Education programs tested

Even by his own lofty standards, Roland G. Fryer Jr., a Harvard professor of economics, is facing his most daunting challenge yet: changing the face of public education.

Fryer, a man who aspires to the likes of W.E.B. DuBois and is the youngest tenured African-American professor in Harvard history, recently headed up the Educational Innovation Laboratory, a $44 million backed initiative to use scientific-based research to help turn around struggling schools in New York, Washington, and Chicago.

Since June 2007, Fryer has been working as the chief equality officer in New York City's Department of Education, focusing on improving the educational performance of black and Hispanic students. Before quitting his post to head up the initiative, Fryer controversially implemented incentive programs such as cash prizes. Students in the fourth and seventh grades could earn up to $500 a year for high performance on exams and for good attendance.

Fryer hopes to implement similar incentive programs in more school districts during the initiative's first year.

"We know that children are in different environments, with different passions and fears and consequences," Fryer told reporters at The New York Times. "We have to figure out what gets them to learn. How many kids got an extra dollar or two in their allowance for getting A's?"

Patrick McQuillan, an associate professor in the Lynch School of Education, is skeptical about attaching monetary incentives to education. "There is a standard concern with behavioristic practices like simplistic rewards that don't generate intrinsic motivation," McQuillan said."The problem with extrinsic rewards is that when the rewards are gone, the associated behavior is also undermined or done away with."

Last year, 31 New York City high schools experimented with a $1,000 cash prize for passing scores on Advanced Placement exams. The program, however, experienced mixed results. Students took 345 more tests than the previous year, but five fewer actually passed. Students scored more 5s, the highest possible score, but fewer 4s and 3s.

Fryer and other school organizers argue that it is still too early to judge the efficacy of these programs.

Still, McQuillan wonders if Fryer is attacking the educational system on enough fronts. "[Fryer's initiatives] seem to target a very narrow aspect of the [educational] system," McQuillan said. "If you are going to try to change schools, which are some of the most complex organizations, you need to target multiple factors."

McQuillan argues that teacher reform should be among the most pressing issues, noting that in urban settings, teachers have to deal with a much wider range of factors than do suburban teachers. A higher number of special-needs students, English language learners, and disproportionately large numbers of low-income students create an environment where a teacher cannot adequately respond to the needs of a 28-person class.

"[Teachers] need to have a more personalized relationship with students," McQuillan said.

Dennis Shirley, a professor in the Lynch School of Education, said in an e-mail, "Bringing in more market ideology into education, especially after the spectacular disaster on Wall Street that is now unfolding before our eyes, seems like exactly the wrong medicine."

McQuillan said, "It makes sense that people will work for money but is that the right motivation?" He points to large school districts in urban centers as the root cause of the problem. "There is not a single urban public school system in the country that works effectively," he said.

Lawmakers and school officials have looked to high school graduation rates as evidence of improving school conditions. But with no set system for calculating these rates, high schools often submit figures with discrepancies of up to 20 percentage points.

The Editorial Projects in the Education Research Center use the Cumulative Promotion Index (CPI), which estimates the likelihood that a ninth grader will graduate from high school on time and with a diploma. The nation's three largest school districts, the New York City Public Schools, the Los Angeles Unified School District, and the City of Chicago School District, saw 2008 graduation rates of 45.2 percent, 45.3 percent, and 51.5 percent, respectively.

Among the nation's 50 largest cities, the average graduation rate was 51.8 percent.

Lawmakers hoped the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 would improve school conditions by demanding accountability on the part of school officials. Under NCLB, schools were subject to sanctions if students underperformed on a series of standardized tests. Particularly, NCLB focused on eliminating low expectations for minority students.

The federal government took up a vastly increased role in public education under NCLB, McQuillan argued, but has failed to show that it can "effectively implement" the sanctions of the bill.

Eli Broad, the billionaire philanthropist whose Broad Foundation is backing Fryer and the Educational Innovation Laboratory, said in an interview with The New York Times that we need people who recognize "how far America has fallen behind other nations in public education."

When asked about the current state of America's educational system, McQuillan responded, "The system? It's chaos. The kids are getting lost."