Results for “roland fryer” 40 found
Assorted links
1. New Freakonomics study guide, explained and downloadable here. Elsewhere on the Steve Levitt front, he argues with Roland Fryer that black and white kids have roughly the same mental abilities when measured at age one.
2. Google map of Mars, hat tip to Yana.
3. Here is a new cost-benefit study of the war in Iraq, from a hawk-friendly point of view. The authors are Steve Davis, Kevin Murphy, and Bob Topel; I’ll let you know more once I’ve read it.
Paying for Performance II
Roland Fryer’s experiment to pay school children for better grades will go into effect next year reports the New York Post.
Under the pilot, a
national testing firm will devise a series of reading and math exams to
be given to students at intervals throughout the school year.Students
will earn the cash equivalent to a quarter of their total score – $20
for scoring 80 percent, for instance – and an additional monetary
reward for improving their grades on subsequent tests….Levin
said details about the number of exams, what grades would be tested,
funding for the initiative – which would be paid for with private
donations – and how the cash will be distributed are still being
hammered out.…"There are people who are
worried about giving kids extra incentives for something that they
should intrinsically be able to do," Fryer said. "I understand that,
but there is a huge achievement gap in this country, and we have to be
proactive."
Thanks to Katie Newmark for the pointer.
“Acting white” and its price
Mark Steckbeck directs our attention to a new paper by Roland Fryer and Paul Torelli. Here is an excerpt:
Among whites, higher grades yield higher popularity. For
Blacks, higher achievement is associated with modestly higher
popularity until a grade point average of 3.5, when the slope turns
negative. A black student with a 4.0 has, on average, 1.5 fewer
same-race friends than a white student with a 4.0. Among Hispanics,
there is little change in popularity from a grade point average of 1
through 2.5. After 2.5, the gradient turns sharply negative. A Hispanic
student with a 4.0 grade point average is the least popular of all
Hispanic students, and has 3 fewer friends than a typical white student
with a 4.0 grade point average. Put differently, evaluated at the
sample mean, a one standard deviation increase in grades is associated
with roughly a .103 standard deviation decrease in social status for
Blacks and a .171 standard deviation decrease for Hispanics. For
students with a 3.5 grade point average or better, the effect triples.…signals that beget labor market
success are signals that induce peer rejection…these differences will be exacerbated in arenas that foster more
interracial contact or increased mobility…
‘Acting white’ is more salient in public schools and schools in which
the percentage of black students is less than twenty, but non-existent
among blacks in predominantly black schools or those who attend private
schools. Schools with more interracial contact have an ‘acting white’
coefficient twice as large as more segregated schools (seven times as
large for Black males). Other models we consider, such as self-sabotage
among black youth or the presence of an oppositional culture identity,
all contradict the data in important ways.
Here is the paper itself. There was also a good write-up in Richard Morin’s Unconventional Wisdom column, from today’s Washington Post, but this installment is not yet on-line. Here are our earlier posts on Fryer.
Milton Friedman School for Tots
I blogged earlier on Roland Fryer’s experiment in paying children for grades. A school near Detroit is taking the idea even further.
| EARNING THEIR BUCKS |
|
How do Beverly Elementary third-graders earn their paychecks? David Snyder’s paycheck for the three school days before Thanksgiving looked like this: †¢ Spelling test — $2 †¢ Math warm-ups — $5 †¢ Idea with writing piece — $3 †¢ Class work — $3 †¢ Homework — $5 |
Being paid for schoolwork is part of the third-grade curriculum at
Beverly Elementary, in the Birmingham school district. Students earn
"Beverly Bucks" for homework, tests and class work, with a bonus thrown
in for good quality.At the end of the week, they can take a paycheck home for endorsement.
Then the student can cash the check for Beverly Bucks and shop in the
class store….The paycheck curriculum is part economics, part math and a very big part incentive.
"Their work has really improved," Knoper said. "When I come to work, I
get paid for it. We’ve really just likened it to the real world."
That’s cool but what I really like is this:
After the Christmas break, Knoper said the paycheck curriculum will be
ramped up a notch when the kids start paying taxes on the hallways (a
form of road tax) and playgrounds.
and the teachers even understand Beckerian efficiency conditions for crime.
Students can lose money, too.
"If I accidentally hit somebody, I have to lose $4 or $5," said Shane Holmes, 8, suggesting that losing that much money was horrifying.
I don’t suppose my children’s Montessori school will go for this.
Thanks to Ted Craig for the pointer.
