Roland Fryer Refuses to Lie to Black America | Freakonomics Radio | Episode 514

in 2005 I wrote a piece for the New York Times magazine called toured a unified theory of Black America it was a profile of a young Harvard Economist named Roland fryer whose journey to Harvard was beyond surprising Beyond unpredictable given his background it may have seemed impossible and yet there he was a lot of things happened to get Friar into the upper echelons of Academia and even more has happened since much of it controversial how does Friar describe his research agenda today trying to make Black America happier wealthier healthier more educated that's all I've ever tried to do and I refuse to lie to them so Roland it feels like most public discussions about race these days at least the ones that I read in Academia in journalism and elsewhere do treat blacknesses essentially a handicap what are the costs to that perception I mean how much time you got we've got plenty of time today on Freakonomics radio a conversation with Roland fryer about his research on policing I had a five-hour meeting with Obama and other folks and we got zero done on education the thing that drives me nuts is that this woman is doing everything that she thinks is right we'll get his take on corporate diversity programs that made me sick of my stomach man and we'll hear about Friar's personal controversy including a two-year suspension by Harvard I broke a lot of glass early on in my career and I don't think that was helpful to be fair Roland fryer is still breaking glass all that on Freakonomics radio right now foreign [Music] omics radio the podcast that explores the Hidden Side of Everything with your host Stephen Dubner [Music] in 2007 at age 30 Roland fryer became the youngest African-American to receive tenure at Harvard he would go on to win a MacArthur Fellowship the so-called genius Grant as well as the John Bates Clark medal one of the top prizes in academic economics he got his own research lab at Harvard to study the achievement gap between black and white kids he even made it onto late night TV please welcome Roland fryer [Applause] he has some controversial areas you study here you say that blacks are the worst performing ethnic group in our school system excuse me but that is pretty racist thing for you to say well you're not the first person to call me a racist so uh I'm not no I was hoping I would be the first it's not racism it's reality all right a lot of Friars research pushed boundaries and crossed ideological lines my life's work is about making those communities better and so whatever cost there is frankly to me of telling what I think is the data-driven truth about these issues whether it's health or police or education I'm gonna do it in 2019 Friar was suspended by Harvard over allegations that he had engaged in unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature and charges that he had violated some of Harvard's Finance rules in a letter he sent to his Dean Friar wrote I apologize for the insensitive and inappropriate comments that led to my suspension I didn't appreciate the inherent power dynamics in my interactions which led me to act in ways that I now realize were deeply inappropriate for someone in my position in 2021 Friar returned to teaching and research but his lab remained shut down and at the moment he is still barred from advising or supervising students we'll hear more about his suspension later in today's conversation but let's start with Friar's origin story when I wrote that Times magazine piece years ago he and I spent time together in New York and Boston and we visited his grandmother and father in Central Florida we went to the small city outside Dallas where Friar spent his unproductive teens and we went to Oklahoma to visit his mother from whom he had long been estranged when we spoke recently I asked Friar to summarize his unlikely path to becoming an Ivy League economics professor I was born in Daytona Beach Florida oddly enough in this hotel a lot of the story brought home from the hospital with my grandmother and lived the first few years of life in Florida my mother kind of disappeared out of my life very very early my father was still there he was kind of a copy salesman and my uncles were there and I grew up in this really ironic strange I don't know quite what to do about it environment in which my grandmother was a teacher and my great aunt my grandmother's Mother's sister was also a teacher and the other sister ran one of the largest Distributors of crack cocaine in Central Florida so high Achievers in different Realms we'll call it yeah she was the CEO of a street pharmaceutical company and yet you know we would chat with each other and there was no judgment and love of each other and so I grew up in this strange world where my grandmother viewed it as hard work and get ahead though she thought discrimination was omnipresent in the world and my great aunt who was for lack of better words an entrepreneur who did lots of illegal stuff to get ahead and I spent I'd say four months out of the Year even when my father and I moved to Texas early on my father had a reasonable relationship deteriorated over the years and by the time I was a teenager I was just angry man I was really angry at the world pretty good at sports but just an Angry Kid and I wasn't trying hard school at all they used to pass out books in school and I'd say you just keep them I'll lose them never did a lick of homework managed to eat out of high school with a GPA of I don't know two point something but had really high test scores oddly and you know got involved in a bunch of little petty crimes when I was 15. like was driving a car without a license stealing stuff out of stores forged my birth certificate so I could work at McDonald's and so my father eventually lost his house and he ended up going to prison and all that kind of stuff I didn't know my mother and I just felt really really angry and alone in the world I made my way to a college not a great one but a good enough one and it's there that I took a principles of microeconomics course it was 8 am he had office hours at seven a.m I know now that was a joke but back then I thought it was pretty convenient because I'm an early morning guy and I was there before every class at 7am and we started arguing about welfare and economic policy and how to use food stamps what the restrictions should be and really fell in love with it but let me just say I have been on a absolute quest for the last 25 years to catch up because I spent the first 20 goofing off and being angry at the world I was just meeting with a guy who's a really accomplished businessman and he came from the golf course and he says well why do you work so hard what are you doing it's time to enjoy life and I said to him I gave you a 20-year Head Start man and a better family and all that stuff so every time you play golf I catch up a little bit every time you take the night off I catch up right and that's been my attitude and you know that for years I remember when I was spending time with you you were a relatively