Five Things That Mattered in a Charter School Study

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"I wanted to go deeper that, you know, one quarter standard deviation is great, but the gap is standard deviation and a quarter, right? So you still need a lot more," he says. "So I took two years and we went in and tried to understand what makes some charter schools good and other charter schools not so good." The five things that we found explained 50% of the variance in the charter school sample were basic things, like more time in school,. High dosage tutoring for four hours a year is going to get you what you expect, not a lot.

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.