Chienge is a role model. Since the initiative began more than a year ago, Crooks says, the district has not recorded a single case of cholera.

The residents are happy about using toilets, says Leonard Mukosha, national coordinator of the Community-Led Total Sanitation program in Zambia. He recalls what he heard from a boy about 12 years old.

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"Before, he would go into the bush [to use the bathroom] with fear because he would think of snakes," Mukosha says. "And during the rainy season, sometimes you go and suddenly it starts raining. Now, least, he's able to go to the toilet [indoors] so there are no surprises there."

Over the past year, Mukosha and other health workers have been working with village chiefs and "champions" — those selected as community role models — to teach villagers about the importance of using toilets and washing hands with soap.

The goal is to help the community realize that "open defecation is very risky and that it strips the dignity from people," says Mukosha. "You show them how the feces left in bushes get back to them. You create a sense of disgust when they realize so much money is being wasted to treat diseases that are preventable."

Both Mukosha and Crooks say that despite defecation being a taboo subject in the communities, the village chiefs and champions met little resistance. They say, it's because the residents already have a tradition of keeping their villages and homes clean.

"Historically that's how the people have been," Mukosha says. "If you go to the district you'll find that lots of the villages are clean, and what was just lacking was the presence of toilets. So we made clear to them that you cannot claim to be completely clean [and] then use the bushes as a toilet — that does not mean cleanliness."

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Those caught defecating in the open can face penalties in the form of community work — cleaning government offices or gathering crops for orphans and disadvantaged people. But Mukosha says the district has rarely had to use the penalties.

What the campaign doesn't do is hand out toilets. The Zambian government used to just donate cement slabs to villages, "and it never moved the country anywhere," says Mukosha. "We only reached about 20 percent of the people, and everyone else was waiting for the material."

Instead, the volunteers work with the villages to build pit latrines using locally available materials. The pit latrines are simple to construct: a hole in the ground for the actual latrine with a cleanable slab over it. Then poles and mud bricks for walls, straw for the roof and empty bottles and jugs for the hand-washing station.

"You can see that people have a lot of pride in their toilets, and they just keep them very, very clean," Crooks tells Goats and Soda.

Mukosha says they plan to make at least five more districts open-defecation-free by the end of this year, as well as to provide better and more efficient toilets.

And part of the strategy is to celebrate the toilet era every year and set new goals as the people of Zambia climb what he calls the "sanitation ladder."

Zambia

toilets

cholera

Rob Burnett started working with David Letterman as an intern in 1985 and never left, even when the talk-show host moved from NBC to CBS. During the course of his 29-year tenure, Burnett evolved from intern to head writer to executive producer of the Late Show with David Letterman, a position he held through last night's final show.

Burnett tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that end of the Late Show is difficult to process. "I think none of us truly understand what it feels like and what it means for this to be ending," he says. "It was very odd to hear that this was over, but I remember my gut feeling at the time feeling like: You know what? [Letterman] deserves this."

Burnett's work with Letterman has spanned from the absurd — who could forget Letterman's "Alka-Seltzer" suit? — to the somber, such as the host's first monologue following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Throughout it all, Burnett says he has had unwavering respect for the man behind the desk. "At the end of the day, I think what drives all of us is that if you're going to spend this amount of time and energy doing this, you want to be doing it for the best possible person, and at least from where we sit, [Letterman]'s the best ever at this."

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Rob Burnett celebrates with Barbara Gaines, left, and Maria Pope, right, after winning an Emmy Award for his work on the Late Show with David Letterman in 2000. Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press hide caption

itoggle caption Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press

Rob Burnett celebrates with Barbara Gaines, left, and Maria Pope, right, after winning an Emmy Award for his work on the Late Show with David Letterman in 2000.

Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press

Interview Highlights

On trying to keep the last shows from getting sentimental

Dave is not sentimental, although I think he's a little more so now ... as he's gotten a little bit older. I think that happens to people. ... For a long time, we pushed guests very hard not to mention the end, not to tell Dave what he meant to them and all of this, and then at some point, as you get close, it becomes inevitable. And it has been lovely. We've had really beautiful tributes from a lot of people — Howard Stern and [Martin] Short and Tom Hanks. ... People getting very emotional and you start to feel Dave — we know what he's meant to us, but you start to realize he's meant a lot to a lot of people.