young professor at Harvard and there was that car in the parking lot this car was outside early every morning late at night and you're like damn somebody is out working me and you were pissed off and then you later found out they were on vacation just parked there it was like a silver one right I remember that and I was worried about that but that's my attitude I'm in a big hurry to catch up and my upbringing it really has formed my view of how to do this number one data first obviously but this is why I don't have any politics in this stuff because I have seen that yes there are things that need to be changed in Black communities but I also see the effects of discrimination whether perceived or real on these communities the only thing I care about is making them better that's it I really don't care otherwise foreign is probably best known for a 2016 research paper called an empirical analysis of racial differences in Police use of force it Incorporated a variety of data sets including a federal survey on interactions with police and the data on police shootings from 10 police departments around the country including Houston Jacksonville and Los Angeles County what did he find on average in any given stop black people are 50 more likely to have Force used on them than white people okay that's on average not controlling for anything that's exactly it that's just in the Raw data now if we control for lots of other things where they are in terms of the city I mean we had millions in data points so we could really be very strict on the controls if we do that then the difference decreases substantially but this number I find the most compelling in this entire research is that we looked at the cases in which the police officers themselves said the civilian was perfectly compliant didn't have Contraband was not arrested even in those instances blacks were roughly 20 percent more likely to have Force used on them than whites so the conclusion that one would almost be forced to draw from that is that police are on average racist against blacks no I'm not going to say racist but there's discrimination going on okay noted so that's the part of your research about what's called the non-lethal use of force and then there's lethal use of force which essentially means a police shooting correct yes yes whether it's fatal or not exactly so what'd you find there what we found there was no racial differences whatsoever in Lethal uses of force Roland that can't be right Roland Roland my friend that cannot be right I read the newspapers Roland yeah I know well it surprised me as well we had I don't know 10 15 cities by the time we finished that research in no city was it true because the thing is if you read The Washington Post or the guardian they'll say things like the fraction of black people who were unarmed and were shot at by police is higher than the fraction of white people who were unarmed and shot up by the police but that's just not that's not the right way to do those statistics because why because they're not accounting that's comparing apples with cars and I'd like to compare apples with apples I don't understand why is that not a relevant variable it's not that it's not a relevant variable it's incomplete there are a lot more things about a police interaction than whether or not the person eventually has a weapon before you got into this big data analysis as I understand it you also felt the need or at least the intellectual curiosity to understand the day-to-day life of a a police officer a little bit better let me back up slightly before that even which is you know we all saw what was going on in these videos and the Walter Scott video is the one that got me off the couch so to speak I just couldn't take it I was Furious he was a guy that was running away after a traffic stop is that right yeah running is generous it was shuffling across an abandoned field and somehow because I think it was in South Carolina the picture of it reminded me of Daytona Beach and there was something about that that said to me there but for the grace of God go I and it just woke me up and I was upset and I went to my colleagues in the economics department and I was all fired up about this in the hallways and you know they weren't as fired up as I was but I was pretty fired up about it and one of them Andre schleifer who is a dear friend of mine he said to me I don't know really do you even know what police do and it was like a gut punch man I didn't know right the truth is I was biased I don't like police I don't like them now right like I was driving down the highway yesterday police put his lights on I started remembering stuff I did in seventh grade I mean it was scary luckily it wasn't for me but anyway and so I decided maybe I should go embed myself in police departments and so I did just that I went to Camden and did a couple double shifts in Camden riding around I went to Houston and did that and even did some simulation and de-escalation training with another Police Department the truth is I didn't like who I became riding around in a police car after three to four hours if you ride around looking for bad guys lo and behold you see bad guys right I was the worst police officer you can imagine it kept saying rolling it's not illegal to dribble a basketball I'm not sure and what was interesting though in all seriousness was in Camden I met police officers who walked the beat what happens there is that when you see someone who you know might look dangerous or at least uncertain or random to me because they know the person they're just like he's like that on Thursdays right it was really interesting for me to see them say that because most police officers see you at your worst but if you're hanging out in the communities that gives you a denominator for which to understand the other Behavior so were these ride-alongs before you actually started analyzing the police data didn't have any data yet part of the ride-alongs were to try to understand what data existed to really understand from the police the types of data they collected the types of data they wanted to collect and also to get their sense of what was going on in these interactions what were we missing in the videos you know we'd only seen 12. we had all made these huge conclusions because we had seen 12 horrific videos but police stops happen thousands of times a day look eighty percent of the police shootings in our data came from a 9-1-1 call not someone pulling someone over and it escalating which is how we typically see it on TV but a 9-1-1 call where the police show up the person has a weapon there are multiple Witnesses and a shooting happens and if that's 80 of the data it's not that surprising that there are no racial differences right whenever we talked about lethal uses Force they would become very Earnest and say things like discharging your weapon is a life-changing event I heard that in city after City discharging your weapon sir is a life-changing event not one police officer told me roughing up a black kid in an alley is a life-changing event so these are categorically different