Achievement

ARE HIGH-QUALITY SCHOOLS ENOUGH TO CLOSE THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP? EVIDENCE FROM A BOLD SOCIAL EXPERIMENT IN HARLEM. Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) is arguably the most ambitious social experiment to alleviate poverty of our time. Student Will Dobbie and Prof Roland Fryer provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ on educational outcomes, with an eye toward informing the long-standing debate whether schools alone can eliminate the achievement gap or whether the issues that poor children bring to school are too much for educators to overcome. They implement two identification strategies (omitted here for brevity) and find HCZ is enormously effective at increasing the achievement of the poorest minority children. Taken at face value, the effects in middle school are enough to reverse the black-white achievement gap in mathematics and reduce it in English Language Arts. The effects in elementary school close the racial achievement gap in both subjects. Cited in NYT, 5/8/09.