Cash incentive programmes boost black pupils


The rise of Barack Obama shows what black Americans can achieve but many are still left behind in school and workTony Allen-Mills in New York

From The Sunday TimesMay 18, 2008

Cash incentive programmes boost black pupils
The rise of Barack Obama shows what black Americans can achieve but many are still left behind in school and workTony Allen-Mills in New York
WHEN a group of New York schools published their latest test results for reading and maths, Cynthia Baptiste had 218 reasons to celebrate. After working hard throughout the year, the 13-year-old Brooklyn student had earned $218 (£111) from an incentive programme that is helping to transform the anguished debate about racial difference in America.

Baptiste’s class at the predominantly black Family academy in Brooklyn is part of an intriguing project aimed at encouraging African-American and other disadvantaged students to try harder at school. Its broader goal is to narrow the notorious gap between black and white education in America, where the average 17-year-old black student has the academic skills of a 14-year-old white pupil.

The programme is the brain-child of one of America’s most intriguing academics: Roland Fryer, a 30-year-old African-American professor at Harvard whose father was convicted of sexual assault, whose great-aunt went to jail for dealing cocaine and who once thought of becoming a drug dealer himself.

As New York’s recently appointed chief education “equality officer”, Fryer is searching for an educational breakthrough that will put an end to more than 40 years of failed experiments, barbed antagonism and lingering racism that has continued to afflict the black community since the segregation era ended with the civil rights act of 1964.

Even as Barack Obama aspires to become America’s first black president, the African-American community remains painfully divided over the causes and possible cures of not only a damaging education gap but a social and moral crisis: black men are seven times more likely than whites to go to prison; two out of three black babies are born out of wedlock; the proportion of black men with jobs fell from 74% to 69% last year.

Can all these problems still be blamed on the familiar evils of white discrimination? Or are black people themselves responsible for the miseries so many of them face?

Some of the answers may lie in the progress of Baptiste and her classmates, who can earn up to £255 a year from their grades in a series of 10 tests. The programme includes about 6,000 poor black and Hispanic children among the 1.1m students in the New York school system.

Critics have complained that by offering children cash if they get good grades, Fryer is merely replacing teaching with bribery. The scheme is still in its first year, but previously sceptical teachers have already begun to report marked improvements in their children’s attendance and attention.

“I have to say that my first reaction when I heard of this project was, ‘I can’t believe they are doing this’,” said Sheila Richards, the principal of the Brooklyn school. “I’m old school – I worked hard for good grades and no one ever gave me money.”

Yet Richards has seen a “very good” increase in her students’ grades and is thrilled that many of them are choosing to open bank accounts to save their earnings. “It’s more than just an incentive,” she said. “It has taught them the value of saving.”

The education initiative has pushed Fryer to the forefront of a national debate that has previously owed more to emotional political bias than scientific rigour. On Fryer’s left is the black “ghettocracy”, the angry old guard of black liberation. Led by rabble-rousing preachers such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jack-son, it tends to blame everything on racism or white malice.

On his right is the “Afristocracy”, the conservative black elite led by Bill Cosby, one of America’s most popular comedians, who has repeatedly taken black youths to task for being stupid, ill-mannered slackers. “They think they’re hip,” Cosby once said. “They can’t read, they can’t write, they are laughing and giggling and they’re going nowhere.”

Fryer, who became an assistant Harvard professor at 27, belongs to neither of those groups. He claims never to have voted and does not support Obama or any other presidential candidate. “I don’t do politics; I’m a scientist,” he told me.

He defended his incentives as a crucial tool in encouraging black students who receive scant support at home. “Yes, of course learning for learning’s sake sounds great in theory,” he said. “And it works very well for kids who come from affluent families. They only need to look around the family dinner table to see the value of education.”

Fryer argued that many well-to-do parents routinely offer their children incentives, from pocket money dependent on good grades to new cars for graduation. Little of that is available to black families with an average household income of $32,400 (about £16,500) a year.

Fryer readily acknowledges it is a big leap from small-scale New York incentive programmes to nationwide community solutions. Yet he is convinced that education has become “the fundamental civil rights battle of the 21st century”.

More high-school diplomas for black students should inexorably lead to more university degrees, better jobs, less despair, less crime and ultimately an end to what Larry Elder, a black conservative columnist, has dubbed the community’s BMW syndrome - “bitching, moaning, whining” about supposed discrimination.

In a recent book, Stupid Black Men - named after those who blame everything on whites - Elder noted that “crying racism takes less effort than exploring why black children underperform compared to their white and Asian counterparts”.

The columnist accused black leaders of being “stuck in a time-warped, decades-old fight . . . the battle against racism takes precedence over personal responsibility, hard work, pursuing an education”.

Fryer’s research had previously focused on some of the most contentious aspects of race in America, notably the oft-repeated assertion that black intelligence is genetically inferior to that of whites. He tackled that issue by studying one-year-old babies of both races and found that they displayed no significant mental differences, suggesting that the intelligence gap is nurtured and not natural.

He then studied the damaging claim that black schoolchildren tend to shun academic endeavour because they regard it as “acting white” - traditionally a contemptible offence for blacks.

When Fryer found that blacks with good grades had fewer friends than mediocre performers, he concluded that highflying blacks were indeed being ostracised. Not the least of his aims for New York schools is to persuade black students that hard work should be encouraged, not mocked. Fryer escaped his drug-dealing relatives, won a sports scholarship to the University of Texas and discovered that he was good at studying.

Other young black community leaders have been trying to bring about similar shifts in attitude. A few miles from Manhattan, Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, has been presiding for more than a year over an eye-catching attempt to transform one of America’s most blighted black-majority cities.

Newark sits only a few miles from Manhattan on what should be some of the most valuable property in America. Yet rows of houses are derelict, shop fronts are boarded up and poverty is endemic.

Booker, 39, has wooed corporate investment, beefed up his police force and introduced a range of what have been dubbed “postracial” reforms. The homicide rate seems to be falling and this summer Newark will even introduce etiquette classes for black people who want to learn table manners.

Yet in some quarters Booker is regarded as a “sell-out”. Martin Kilson, another black professor from Harvard, described him as “a black Trojan horse . . . an errand-boy black politician for [the] conservative Republican power-class”.

Similar accusations may lie in wait for Obama, who has already been criticised by black radicals for “not being black enough”. He has tried in his presidential campaign to present himself asa candidate for all Americans, not just blacks.

Fryer has met Obama and considers him a “nice man”, but he noted last week that he had heard few proposals from any of the presidential candidates for dealing specifically with African-American problems. “I listened to the debates,” he said. “There was nothing on black students who don’t read as well as whites. There was nothing on the fact there are more black men in prison than in college.”

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