in their frame categorically different and the incentives are disincentives as it were are not the same because once you discharge your weapon then what happens there's a real investigation that happens independent of if many people saw it and they think it was fully Justified but we don't put the same scrutiny on how we treat young black men civilians right so how do these ride-alongs change the shape of your understanding of this job it gave me a better sense of how complicated the job is man it's really complicated okay and you realize that the job is really difficult okay and let's go back then to your findings on lethal use of force on lethal uses of force we found no racial differences in those and it caused you know some alarm among people what do you mean by alarm was there alarm even before you published the research oh man I mean I had colleagues pull me to the side and said you crazy don't publish this you're gonna ruin your career because why I don't know they didn't give a full example ruin your career because here you are a black Economist who's saying what exactly you know that's the difference in you and I see when someone said man that's gonna ruin your career I don't go exactly how Bud but they came to me and said look after a seminar here's what you do you take the lower level uses of force publish that don't publish the other and I said to this person if the results were that there were racial differences in Lethal use of force that looked like discrimination do you think I should publish them then and they said yeah because then it would fit with the first part and I said well then you just ensured I'm going to publish it all because I'm not going to hide a result because you don't like it I have heard you refer to other researchers who analyze police bias and police Behavior as cowards is this what you're talking about that Scholars are you know withholding either evidence or emphasis at least on the lack of racial bias in police shootings yes that's exactly what I mean because you can look at the papers and people have similar findings but it's an appendix table 157. and they bury it and here's the difference man you're one of the rare people who have actually been to the communities where I grew up and they haven't changed much since I was a kid my life's work is about making those communities better and I refuse to lie to them right I just refuse because the folks in those communities they know when they're being lied to and we think we're making all this progress because we you know now capitalize the letter B in black no one in that neighborhood gives a crap about that they don't these are real issues and I'm not going to bury the truth that can actually help folks just because people are going to be upset about it right like the thing about lower level uses of force is that actually for me provides some optimism because that's a place that with the police we can dig in and try to actually make real progress together if folks would just stay true to the data instead of trying to make it be what they want it to be we'd all be in a better place I've heard you use the word dignity before in discussing this or the absence of dignity can you talk about how that works really important when I wrote this someone I respect shot me a text and said I don't see this as a big problem because this is you know it's about black lives matter and not about being roughed up and that really upset me because as a person who's been roughed up by police it is a very stressful stressful interaction it is not a good interaction to have so I wrote back to him black dignity matters as well if you talk to kids in the communities that I care about when you ask them about their prospects and how fair the world is and how much effort matters things like that one of the things they will mention is police how can it be that effort matters so much and there's this true meritocracy if I I can't get a home safe for my own police and so I think it erodes trust in the American dream it erodes trust in American institutions and it's something that we could spend some good time really working on right because there's a place where we're not hardly at all collecting data to hold police accountable we don't have an incentive scheme it feels like that is ripe for reform and if it were me that's where I would start seven days after that paper came out I had had a five-hour meeting with Obama and activists and other folks Al Sharpton was there and Al Sharpton and I probably don't agree on hardly anything but there's one thing we agreed on he said look if we weren't being harassed daily then we'd be willing to listen on some of these shootings that weren't clear that's a profound point if we could take away the Discrimination that we know exist then there'd be room for common ground on these other things so Roland what happened next did the president or the justice department issue a new manual on best policing practices as determined by Roland fryer for instance not even close not even close but we did have some follow-up meetings with other senior White House officials and the Hope was to try to get the head of the FBI at that time Comey involved because they served for much longer typically than administrations and to start doing these things where you know we can potentially look at tying Federal resources to police collecting the right data Etc and just none of it happened you know I was failed because why because that's just how it works in government is that the easiest answer I don't know maybe I suck right I don't know I really don't know but it was extraordinarily frustrating to me because this is something that matters so much and it felt like there was a wedge to really make progress after the break Roland Friar and the push for corporate diversity I said why aren't they doing what we know works also I want to let you know that the newest weekly show in the Freakonomics radio network Freakonomics MD has just hit its one year anniversary it is hosted by Papu Jenna and every week he explores a fascinating question at The Sweet Spot between health and economics like the hidden consequences of school shootings why July is a bad month to visit the hospital and whether more expensive hospitals are better hospitals Freakonomics MD has been downloaded more than 5 million times since it launched so what are you waiting for you can get Freakonomics MD wherever you get your podcasts [Music] foreign a few years ago The Economist Roland fryer started a firm called EO Ventures the EO stands for Equal Opportunity when he got a two-year suspension from Harvard and had time on his hands he worked 100 hours a week to get EO Ventures off the ground we really want to invest in companies that move the levers that we know are important for increasing economic Mobility most companies in their portfolio were founded by women and people of color people who traditionally don't have the best access to venture capital I mean as you know Stephen I did fight the good fight I wrote a bunch of papers for academic journals like seven people read them you're one of