Reply #4: Really excellent point, leftstreet, and thank you for reiterating it.

[Starry Messenger]

I had a hard time deciding what to excerpt. I found this part below horrifying and need to dive a little more into the fevered neoliberal ravings of this fellow Fryer that John Legend is such an unexpected fan of:

Legend landed his logic upon “five universal, research-based, successful school strategies” that make charters work—the brain babies of Roland Fryer, a neoliberal economist and CEO of the Harvard-based Education Innovation Laboratory, a research agency hoping to “transform education by using the power of the scientific method” with sound business concepts inspired by “Nike, Motorola, MTV.” The five strategies:

1. Effective Principals and Teachers in Every School (while getting rid of the ineffective ones).

2. More Instructional Time (An extended school day and year).

3. Use of Data to Drive Instruction (Always be aware of students’ strengths and weaknesses, and when the students don’t learn it, re-teach!).

4. High-dosage, Individualized Tutoring (so every child in the classroom can learn).

5. A Culture of High Expectations for All (no excuses for failure).

Fryer, subject of a New York Times Magazine profile and the youngest ever tenured Harvard Black professor, confessed his dilemma in March 2005: “I basically want to figure out where blacks went wrong.” Unfortunately, “As soon as you say something like, ‘Well, could the black-white test-score gap be genetics?’ everybody gets tensed up. But why shouldn’t that be on the table?” he wondered. Also among Fryer’s unanswered inquiries, as documented in a July 2003 paper, “The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names,” co-authored with fellow economist Steven D. Lewitt, is whether ethnic-heavy names like “DeShawn, Tyrone, Reginald, Shanice, Precious, Kiara, and Deja” hinder Black kids from more prosperous futures. Better luck with “Connor, Cody, Jake, Molly, Emily, Abigail, and Caitlin,” he hints.