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Posts Tagged ‘Achievement Gap’

What Can the Olympics Teach Us About Closing the Achievement Gap?

John List and Uri Gneezy have appeared on our blog many times. This guest post is part of a series adapted from their book The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life. List also appeared in our recent podcast “How to Raise Money Without Killing a Kitten.”

If you look at two pictures of two athletes: One is beaming, the other doesn’t seem too sure what she’s feeling. Which do you think won the silver? Which the bronze? Easy, right? Silver is better than bronze, so the smiling girl on the right must have won the silver. Which do you think won the silver? Which the bronze? Easy, right? Silver is better than bronze, so the smiling girl on the right must have won the silver.


College Counseling and the Achievement Gap

Closing the black-white – and the rich-poor – achievement gap is a frequent topic of conversation on this blog. Economist Christopher Avery takes a look (ungated version here) at one intervention aimed at closing the gap: providing college counselors for high-achieving, low-income students.


Closing the Gap

We’ve blogged several times about Roland Fryer’s research on education and the black-white achievement gap. Now Fryer thinks he has identified one system that successfully closes the gap. His new working paper, with co-author Will Dobbie, analyzes both the high-quality charter schools and the comprehensive community programs of the Harlem Children’s Zone (which was chronicled in Paul Tough’s excellent book Whatever It Takes), with hopeful results.


How Can the Achievement Gap Be Closed? A Freakonomics Quorum

The black-white gap in U.S. education is an issue that continues to occupy the efforts of a great many scholars. Roland Fryer and Steve Levitt have poked at the issue repeatedly; a recent study by Spyros Konstantopoulos looked at class size as a possible culprit, to little avail. We gathered a group of people with wisdom and experience in this . . .