them thank you and spent you know pretty good time with folks in Washington and other state governments but I just had no impact whatsoever I didn't get anything done at some point I had to look myself in the mirror and go would Milton Friedman go around all these foundations and beg them to do the right thing no we would try to use the market forces to increase opportunity when I was a kid people told me capitalism was the problem what I'm trying to say here is it's going to be part of the answer one of your portfolio companies I see is called intus care which is described as a data-driven elder care company can you tell me about that firm and how that fits into this notion of investing in a business that increases opportunity yeah this is an interesting one because two of the co-founders are two young black men from Brown University they're former athletes they marched into my office these In-Shape young black gentlemen with this passionate plea for Elder Care and it was like what the heck is going on but you know it's an interesting field because they are using data and really sophisticated and interesting ways to essentially not to sound like buzzwords but to risk group people what they're saying is to actually increase the quality of care maybe I should check on Stephen three times a day because he's in a higher risk group and other people one time a day that would have been great when trying to care for my grandmother at the final stages of her life because I never could tell from Boston whether or not she was getting the right care whether or not someone was stopping by to check on her and there are you know big big differences by population in terms of how that care goes based on how much income you have there's another company that I guess is a portfolio company in your Venture Capital firm but you are also involved in this company this is called Sigma squared which is described as science driven diversity can you just give me the top line description on that Sigma squared really is trying to help companies universities not for profits increase diversity but do it in a way that frankly makes sense that is data first that isn't just hand waving let's say oh the hand waving is that's why I started it because after George Floyd I saw what a lot of Corporations did in terms of the I would call it value signaling and it made me sick in my stomach man on the other hand I went to a friend of mine and I said why aren't they doing what we know Works in this area you know their theorem's proven there are simulations that have been run why aren't they using that and they rolled their eyes at me and says because most CEOs and people in HR are not reading papers and economics from the 1990s and I said oh and so we wanted to make it easy for them so we essentially created software that does the analytics for them it seems as though just about every kind of of institution these days corporations and government departments and universities and so on have embarked on diversity equity and inclusion or Dei programs and this was certainly boosted by the outrage around the murder of George Floyd in 2020. a recent McKinsey analysis found that fortune 1000 companies have committed to 66 billion dollars in spending on racial Equity initiatives how well do you think this money is being spent I don't know but I would say the jury is still out and that's being very gracious you recently published a piece Roland in Fortune Magazine it was headlined it's time for data first diversity equity and inclusion here's one sentence I found particularly interesting the average impact you write of corporate Dei training is zero and some evidence suggests that the impact can become negative if the training is mandated so uh oh that doesn't sound like a very good return on 66 billion dollars or whatever these firms are spending walk me through that then I want to know when it's failing why it's failing and what you want to do differently yeah this is not my research but there have been lots of others who worked on this uh professor at Princeton Betsy Pollock has a recent paper and she reports that the impact of those trainings is zero Frank Dobbin at Harvard and sociology department has also written things that show that not only is the impact zero but he has shown data from companies that when it was mandated the actual share the percentage of minority managers goes down so I'm looking at something that I think is from the Dobbin research done with Alexandra khalev uh in the Harvard Business review one of the reasons they write that it doesn't work when it's mandated and I just found this surprising but in retrospect maybe not was that when it's mandated managers don't like it because they quote resist strong arming can you just talk about how it actually works how it plays out there is a lot Company by company some will put folks through mandatory trainings some people will just add it as a resource for those who want to use it others will do things like mask information on resumes of applicants because they think that is the right thing to do all of these things even when they have really really great intentions scare the heck out of me because why because they are the equivalent of given antibiotics no matter what happens when someone comes into the doctor's office right so you come in with a broken leg antibiotics you come in you've got an earache antibiotic and what happens inevitably is that you know let's suppose that antibiotics Works in 10 of the cases then those 10 percent told you antibiotics work maybe I need a different dosage can't quite get this broken ankle to feel better and so what we really need to do in my opinion and this is I don't think this should be controversial I do this in every other research project I'm in and corporations do it in every other aspect of their business is to start with the data like where do we actually have issues and I mean deeper than we don't have enough black people in the engineering department we know you don't okay we don't have to look right like most companies that's true and so the question becomes can I get a full picture of what's going on in my company and what type of bias is producing those disparities social scientists tend to group disparities in different parts maybe it's good old-fashioned bigotry but bucket number two could be information maybe you don't have perfect information when you hire or promote or assign work and in those cases maybe you rely on your stereotypes accidentally or on purpose the third one is what I Loosely call structural bias and and that is you're doing something that on its surface seems absolutely fine but unknowingly it's got a disparate impact on one group or the other I was talking to a company a couple months ago and they had some supply issues they couldn't get enough people to apply to their internships okay and I said well how do you find people for your internships they said oh Roland it's really random I said what do you mean random well we all just you know look at our Alma Mater's and we kind of select any random kid from our alma mater who wants to work