Techniques Feb 2013 - 41

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and be able to get a scholarship to play
ball in college. He was encouraged to get
involved in education, to “give back,” by
his grandmother and others.
Fryer spent the remainder of his speech
explaining to the audience the journey he’s
been on trying to find “scalable solutions
to help save kids” that were like him. He
stated that in the United States, a student’s
ZIP code is a pretty good indicator of how
he or she will be educated; however, this is
something he wants to change, and he has
gone on a seven-year quest to fix it.
He noted that many people believe the
American education system is fine the
way it is. According to Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) statistics, mathematics scores
for 15-year-old students rank 20th when
compared to students in other developed
nations. He cited, if you were to break
down the findings by ZIP code, those
students living in high-income zip codes
would rank #1 and #2 in the world, but
low-income ZIP codes in America “would
be the lowest-performing group in any
developed nation, saying, ‘That’s crazy.’”
His journey began with an idea, which
was to provide students with an incentive
for achievement. He started with $40,000
(his research stipend from Harvard) and

the kids at PS 70 in the Bronx. That
$40,000 turned into $10 million dollars.
In the beginning stages, they didn’t pay
with cash, but instead with trips to the zoo
and other activities around New York City.
Two years later, he had 260 schools in his
program and 20,000 kids. By this point,
he decided it might work better to pay the
kids actual money to do better in school,
and so that’s what he did in Dallas, paying
students $2 per book to read books. Unfortunately, the idea met with controversy
and criticism, but there were pockets of
success. What he found was that, “If you
pay kids to read books, they read a lot of
books. And their reading comprehension
goes up. If you pay kids to come to class
and not beat up the person next to them,
their math and reading scores go up.”
But even with these results, Fryer said
it wasn’t good enough: “If you truly want
to put [students] on a different trajectory
in life, we’ve got to find something else,”
something that works even better than
incentivizing students. Eventually, Fryer
partnered with Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO of the Harlem Children’s
Zone in Harlem, New York. Canada
had experienced success with closing the
math gap scores through his innovative
program—one where Canada attempts to

Congratulations to the
ACTE 2012 Fellows!
•
•
•
•

Region I: Connie Strebe
Region II: Chaney Mosley
Region III: Patrick Biggerstaff
Region IV: Lynne Cagle Cox
and Hershel Williams
• Region V: Dawn Lindsley
and Ron Umehira
The ACTE National Leadership
Fellowship Program began in
2009 and its purpose is primarily
leadership development. To learn
more about the ACTE Fellowship
Program, go to www.acteonline.
org/leadership.aspx.

take care “of all the needs poor children
have from cradle to college.” Canada has
raised millions of dollars for the Harlem
Children’s Zone, as well as having closed
the math gap scores between those children in the Harlem Children’s Zone and
those in affluent areas. Fryer wanted to
replicate Canada’s results.
After two years of careful study of what
makes some schools effective and others
not, he discovered that the “traditional”
measures, such as class size and whether

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Techniques Feb 2013

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