On the Top 10 lists

I was around when the Top 10 began and, like most things, no one ever really thought it would become what it would become. It was just a silly parody idea to make fun of other top 10 lists. ...

People responded to it and it actually became kind of an interesting way to write topical jokes every day. It was an interesting form. Originally, you know, the first one was very silly: "Top 10 Things That Kind Of Rhyme With 'Peas.' " Very Lettermanesque. I remember when I was a writer, just a staff writer, Gerry Mulligan and I were pushing for a long time and finally got through a list that was "Top 10 Ways The World Would Be Different If Everyone Were Named 'Phil,'" which was one of my favorites. It was so dumb. It was things like "Ben & Jerry's now called Phil & Phil's." It couldn't have been stupider. "Favorite Beatle? Phil." It was just 10 of the stupidest things possible and some of those were ultimately my favorites.

On dropping things off the roof

"I remember particularly one day at the Ed Sullivan Theater holding a bowling ball in my hand and dropping it into a bathtub full of pudding and thinking, 'I am the luckiest man alive.' "

- Rob Burnett

Dropping things off a building I did my fair share of. I remember particularly one day at the Ed Sullivan Theater holding a bowling ball in my hand and dropping it into a bathtub full of pudding and thinking, "I am the luckiest man alive."

On Letterman's bypass surgery in 2000

He was unreachable — it's strange because everything on that show, it all goes through Dave. It's all Dave all the time. Whether he's actually weighing in on it or people are just guessing what he would weigh in on, it's all about him. And suddenly he was gone and inaccessible to us for a while. There was great concern by the staff and then when finally I was back in communication with him and I got the sense that everything went well and that he was going to be back, there was great relief. It was a very emotional moment, I think, for all of us as well as for him and the audience when he retook the stage because that's where he belonged.

On how the show has changed over the years

I think this show has evolved. There are very distinct phases to it. I think the very early years, with Merrill [Markoe, Letterman's first head writer,] and all of those great writers ... it was pure innovation; it was turning television on its head. It was like nothing anyone had ever seen.

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Then the show evolved a little further when we went to CBS. The show moved to 11:30 and to a big theater. You could do less material that was kind of material for comedy writers only. ... You had to appeal a little bit more to a mass audience.

As the show has evolved beyond that, now we are in a phase where ... [after] the bypass, Sept. 11, but I think also as Dave has gotten older — if you look at most of the highlights of the show, they're actually not comedy highlights as much. ... This is part of Dave's genius and I can tell you that I've felt the pains of this as head writer when your instinct in desperation as you're putting on a show each night is that sometimes you want to go back to a certain well because things have worked and people love it. And Dave, through that honesty as a performer, says, "No, I don't want to do that," and these microscopic course-corrections each day lead you to another place and, thankfully, then you're not 68 and still putting on a Velcro suit and jumping up on a wall. I think what you have now is Dave as this great broadcaster and great communicator.

On the audience's laughter when Letterman first spoke about his affairs and being blackmailed

My sense of it in the studio was that I think the audience didn't quite understand what was being said right away. The way I remember it was Dave said something about, I'm paraphrasing, but he said something like, "I'm going to tell you a little story. Do you have time for a little story?" is how he kind of got into it. And I think [the audience is] so juiced up and responding to the show and such that I think as a group — I don't think they were really processing at all as he was doing it until the end. But I do think ... [the audience] sided on the idea that the blackmail was so wrong and I think they do love Dave.

On what it was like working for Letterman

He is definitely one of a kind. He is funny almost all the time but not "on." I think show business people come in two varieties: There's the kind that wants everybody to look at them and draw attention to themselves, and then there's the other kind — and Dave is the other kind. He's never been comfortable drawing attention to himself. As a result, he's extremely self-critical so the mood at the show can be — somber [is] maybe is too strong a word. There are certainly laughs that happen, but it is not a typical show business slap-on-the-back "Hey, that was great." ... That's not the mode there.