here and I said well where'd you go to school you said Yeshiva University and that's fantastic but it's gonna be he might not get the diversity that is not a historically black school as far as I understand correct not historically and again it's unwittingly in my experience the vast majority of the disparities that we see in companies are being produced by buckets two and three but you need to know that because imagine it is an information problem okay the last thing you want to do was hide information on the resume and so that's my antibiotics versus ankle pain issue which is you have to take the data diagnosed and then figure out solutions that actually work we're doing it all wrong so this magic software viewers sounds to me from the outside a little bit like science fiction in that you have some kind of magic x-ray wand that you can wave across a firm and you can glean what is in people's minds and hearts but I assume this is real science persuade me that it's real and tell me how it actually works it is not at all science fiction it's going to be embarrassingly simple when I tell you how it works what happens is we integrate into their HR data where they may have data from their applicant tracking systems Etc the first thing we try to do is understand what the real disparities truly are because average disparities are very different than once you actually account for apples and apples right let me give you an example from a case study so a hospital Network reached out to us and said we have a 33 difference in wages so women earn 33 Less in our Hospital we've done all the training we can do implicit bias we've done everything and so what can we do we got their data and that 33 percent was true on average but you know it's a hospital Network you can't compare doctor salaries with nurses salaries and things like that and so once you actually accounted for some basic demographics to compare you know apples with apples that 33 went down to 8.9 percent now that wouldn't surprise anyone who's familiar with the research of your Harvard colleague Claudia golden who's been writing about the gender pay Gap and how we kind of get it wrong yes right but still eight point something percent is not zero so what did you want to do next oh and that's important it's not zero but it's not 33 so you'd be surprised or maybe you wouldn't the did this emboldened the CEO the CEO was a woman who said 8.9 I can do something with 33 I don't know what to do that's step one understanding what the true disparities are and for this particular network of hospitals once you accounted for overtime hours that's what explained the 8.9 percent and so we had to figure out why is it that women weren't working as many hours was it because they didn't demand as many hours or was there a structural barrier to them getting the hours they wanted like Family Care perhaps there you go and so what happened is very simple they had shifts from seven to seven okay that's just the way they've always done it seven to seven and when they change the shifts to Ten to Ten then this disparity went away walk me through that seven to seven seven a.m to 7 P.M that is yeah that was the shift for the nurses for the hospital Network and the issue for this particular network of hospitals not all obviously but this particular one the many of the female employers who are working those ships told the administration it's really hard to find child care in the morning but if I can get my kids to school and come to work it's easier to find in the evenings and so therefore if you shift the schedule back we can work as many hours because we want to work hours they were demanding more the c-suite of this Hospital Network had put themselves in pretzels trying to understand why these big 33 disparities were going on turns out it was actually 8.9 turns out if you made a scheduling change even that was dramatically reduced and so by using data in a matter of few weeks it completely transformed how they thought about the disparities in their organization that example is incredibly compelling it also strikes me as very different from a lot of what we read about as Dei you know awareness and training and hiring because the example you gave was so empirical it was so concrete it was so actionable and so on I hate to be cynical about it and I'm sure that the cases that become public that we read about are just a small fraction of them but they make a really big impression I remember there was a story about Wells Fargo which had done all kinds of illegal junk over the previous several years but in 2020 they pledged to increase diversity and they took up this policy that required that all hires over certain salary level I think was a hundred thousand dollars would include at least one interview with a candidate who was female or a person of color right it was kind of the corporate version of What's called the Rooney Rule in the NFL it was later revealed and this is just a couple years ago that Wells Fargo had conducted fake interviews with women and minorities after the job had already been promised to someone else which I'm assuming is often a white man so when you read that kind of story you say oh gosh 66 billion dollars worth of hand waving and window dressing I'm sure it's not that bad but can you talk to me about how bad it actually is well I read the same stories you do I just approach it from a different way some training and some those programs they can work but when targeted to the problem this is not controversial right this is not a magic wand this is let's start with the data and if the data lead us to a particular empirical issue that we think the Rooney Rule can solve let's do it right let's actually do it let's not fake do it but let's actually do it if the data lead us to a place where we think training is really important so be it but the issue I believe is people are desperate to make a difference they are desperate to show that they are an ally they are desperate to show that they are on the right side of History here so they're in a big scramble to just do something and I think that is dangerous because over and over again we have examples that even if they're Earnest attempts guessing hurts the people a lot of times that we're trying to help in Dei we're scared to make mistakes right and so I want to introduce lo and behold I'm an economist a little bit of experimentation a little bit of trying things data driven to try to really make progress this approach is about getting two percent better every day not about checking a box so that you can you know appear on the Nightly News and say we did this great thing and move on so let me ask you this Roland you've said in the past that your research on police bias hasn't changed policing and that your research in education hasn't really changed education I'm guessing your work on Dei programs probably isn't going to change the EI also it's doing amazing third time's a charm no the truth is I don't know what impact it has had but it's not enough for me because I'm committed to what we're doing but I don't want a lot of myself either about the