He is the latest winner of the John Bates Clark Medal. The announcement reads, in part
Roland Fryer in a series of highly-influential studies has examined the age profile and sources of the U.S. racial achievement gap as measured by standardized test scores for children from 8 months to seventeen years old. Fryer (with Steven Levitt) has shown the black-white test score gap is quite small in the first year of life, but black children fall behind quickly thereafter (“Testing for Racial Differences in Mental Ability among Young Children,” American Economic Review 2013). The racial test score gap is largely explained by racial differences in socioeconomic status at the start of schooling (“Understanding the Black-White Test Gap in the First Two Years of School,” Review of Economics and Statistics 2004), but observable family background and school variables cannot explain most of the growth of the racial test score gap after kindergarten. Fryer’s comprehensive chapter in the Handbook of Labor Economics (2011, “Racial Inequality in the 21st Century: The Declining Significance of Discrimination”) documents that racial differences in social and economic outcomes today are greatly reduced when one accounts for educational achievement gaps. He concludes that understanding the obstacles facing minority children in K12 schools is essential to addressing racial inequality. Fryer has taken up this challenge to study the efficacy of education policies to improve the academic achievement and economic outcomes of low-income and minority children.
His research has a lot of bearing on the Null Hypothesis. Some of his papers contradict the Null Hypothesis, and some do not.
It certainly is intriguing that the racial test score gap is low in the first year of life and rapidly rises early in the school years but that “observable family background and school variables cannot explain most of the growth of the racial test score gap after kindergarten.” Some possibilities:
1. The Null Hypothesis is incorrect, but the school variables that make a difference are subtler than what we now find to be “observable.” Some of Fryer’s other studies might lend some support to this, but other of his studies would not.
2. The Null Hypothesis is correct because test scores performance is dominated by non-school environmental factors.
3. The Null Hypothesis is correct because test score performance is dominated by genetic factors. Then the problem is to explain why the gap appears at age seven (say) but not at age one. The lack of any gap at age one might be due to tests not being able to discriminate ability as well at that age as at later ages. This would give rise to a measurement error problem, one which biases differences toward zero.
Incidentally, someone pointed me to the blogger Isegoria’s link to a journal article entitled Individual Differences in Executive Functions Are Almost Entirely Genetic in Origin. The article comes from 2008, and the finding of 99 percent heritability strikes me as ridiculous. My guess is that if the same person is measured for executive function by two different investigators, the correlation will not be anywhere close to 99 percent. I hereby invoke Merle Kling’s third iron law.
The problem with Jim Crow regarding education was the inherent problem of having political dispensation of education. Because this problem was never confronted in the civil rights era, desegregation was seen as the solution. But this was simply a means to try to trick overtly racist school districts to be more fair. It didn’t solve the foundational problem of politically distributed education.
So education proponents identify progress with forced desegregation, and force a bunch of kids into schools where they are constantly assessed against kids from different socio-economic backgrounds. And the schools are basically run for the benefit of those other kids in many subtle ways that are more emergent than planned.
So I think there is a kind of ironic elitism in the complaint that school choice is supporting some sort of white flight from the public schools. It presumes that poor or ethnic kids must benefit by sharing a school with middle class white kids. It looks like Fryer’s work exposes the subtle problems with that assumption.
It seems like an important message in a time where social justice folks seem to work to prevent urban families from having more power over their educational options.
How bout a very simple question like are boys/minority X more likely to be kinetic learners than girls/minority Y?
Maybe it us also true that unseparate is unequal.
I don’t think it’s really a problem at all that test score gaps don’t show up at age one or two. At that age, no one has developed much in the way of cognitive skills. If there was a black-white bench press test score gap, looking at five year olds’ test scores isn’t going to tell you much; boys don’t start packing on muscle mass until after they hit puberty.
All Fryer (and Levitt) have actually reported is that they don’t have (because, in fact, no one has) a test for infants which predicts adult intelligence to any useful extent.
Students of biology rather than political economy are not surprised:
Brain development continues for an extended period postnatally. The brain increases in size by four-fold during the preschool period, reaching approximately 90% of adult volume by age 6 (Reiss et al. 1996; Iwasaki et al. 1997; Courchesne et al. 2000; Kennedy and Dehay 2001; Paus et al. 2001; Kennedy et al. 2002; Lenroot and Giedd 2006). But structural changes in both the major gray and white matter compartments continue through childhood and adolescence, and these changes in structure parallel changes in functional organization that are also reflected in behavior. During the early postnatal period, level of connectivity throughout the developing brain far exceeds that of adults (Innocenti and Price 2005). This exuberant connectivity is gradually pruned back via competitive processes that are influenced by the experience of the organism. These early experience dependent processes underlie the well-documented plasticity and capacity for adaptation that is the hallmark of early brain development.
In the future it may well be possible to predict adult intelligence based on some characteristic of the infant brain, but at present we don’t know how to do that. We especially don’t know how to do that now by observing infant behavior (even responses to benign stimuli), and perhaps we never will– infant behavior is pretty limited. We may have to resort to MRI scans or some such to characterize infant brains enough to predict their development.