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Author: Fryer, Roland G. Jr.
Resulting in 3 citations.
1. Fryer, Roland G. Jr.
Importance of Segregation, Discrimination, Peer Dynamics, and Identity In Explaining Trends in the Racial Achievement Gap
NBER Working Paper Series No. w16257, National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2010.
Also: http://www.nber.org/papers/w16257.pdf
Cohort(s): NLSY79, NLSY97
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Keyword(s): Achievement; Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Discrimination, Racial/Ethnic; Educational Returns; National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS); Racial Differences; Racial Equality/Inequality; Skill Formation

After decades of narrowing, the achievement gap between black and white school children widened in the 1990s – a period when the labor market rewards for education were increasing. This presents an important puzzle for economists. In this chapter, I investigate the extent to which economic models of segregation, information-based discrimination, peer dynamics, and identity can explain this puzzle. Under a reasonable set of assumptions, models of peer dynamics and identity are consistent with the time-series data. Segregation and models of discrimination both contradict the trends in important ways.
Bibliography Citation
Fryer, Roland G. Jr. "Importance of Segregation, Discrimination, Peer Dynamics, and Identity In Explaining Trends in the Racial Achievement Gap." NBER Working Paper Series No. w16257, National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2010.
2. Fryer, Roland G. Jr.
Racial Inequality in the 21st Century: The Declining Significance of Discrimination
NBER Working Paper Series No. w16256, National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2010.
Also: http:www.nber.org/papers/w16256.pdf
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79, NLSY97
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Keyword(s): Achievement; Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Collaborative Perinatal Project (CPP); College and Beyond, 1976; Discrimination, Racial/Ethnic; Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-B, ECLS-K); Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Racial Differences; Racial Equality/Inequality; Racial Studies

There are large and important differences between blacks and whites in nearly every facet of life - earnings, unemployment, incarceration, health, and so on. This chapter contains three themes. First, relative to the 20th century, the significance of discrimination as an explanation for racial inequality across economic and social indicators has declined. Racial differences in social and economic outcomes are greatly reduced when one accounts for educational achievement; therefore, the new challenge is to understand the obstacles undermining the development of skill in black and Hispanic children in primary and secondary school. Second, analyzing ten large datasets that include children ranging in age from eight months old to seventeen years old, I demonstrate that the racial achievement gap is remarkably robust across time, samples, and particular assessments used. The gap does not exist in the first year of life, but black students fall behind quickly thereafter and observables cannot explain differences between racial groups after kindergarten. Third, we provide a brief history of efforts to close the achievement gap. There are several programs -- various early childhood interventions, more flexibility and stricter accountability for schools, data-driven instruction, smaller class sizes, certain student incentives, and bonuses for effective teachers to teach in high-need schools, which have a positive return on investment, but they cannot close the achievement gap in isolation. More promising are results from a handful of high-performing charter schools, which combine many of the investments above in a comprehensive framework and provide an "existence proof" -- demonstrating that a few simple investments can dramatically increase the achievement of even the poorest minority students. The challenge for the future is to take these examples to scale.
Bibliography Citation
Fryer, Roland G. Jr. "Racial Inequality in the 21st Century: The Declining Significance of Discrimination." NBER Working Paper Series No. w16256, National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2010.
3. Fryer, Roland G. Jr.
Racial Inequality in the 21st Century: The Declining Significance of Discrimination
Working Paper, EdLabs & Department of Economics, Harvard University, June 18, 2010.
Also: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_Racial_Inequality.pdf
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79, NLSY97
Publisher: EdLabs at Harvard University
Keyword(s): Achievement; Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Discrimination, Racial/Ethnic; Genetics; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT); Racial Differences; Racial Equality/Inequality; Racial Studies

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Racial inequality is an American tradition. Relative to whites, blacks earn twenty-four percent less, live five fewer years, and are six times more likely to be incarcerated on a given day. Hispanics earn twenty-five percent less than whites and are three times more likely to be incarcerated. At the end of the 1990s, there were one-third more black men under the jurisdiction of the corrections system than there were enrolled in colleges or universities (Ziedenberg and Schiraldi, 2002). While the majority of barometers of economic and social progress have increased substantially since the passing of the civil rights act, large disparities between racial groups have been and continue to be an everyday part of American life.

Understanding the causes of current racial inequality is a subject of intense debate. A wide variety of explanations have been put forth, which range from genetics (Jensen, 1973; Rushton, 1995) to personal and institutional discrimination (Darity and Mason, 1998; Pager, 2007; Krieger and Sidney, 1996) to the cultural backwardness of minority groups (Reuter, 1945; Shukla, 1971). Renowned sociologist William Julius Wilson argues that a potent interaction between poverty and racial discrimination can explain current disparities (Wilson, 2010).

Decomposing the share of inequality attributable to these explanations is exceedingly difficult, as experiments (field, quasi-, or natural) or other means of credible identification are rarely available. Even in cases where experiments are used (i.e., audit studies), it is unclear precisely what is being measured (Heckman, 1998). The lack of success in convincingly identifying root causes of racial inequality has often reduced the debate to a competition of "name that residual" -- arbitrarily assigning identity to unexplained differences between racial groups in economic outcomes after accounting for a set of confounding factors. The residuals are often interpreted as "discrimination," "culture," "genetics," and so on. Gaining a better understanding of the root causes of racial inequality is of tremendous importance for social policy, and the purpose of this chapter.

Bibliography Citation
Fryer, Roland G. Jr. "Racial Inequality in the 21st Century: The Declining Significance of Discrimination." Working Paper, EdLabs & Department of Economics, Harvard University, June 18, 2010.