On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Roland Fryer about incentives and opportunity. Nat and Roland discuss paying students, parents, and teachers; the importance of properly structuring incentives; affirmative action; loss aversion; why certain ideas in education get treated as out of bounds; using machine learning to increase diversity in college admissions; COVID learning loss; whether the Ivy League should create feeder schools for disadvantaged students; using data in the classroom; and more.

Roland Fryer is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He was a MacArthur Fellow and is a winner of the John Bates Clark Medal.

Show Notes:

How to Make Up the COVID Learning Loss

Affirmative Action in College Admissions Doesn’t Work—But It Could

Build Feeder Schools (And Make Yale and Harvard Fund Them)

Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives through Framing: A Field Experiment

Parental Incentives and Early Childhood Achievement: A Field Experiment in Chicago Heights