His name is Roland Fryer, Jr. and he has quite the resume.
He is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and faculty director of the Education Innovation Laboratory (EdLabs). Fryer’s research combines economic theory, empirical evidence, and randomized experiments to help design more effective government policies. His work on education, inequality, and race has been widely cited in media outlets and Congressional testimony.
Professor Fryer was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the John Bates Clark Medal — given by the American Economic Association to the best American Economist under age 40. Among other honors, he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of the Calvó-Armengol Prize and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. At age 30, he became the youngest African-American to receive tenure at Harvard. His current research focuses on education reform, social interactions, and police use of force.
Before coming to Harvard, Fryer worked at McDonald’s (drive-thru, not corporate).
So you don’t have to believe me, I will let Professor Fryer lay out the facts.
Fryer has spent the past decade testing out a variety of incentive schemes in experiments with public school students in Houston, New York, Chi- cago, and other American cities that have school systems with high poverty rates. Fryer has paid parents for attending parent-teacher conferences, students for reading books, and teachers for rais- ing their students’ test scores. He has given kids cell phones to inspire them to study harder. Alto- gether, he has handed out millions of dollars in rewards and prizes. As a body of work, Fryer’s incentive studies have marked one of the biggest and most thorough educational experiments in American history.
Here are some highlights:
In New York City, between 2007 and 2010, Fryer oversaw and evaluated a program jointly administered by the city’s education department and its teachers’ union that distributed $75 million in cash incentives to teachers in some of the city’s most low-performing schools.
Between 2007 and 2009, Fryer distributed a total of $9.4 million in cash incentives to 27,000 students in Chicago, Dallas, and New York City, in- centivizing book reading in Dallas, test scores in New York, and course grades in Chicago.
Finally, in Houston in 2010–11, he gave cash incentives to fifth-grade students in 25 low- performing public schools, as well as to the par- ents and teachers of those students, with the in- tent of increasing the time they spent on math homework and improving their scores on stand- ardized math tests.
And the result of all of this: in almost every case, the effect of Fryer’s incentive pro- grams has been zero.
“I find no evidence that teacher incentives in- crease student performance, attendance, or graduation, nor do I find any evidence that the incen- tives change student or teacher behavior. If any- thing, teacher incentives may decrease student achievement, especially in larger schools.”
“The results from our incentive experiments are surprising,” Fryer reported. “The impact of finan- cial incentives on student achievement is statistically 0 in each city.”
So, if money does not motivate, what does??
This might be a good dinner time conversation with your children.
Part 2 next week.