impact we're making the reason that we started EO Ventures was because Founders have real power you know the schools in my grandmother's neighborhood in Florida are all still bad but everybody's got an iPhone okay these Founders these technology companies have really changed the way we obviously duh change the way we live and work can we use that same power to make real changes in the neighborhoods that I've been concentrating on my whole career and in the companies and things like that I really believe that's true and so I am 100 behind the strategy of using Market forces to close racial gaps hey that's pretty good I got to put that on a t-shirt foreign [Music] coming up after the break more Roland friarisms that ought to go on a t-shirt Shalom brother and what happened when the New York City Schools made Friar their Chief Equity officer well kids have a lot of cell phones in schools do I get credit for that this is Freakonomics radio I'm Stephen Dubner we'll be right back [Music] a quick reintroduction this is who we are speaking with today I'm Roland fryer and I am a professor of Economics at Harvard University and the managing partner at EO Ventures and then there's another project you're involved in called the Reconstruction education project which offers what one person calls an unapologetically black education and this is not instead of school right it's online classes on top of school yeah this is supplemental but you know it's it's a Hebrew school for black kids right it is Shalom brother my co-founder and CEO on that is Kaya Henderson who is like an American hero right she did amazing work in DC public schools and with other organizations and Kai has got a real Vision that black communities should support and nurture and take over how we tell history and how we get a chance to write our own story she wants kids to see themselves differently in life and in school cool again very similar to what lots of other groups do whether it's Saturday school for folks who are Korean or Hebrew school that's what reconstruction is and they're they're doing really really quite well you each thing is I hear you just describe Kaya and that project it seems that the public discourse about race treats Blackness as a problem and it seems that you not only never thought like that but think quite the opposite and that feels manifest in something like this reconstruction project could you talk about that for a moment and maybe I'm wrong tell me if I'm wrong Roland no man that's a great Point Stephen you are exactly right and you met years ago my grandmother and I did who was really close to me and we had our issues but you know love love love that woman and one of the things that she did when I was a kid was any time we saw a white person mess up anything it could be accidentally tripping over a curb it could be that they weren't quite dancing on Beat it could be that they gave the wrong change at the grocery store she would look at me right in the eyes and then she would roll hers and she would say hmm that's that Superior race and she just made me always feel like I was so lucky to be black and so I've never ever for one second thought of Blackness is a problem and you're right many people are seeing that or at least implicitly and sometimes explicitly saying that in public discourse and reconstruction is a celebration of Black Culture it's a celebration of black love it's a celebration of black Excellence we as a community can take over what we teach our kids what we signal to them so Roland you are not what I think of at least as a behavioral Economist but you certainly know enough about behavioral ideas like anchoring and framing to understand how strong those concepts are for many people and how they can set expectations it's huge because it implicitly puts a cap on what kids think they can achieve right like I really thought I could be anything and I didn't understand that we grew up without money until I got to Harvard and someone says wow you grow that money I didn't understand we didn't summer places and so I think it's really important you mentioned Framing and anchoring let's add another one to that which economists don't know a whole lot about which is identity right two of my favorite economists George akerloff and Rachel cranton somewhere around 2000 wrote a paper on the economics of identity and they start this paper with this beautiful sentence that identity is one of the most important choices that an individual can make that's what I think this is about who Am I who are my people you know when I was in school in Texas it was like well there was slavery and then there was Jim Crow and then there's you right let's take a test whereas we didn't learn about the rich history that all of us come from and other cultures have institutions or organizations that help them understand their history and their role in promoting their own culture and in in how they situate positively in that history and we don't do a good job of that I'm really influenced by that question Stephen because I just returned a couple of weeks ago from Israel and I called kaya from Israel and I said wow right this is an example of some of the things we were trying to do in terms of a shared understanding of our history the ups and the downs and building upon that history to make a generation of super kids who like me felt like they could do anything way back in 2008 you went on The Colbert Report and you said that the achievement Gap in this country is our biggest civil rights concern that statement has some Echoes to me at least of Dubois saying the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line yes 15 years later almost how do you think about that statement of yours the achievement Gap is the the biggest civil rights concern do you think that's still the case yeah absolutely the issue is development and that's what I meant it's development period the end and yes yes of course there's discrimination in the world of course there is but if you just look at the data the vast majority of the disparities are driven and by differences in development this is Opera Pro everything we've been talking about like folks have now just decided it's not the achievement Gap anymore because that's offensive it's the opportunity Gap give me a break do you think that's helping the people in the neighborhood oh thanks appreciate that I can really go now [Laughter] really but yes that's it right if we can solve that problem many of the other things that are social ills you know there's no magic bullet here but that will get a lot better right when I wrote about defunding the police I was like why don't we invest in kids and they all have you know productive jobs and the police can defund themselves [Music] years ago you were something called the chief Equity officer in the New York City Schools tell me how that went and what you learned from it I was fresh out of graduate school wanting to make a difference I called up ps70 in the Bronx which was off of Colgate Avenue in the South Bronx close to where my uncle used to live and they wanted to do an incentive program I love