Are High Quality Schools Enough to Close the Achievement Gap? Evidence from a Social Experiment in Harlem
Open accessAbstract
Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ), which combines community investments with reform minded charter schools, is one of the most ambitious social experiments to alleviate poverty of our time.We provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ on educational outcomes, with an eye toward informing the long-standing debate whether schools alone can eliminate the achievement gap or whether the issues that poor children bring to school are too much for educators alone to overcome.Both lottery and instrumental variable identification strategies lead us to the same story: Harlem Children's Zone is effective at increasing the achievement of the poorest minority children.Taken at face value, the effects in middle school are enough to close the black-white achievement gap in mathematics and reduce it by nearly half in English Language Arts.The effects in elementary school close the racial achievement gap in both subjects.We conclude by presenting four pieces of evidence that high-quality schools or high-quality schools coupled with community investments generate the achievement gains.Community investments alone cannot explain the results.
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Rigorous evaluation of the Harlem Children's Zone has shown that it eliminated racial gaps in academic achievement and was successful in improving housing conditions and childhood asthma outcomes.
“Rigorous evaluation of the HCZ has shown that it eliminated racial gaps in academic achievement and was successful in improving housing conditions and childhood asthma outcomes [50,51].”
From Reducing Racial Inequities in Health: Using What We Already Know to Take Action (2019) · cites this paper as [51]
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- Authors
- Dobbie, W., & Fryer, R.
- Affiliations
- Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CA)
- ORCID
- Fryer, Roland
- Venue
- National Bureau of Economic Research
- Publisher
- National Bureau of Economic Research
- Published
- 2009-11
- OpenAlex
- W1599415996
- Cited by
- 299
- References
- 12
- Citations by year
- 2025: 2 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 91 · 2016: 85 · 2015: 15 · 2014: 14 · 2013: 15 · 2012: 14
- Type
- report
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Locations
- National Bureau of Economic Research (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- National Bureau of Economic Research (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Education › School Choice and Performance
- Social Sciences › Education › Parental Involvement in Education
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies
- Keywords
- achievement gap, charter schools, school quality, community investment, poverty, racial achievement gap, black-white gap, educational outcomes, lottery assignment, instrumental variables, junior high school, elementary school, Harlem
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