Paying for Performance
The field of education is littered with reforms designed to increase student performance – everything from the "new math," to more teachers to better pay. Yet the most obvious reform of all has hardly been tried – pay the students to learn. That’s the simple idea of an impressive young economist, Roland Fryer (earlier I posted on Fryer’s controversial work with Steven Levitt on the causes and consequences of distinctively black names).
Fryer was here on Monday and he told me of a large scale experiment he is running in 24 of the poorest performing New York schools. Every three weeks students are tested and if they improve they are paid on the order of $20. Control groups are also tested. Early results are very encouraging. No other reform has anywhere near the bang for the buck as paying the students.
As Fryer said to me, ‘for years white parents have been giving their kids money for As, now we are trying the same system for black kids.’
If Shemekia were Sally would she earn more?
Steve Levitt, recenty profiled in the NYT Magazine has written another amazing and sure to be controversial paper. Levitt and co-author Roland Fryer begin The Causes and Consequences of Black Names with some startling statistics on the racial divide in names. For example, “more than forty percent of Black girls born in California in recent years received a name that not one of the roughly 100,000 white girls born in California in that year was given.” Blacks are more segregated by name than are other races – the majority of Asians, for example, choose from the same name-pool as do whites. Segregation by naming has also increased over time. Prior to the late 1960s, for example, blacks and whites chose from the same name-pool to much greater degree than they do today.
Other studies have shown that when sent resumes identical but for name, employers more frequently ask for follow-up interviews with applicants who have stereotypical white names. Levitt and Fryer respond to these studies in two ways. The first response I find unconvincing. They argue that it is unlikely that a black name could have a big impact on earnings because “Once an employer has met a candidate in person, race is directly observable. A person’s manner of speaking, dress, interview responses and on-the-job performance no doubt provide far better signals of productivity than a name.” No doubt – but this is a rather facile interpretation of the audit studies. The point of these studies was not the literal one that employers discriminate on the basis of a person’s name! The point is that if employers use names to discriminate on race at the resume stage then they probably discriminate on race at every other stage in ways that are harder to identify.
Levitt and Fry have a more convincing but sure to be controversial response to this larger issue. They find that black names signal a variety of other characteristics that could plausibly be connected with lower labor productivity. Here is a key quote:
a woman with a BNI equal to one (implying a name that no Whites have) is 10 percentage points more likely to have been born to a teenage mother and 9 percentage points more likely to have been born out-of-wedlock than a Black woman living in the same zip code with the same age and education, but carrying a name that is equally common among White and Blacks. The woman with a Black name is also more likely to have been born in a Black neighborhood and to herself be unmarried.
In other words, names carry information even after the typical information available on a resume has been taken into account and the information that especially black names carry plausibly suggests lower productivity. It’s papers like this that explain why professors need tenure.
Sunday assorted links
Neil Irwin on the rise of Stanford economics
But the recent recruiting success of Stanford shows something broader about how the economics profession is changing. The specialties of the new recruits vary, but they are all examples of how the momentum in economics has shifted away from theoretical modeling and toward “empirical microeconomics,” the analysis of how things work in the real world, often arranging complex experiments or exploiting large sets of data. That kind of work requires lots of research assistants, work across disciplines including fields like sociology and computer science, and the use of advanced computational techniques unavailable a generation ago.
That trend is evident across leading economics departments — the traditional powerhouses have plenty of scholars doing work in the same vein, including work by Esther Duflo at M.I.T. on how to test ways to fight global poverty and by Roland G. Fryer Jr. at Harvard on the roots of racial inequality. But the scholars who have newly signed on with Stanford described a university particularly well suited to research in that vein, with a combination of lab space, strong budgets for research support and proximity to engineering talent.
The article is interesting throughout.
Getting beneath the Veil of Effective Schools: Evidence from New York City
That is a new paper by Will Dobbie and Roland G. Fryer Jr., here is the abstract:
In this paper, we collect data on the inner-workings of 39 charter schools and correlate these data with school effectiveness. We find that traditionally collected input measures—class size, per-pupil expenditure, teacher certification, and teacher training—are not correlated with school effectiveness. In stark contrast, we show that an index of five policies suggested by qualitative research—frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and high expectations— explains approximately 45 percent of the variation in school effectiveness. The same index provides similar results in a separate sample of charter schools.
Cheap Talk Incentive
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg
said yesterday that he was considering a proposal to give some city
students free cellphones and to reward high performance with free
airtime, but emphasized that he had no intention of lifting the ban on
cellphones in the schools.“It’s something we’ll take a look at,” the mayor said of the proposal
being pushed by Roland G. Fryer, a Harvard economist who joined the
Education Department this year as chief equality officer.