Upside Is Now They’ll Leave Their Cellphones At Home Where They Belong

Bloomberg is smart, too smart, and he knows it:

Can the Bloomberg administration convince thousands of low-achieving students that succeeding in school is actually, well, cool?

It wants to try. The city is planning an intensive campaign that would use cellphones to help motivate students, most of them minorities and from poor families, in two dozen schools. The pilot program will include mentoring and incentives for high performance, like free concerts and sporting events and free minutes and ring tones for their phones. Every student in each of the schools will be given a cellphone.

The effort, officials said, will use text messages — drawn up by an advertising agency and sent over the phones — that promote achievement.

That said, anyone who refers to this as “rebranding school” deserves all the low achievement they get:

The plan, designed by Roland G. Fryer, a Harvard University economist who is overseeing the school system’s program of paying students who do well on tests, was approved by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg last week. Details about how much will be spent and where the money will come from are still to be worked out, Education Department officials said.

Mr. Klein said he expected several companies to donate discounted phone service and tickets to events. A former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will help supervise the project.

Mr. Klein said the effort was spurred in part by the results from focus groups performed by market research firms for the Education Department. That research found that black and Latino students from some of the city’s most hard-pressed neighborhoods had a difficult time understanding that doing well in school can provide tangible long-term benefits.

Dr. Fryer approached five advertising agencies in September and asked them to come up with plans to “rebrand” academic achievement. Although it is not clear which of the plans education officials will choose, Dr. Fryer is enthusiastic about one that tries to make poor teenagers aware that academic success can lead to jobs that pay enough to support a middle- or upper-middle-class way of life.