A Prize and a Lesson on Race
The black-white achievement gap. Everyone knows about it; no one seems to know what to do about it. The gap closed a bit in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but then progress stalled. Some have called it “the greatest civil rights issue of our time,” but there’s no agreement about the cure. Enter economist Roland Fryer. Fryer came from about the most disadvantaged background imaginable, with a mother who left his family and an abusive father who was sent to prison. