The Economics of Education Reform

Fryer along with Thomas Sowell are two of the nation's leading African American economists. Both brilliant.

The two elephants in the room to improve performance in poor public schools. 1. Reduce Class size. 2. Lengthen the school year

The Economics of Education Reform

We know how to make schools effective. What’s lacking is leadership committed to doing so.

By Roland Fryer, WSJ

Sept. 8, 2025 12:46 pm ET

As families settle into back-to-school routines, parents should pause to consider the quality of the schools they trust with their children’s futures.

American students still haven’t recovered from the Covid pandemic, during which they lost decades of progress. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, math scores for 9-year-olds fell in 2022 to levels last seen in the 1990s. Reading scores stagnated. Black and Hispanic students slid even further behind, widening gaps that were already troubling.

This is personal to me: In Houston, a research project I led called Apollo 20 showed it was possible to erase the racial achievement gap in less than two years, by applying simple reform principles to the worst-performing schools. Today, the tools we used sit on the shelf—not because they failed, but because leaders failed to act. We are watching temporary setbacks calcify into permanent inequality, even though we know how to reverse them.

I’ve been obsessed with fixing American schools for most of my career. In 2009 I told my team of research assistants and project managers that we would do it by 2025. It was part optimism, part arrogance, part youthful naiveté. At 32, I was surrounded by education leaders—Joel Klein, Geoffrey Canada and Eva Moskowitz in New York, Michelle Rhee in Washington, Tom Boasberg in Denver, and Arne Duncan in Chicago—who believed nothing was impossible and who fueled my optimism.

Fifteen years later, many of the ideas that once filled our conversations are gone—not because they failed, but because the system walked away from them.

In 2012, my graduate student Will Dobbie and I collected unprecedented data from nearly 50 New York City charter schools to see which practices truly boosted student learning. Class size and teacher credentials—political obsessions for decades—mattered little. What mattered most were five concrete, replicable practices: more instruction time, high expectations, frequent teacher feedback, data-driven instruction and high-dosage tutoring. Together, these five tenets explained roughly half the difference between effective and ineffective schools.

Harvard economist Roland Fryer discovered something remarkable while studying the Harlem Children's Zone. They had eliminated the racial achievement gap in math and cut it by a third in reading. But how? Photo: The Free to Choose Network

Armed with that evidence, we searched for districts willing to test the model—from Haiti to Harlem. Most weren’t interested. But in Houston, superintendent Terry Grier opened the door. Together we applied the Five Tenets in 20 struggling public schools serving nearly 20,000 students. We lengthened the school year by 20%, brought in hundreds of tutors, replaced 95% of principals and half the teachers while retraining the rest, embedded data into instruction, and built a culture of high expectations. It was one of the most ambitious social experiments in American public education.

The results were astonishing. In elementary-school math, students gained the equivalent of four extra months of learning a year—enough to erase the racial achievement gap in less than two years if we implemented these practices in the lowest-performing half of schools nationwide. In secondary schools, where skeptics said reform was impossible, students gained nearly eight additional months of learning in a nine-month school year. These were bigger effects than those produced by the Harlem Children’s Zone. Bigger than Success Academy. Bigger than anything else I’ve seen in my career.

For context, cutting class size yields about three months of extra learning. Teach for America adds two months in math. Head Start delivers about two months in early literacy. The Houston schools doubled those gains—year after year. By the third year, elementary students had accumulated the equivalent of an extra academic year. In middle and high school, it was two. These weren’t “miracle kids” or “superhuman teachers.” The system—not the students—changed.

Math results were jaw-dropping, but reading proved stubborn. Gains were modest in elementary school and nearly zero in secondary school—mirroring what even the best charter schools have found nationwide.

Why? Some developmental psychologists point to early windows for language acquisition. Others note that students who speak nonstandard English at home may struggle more with school-based literacy. My own work at an urban boarding school outside Washington, D.C.—where students lived and breathed academic English—produced equal gains in reading and math, the only intervention I know of that closed both gaps simultaneously. Another possibility is the tests themselves: Math can be practiced through rules and repetition, while reading requires comprehension, interpretation and nuance—skills far harder to measure or standardize. Whatever the reason, reading remains America’s unfinished business.

By 2013, Apollo was finished—not despite its success but because of it. If you had told me in 2010 that we would close the racial achievement gap in math in under two years, I would have laughed at you. But we did. Even so, the funding was pulled from the schools—because they were no longer the worst in the district—and they predictably backslid. Ten years later, the Texas Education Agency seized control of Houston’s schools, removing the elected leadership and installing a state board. That is reform by crisis—the worst kind of reform. Denver, by contrast, sustained the gains because its leaders committed to a feeder pattern from elementary through high school.

This fall, millions of children are walking into schools that still bear the scars of Covid—and of our abandonment of real reform. Average math scores are lower than they were two decades ago. Reading scores have flat-lined. Black and Hispanic students lost the most ground. The nation is facing the largest educational crisis in a generation.

And that isn’t even the real tragedy. The tragedy is that we already know what works. High-dosage tutoring, extended learning time, relentless use of data and feedback, and refusing to accept the soft bigotry of low expectations—these aren’t theories. They’re proven. They worked in Houston. They worked in Denver. They can work anywhere, if we have leaders with the courage to act. Kids don’t get a do-over on their school years. If we squander another decade, the damage will be permanent.

The nation faces a choice. We can let another school year pass while students—especially minority students—fall further behind. Or we can finally summon the will to scale what works and sustain it beyond the news cycle. America’s children hang in the balance.

Mr. Fryer, a Journal contributor, is a professor of economics at Harvard, a founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.