the idea of an incentive program it fit everything I knew as a young Economist and so they would take tests and they would you know literally email me the results and I'd order pizza that's how it started meaning the kids who did well got pizza were cash later right absolutely no no cash pizza man they got pizza well didn't you try some cash later no I've tried a whole lot of cash later yes and so that was the start of it one school and then that blossomed to 14 and then do 140 in New York City and you know half of the school district in Washington DC and schools around the country and yes one of our first things as the chief Equity officer in the the New York City Department of Education was to try Innovative programs and rigorously evaluate them okay data first really simple stuff here like collect data analyze it be honest about the answer don't bury the results when you don't like them and then have a real strategy about how to execute on ideas that are promising that's all we were trying to do in the New York City doe that's all I've tried to do with the police and all I'm trying to do now with corporate Dei so in that case we ran incentive programs some of them worked some of them didn't but then the cool thing that we tried to do Stephen that we never quite got off the ground was I wanted to Rebrand education for kids and communities and so we had this campaign called school is money one of my ideas was let's get a rare shoe that LeBron James will wear and the only way to get that shoe is to make you know good grades in New York City Public Schools all the adults they were like oh this is great role and this is so smart right we focus group The this with kids and in 37 seconds a kid looked at me and said man I want those air nerds that was done but we tried all sorts of things like that so we tried an initiative called the million program where we gave kids cell phones and then we texted them things throughout the day to try to give them messages to change the culture around trying hard in school so we would say stuff like your average life expectancy is 72 years that's a long time to be broke or give them the fraction of millionaires who also have a high school or college degree things like that to try to get them to Rebrand education so this was all a part of that job of Chief Equity officer and again some things really worked and some things didn't but that's the whole point it was kind of an r d unit within the New York City Department of Education and kudos to Joel Klein and Mike Bloomberg for letting a 28 year old kid come and try new things that would be kind of unheard of now are any of those programs or ones like them still in existence either in New York or elsewhere well kids have a lot of cell phones in schools I think do I get credit for that yes I think we'll give you all the credit for that yeah thank you thank you Verizon there are many incentive programs going on across the country they're just not well publicized because they're still controversial oddly enough controversial because of the idea that learning should be driven intrinsically right by the love of learning versus rewards yes absolutely yes what do you think of that idea I agree with that I also think that there should be peace in the Middle East and I think you know global warming should stop okay um anything else but no seriously like I took it the opposite direction right they thought you're going to destroy the love of learning I thought this is a way to cultivate it do you think you were mostly right then or no I think both of us were wrong I think it had no effect because we measured lo and behold there's that data again we measured using their measures pre and post level learning and the coefficient was positive but it wasn't statistically significant so we had no real effect or big effect on love of learning either way what we did have an effect on is test scores went up and is that not enough to me that's fantastic right if you can get test score gains and you don't change the level of learning that to me is a policy worth doing never mind it's really inexpensive relative to other reforms right this isn't changing the number of kids in a classroom which is really expensive but this is something where you can actually increase student achievement at a relatively low price most education reformers even the most idealistic also care about test scores and you are offering here a route to a relatively inexpensive intervention that raises them I would think therefore the incentive programs in schools would be everywhere and widely publicized why are they not because there's real pushback on incentive programs in schools by lots of folks it's not just the progressives who believe that we should do it for the love of learning I mean I published this piece in in the Wall Street Journal a couple months ago about using incentives to battle covet laws and you know I got it from both sides there again some people said you're going to destroy the love of learning the other says here you go again one another welfare program it's just a controversial thing and I think that schools are doing it in secret I think they're doing it without cash they're doing it with School t-shirts and pizza parties and things like that there's lots of charter schools and public schools who are doing this that I know about it's just not as publicized as you might think so I want to read a little section of an article that recently appeared in the New York Post this was an opinion piece called a New York City school diploma isn't worth the paper it's written on it's by why chin she's a fellow at the Manhattan Institute she's also the founding president of the Chinese American citizens Alliance of Greater New York here's the opening of this piece in the post when renowned Economist and education innovator Roland fryer served at the school board of Massachusetts and attended a public meeting to close a failing school a black mother walked up to him and told him that the school was a good school no ma'am said Friar who was also black it's not the mother pulled out her child's report card from her purse it was all A's the mother insisted this is a good school Friar had to tell her ma'am they have lied to you that story sounds as though it must have come from you originally so first of all is that a true story it is a true story yes what does that even mean that the school lied to parents at the A's that their kids were getting weren't real A's the issue is this is one of the toughest things I did serve on the school board in Massachusetts and it was an amazing experience to see it from that angle I I took it very seriously and the hardest thing I did during my tenure there was to have those meetings where busloads of parents came it was really hard for me to watch parents fight to keep open a school where the literacy rates and the test scores were so low and what I meant by they have lied to you is that there's no way a kid can get all A's and still perform so poorly on these exams that are measuring basic skills and so the expectations must be very low in that school and