Do You Believe Going to the Gym Makes You Better?

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In New York, we paid kids for test scores and in Chicago, we paidKids for for grades. When we pay for inputs, those experiments, all three of them worked and we're statistically significant. And so what we found to a large degree is that when you pay for outputs, we didn't get any results at all. That was Houston and DC. The first set of incentives we gave were for Outputs. Okay. Hey, you do X we provide why that's the way classic economic theory would tell me to design the incentives. In terms of the students, we followed them up and we looked at longer term test scores. Let me just give you the results for all the

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.