Are Charter Schools Helping Your Educations?

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

I don't know if there's not an incentive to put it in place. In a public school, as long as they live in your neighborhood, they have to come to your school because that's the only place where they can get it without charge. So you talk about incentives. The federal government could have changed the incentives right They had the school improvement grants they gave billions of dollars away. That's the one of the ways we were able to do some of this work was we got school improvement grants. But even with our results, the only thing that the two political parties here could agree on,. One side didn't want all the teacher turnover and that and the other didn't want people

The good news about educational reform, says Harvard economist Roland Fryer, is that we know what it takes to turn a school around. The bad news is that it's hard work--and implementing it won't win you any popularity contests. Listen as the MacArthur Genius Award Winner and John Bates Clark medalist speaks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about how pizza parties revealed the potential of incentives to improve students' test scores, and why he's far more concerned about closing the racial achievement gap than keeping the love of learning pure. He also discusses the five best practices of successful schools, and why it's his failures far more than his successes that keep him in this fight.