(Illustration by Ben Wiseman)
When the economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. accepted a position as chief equality officer in the New York City Department of Education, he had no idea that he was about to step into a minefield. During a two-year stint in that post, Fryer helped implement some very controversial initiatives—giving teachers extra pay for improved student performance, for example. “There were people picketing me outside my apartment,” he recalls.
But Fryer, the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University, also came away from that experience with new ideas for research. Taking note of certain high-performing charter schools, he wondered why they were outperforming so many of their peers in the charter category. Although the average charter school performed no better than the average public school, charter schools as a group varied widely. “There are some charters on the right tail of the distribution [curve] that are phenomenal, but there are also schools on the left tail that are doing terrible things for kids, and this kind of variance is really interesting,” says Fryer. “These schools are making choices without the constraints of the public system.”
Fryer decided to find out what the highly successful charter schools in New York City were doing right. He and a team of research assistants interviewed teachers, principals, and students at those schools. They also analyzed the schools’ teacher- evaluation tools and the teachers’ lesson plans, among other data. Fryer and his team concluded that five specific practices make a significant difference in the academic achievement of disadvantaged and minority children: first, increased instruction time; second, better human capital (in the form of well-qualified teachers and administrators); third, differentiated treatment for students who need extra tutoring and the like; fourth, the use of data (on student performance, for example) to shape instruction; and fifth, a culture of high expectations.
To determine whether educators could transplant these five practices wholesale into a public school system, Fryer’s team tested them in 20 of the lowest-performing elementary and secondary schools in Houston. Later, the team ran the same test in 7 schools in Denver. In math, the results of these experiments were striking: “We got 80 percent to 90 percent of the effect of the best charters,” says Fryer, referring to the performance of the test schools. In reading, there was a significant but smaller effect at the elementary school level but almost no effect at the secondary school level. That finding follows the pattern that Fryer observed in the high- performing New York City charter schools. Exactly why gains made at the elementary level don’t continue at the secondary level is an open question. “We, as a country, need to figure out how to increase reading comprehension scores for low-income populations,” Fryer says.
Kenneth Davis, a principal at a middle school in Houston, worked with Fryer to implement the charter school practices at his institution. Over the course of just one year, Davis notes, the sixth-graders at his school registered a 22-percentage-point improvement in their state math scores. “The results were very impressive,” he says. And yet, Davis adds, it was “very difficult” to adopt all five practices at once. Improving staff quality, for example, led to turnover that in turn made it harder to pursue the other practices.
“You’ve got to implement this well,” says Fryer. The challenge of implementation is one reason that these practices aren’t as widespread as they could be. There’s also the fact that it costs money to initiate those practices. But Fryer argues that redistributing some of the money that flows into the public school system could help make up for any budget shortfall. “If you do these five things with fidelity and strip away other initiatives that aren’t adding value, you’ll have substantial increases in test scores and attendance,” he says. “There are no quick fixes or hidden tricks here. This is just the straightforward ‘blocking and tackling’ of effective schooling.”
Roland G. Fryer Jr., “Injecting Charter School Best Practices Into Traditional Public Schools: Evidence From Field Experiments,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129, 2014.
Read more stories by Adrienne Day.