so that's what I was reacting to and it was sad man the thing that drives me nuts sorry I'm gonna get fired up about this is that this woman is doing everything that she thinks is right part of it is on us dumb researchers who keeps saying stuff in standard deviation units parents don't understand things in standard deviation units folks okay we are obfuscating the truth by providing this in a way that not all parents can digest in the way they should and so that's what I was saying that this woman looked at the school saw great report card so she thought it was a good school but her kids were not being served there is this what's behind the motivation of a lot of schools to get rid of standardized tests then I don't know if it's to get rid of them it may even be to make them easier I really do believe that kids will live up or down to your expectations that if we really held those things high this is not just rolling talking when we did our work on effective schools one of the five tenants that makes the school effective is high expectations when you don't have that then there is this gap between what a kid thinks that they're doing and their report card potentially and actual skills you mentioned that high expectations are one of five behaviors or policies that make good schools good this was a in a study you did of charter schools but as I understand it this would apply universally can you list the other four sure more time in school so uh basic physics of Education that's pretty simple then there's using data to drive instruction it wasn't just that you use data because nearly every school now has some form of data what was different about the schools that were effective is that they had a real plan if we take this assessment and 50 of the kids pass then we pause and we re-teach right we don't just keep going number three was you know small group instruction or was my grandmother call it good old-fashioned tutoring if you tutored kids in groups of six or less for four or more days per week then your test scores were a lot higher than human capital right how you select retain and develop teachers and particular teacher feedback really really important and then the last one was as I said before the culture of high expectations so they all understood that they were dealing with high poverty rates they all understood that they were dealing with unfortunately many single-family households Etc but they didn't use it as an excuse not to teach and those five factors explained 50 of the variance and what made some charter schools good and others not so good look at this if if back at your life and career how would you think about measuring the costs and benefits of your being black both professionally and personally man that's a great question um never really think about it except for you know I'm a lot cooler than my colleagues honestly I don't really think about it but look let's be honest it has open doors it has closed windows right I have been given tremendous opportunities and I try to take advantage of them I don't have any despair put it that way I think it's helped me some it's hurt me some what the net effect is don't know don't care do you think race played some significant role in what happened with you at Harvard in the suspension or no you know I think that um probably but not in the ways that you might think I also believe that you know being an probably didn't help right I'm No Angel here either early in my career for example I really tried not to have any money that I raised privately go to overhead for the University I was trying to give it to poor communities and that's probably not the best way to build teamwork and there was a point at which like folks inside the university didn't want to be associated with my incentives research because it was too controversial so did I push the boundaries trying to do things for the kids in the neighborhoods I served yes did I spend more time off campus Because I thought that the kids in these neighborhoods needed my time more than the kids on campus yes I did and did that rub people the wrong way and did that come across I said so I'm sure it did do you regret it or do you feel like that's just who you are and you've learned from it and you're in a different mode now of course of course I regret it and have apologized for it and the thing that I worked really hard on while I was off campus was trying to be authentically me but not have anything that could be even perceived as offensive to someone else and that's hard but I took it very seriously and I'm back better I'm back stronger you know I used to it would have been nothing for me to have on Thanksgiving to have 20 students over my house for Thanksgiving dinner cook a bunch you know they fall asleep on the couch we play video games I don't do that anymore so I would say that there's clear delineation from my living room to work and I think that's a good thing I was worried that was not going to be I thought how could I do really cutting edge vertically but I was wrong about that I can still be me you and I mixed it up the whole time here I'm still rolling I still care about these issues I refuse to not tell the truth but I'm at a different and dare I say more mature part of life I broke a lot of glass early on in my career that had nothing to do with that but all to do with me being impatient as hell and wanting to help and trying to do the right thing and I don't think that was helpful thanks to Roland fryer for today's conversation we covered a lot of ground and even though I thought I knew his work pretty well I learned an awful lot I hope you did too coming up next time on Freakonomics radio it's worse than cigarette smoking it's worse than Wars it's worse than basically anything you can think of I can't say I've heard many more theories that would surprise me more if they were true I like to think of myself as better than a c minus brain but maybe I'm less smart than I thought I was your brain on pollution that's next time until then take care of yourself and if you can someone else too Freakonomics radio is produced by Stitcher and renbud radio this episode was produced by Alina Coleman our staff also includes Neil karuth Gabriel Roth Greg Griffin Zach Lapinski Ryan Kelly Rebecca Lee Douglas Julie canfer Morgan Levy Eleanor Osborne Jeremy Johnston Jasmine Klinger Emma Terrell lyric foundage and Jacob Clementi our theme song is Mr Fortune by The Hitchhikers all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra you can get the entire Archive of Freakonomics radio on any podcast app along with the other shows in the Freakonomics radio network including Freakonomics MD Now one year old to learn more or to get our newsletter go to freakonomics.com my favorite quote of all of our things when we were going around you said wow man you're really in shape for whatever he was at that point 80. and he said what's your secret oh man I eat well I don't eat any pork and I definitely don't eat no pork well what are that in your beans there sir ham mer the Freakonomics radio network the Hidden Side of Everything Stitcher [Music]