Name: WSJ Opinion: The Economics of ... Education Reform
Uploaded: 2025-09-08T04:00:00Z
Duration: 3 min 44 s
Description: Harvard economist Roland Fryer discovered something remarkable while studying the Harlem Children's Zone. They had eliminated the racial achievement gap in math and cut it by a third in reading. But how?

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Harvard economist Roland Fryer discovered something remarkable while studying the Harlem Children's Zone. They had eliminated the racial achievement gap in math and cut it by a third in reading. But how? Photo: The Free to Choose Network

https://m.wsj.net/video/20250907/64e5d8b0-3681-4c90-a1cd-908adfb66501/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Harvard economist Roland Fryer discovered something remarkable while studying the Harlem Children's Zone. They had eliminated the racial achievement gap in math and cut it by a third in reading. But how?

WSJ Opinion: The Economics of ... Education Reform

There is no topic where economics doesn't have some unique twist on the subject. My early years in education reform were magical. Education reform was at the top of many politicians lists of things that they cared about, and reformers who were in the trenches, doing the work, were American heroes. I had the pleasure to be the person that evaluated the Harlem Children's Zone. And what I found there was that in three years, they could eliminate the racial achievement gap in math and cut it in a third in reading.

We've created a school to help you all become the smartest boys and girls in the country.

I like this school because it's giving us more knowledge and it's like kind of strict, but that's good 'cause it's preparing us for adult world.

We found that there were five things that were associated with really, really high performance in these charter schools. One was more time in school. The second was, the really effective schools could not only tell you whether or not you missed a particular point on a test, but they would say, "Here's why and here's what we're gonna do about it." The third was kind of small group tutoring. They tutored kids into small groups in very, very high doses. The fourth was, how much teachers got feedback where they could improve their craft. The last one was culture and expectations, because students will live up or down to our expectations. And the ones that were successful, expected the most. And so we looked around and we implemented these five things in 20 of the lowest performing schools in Houston. And we found that in the elementary schools, we could close the math achievement gap in three years. It took five years for English language arts. And in our high schools, every single student was accepted into a two or four-year school when they graduated. And then the idea was Houston was going to take it on and continue the hard work that we had started. Well, that didn't quite happen. And what the school district did instead was say, "Oh, these schools are no longer the worst, so let's take the money from them." We spent $1,836 more per kid per year. They took the money from these schools and gave it to those at the bottom. We were the worst in the district two years ago. Now, we're average, which is a good thing, but these kids need us. They have no other pact. The end result in Houston is that those schools slid back down to the bottom, and how many lives were wasted because of really bad policy decisions by a local school board who didn't keep funding it even though it was one of the most successful experiments to ever be done in Houston Public Schools. I thought we had a real chance to demonstrate through economic analysis and real experiments in real schools, the recipe needed to fundamentally change schooling for the bottom 5% of schools in America. That was the goal. I thought the hard part would be developing the vaccine, not distributing it. We know what to do, we just don't have the courage to do it.

WSJ Opinion: The Economics of ... Education Reform

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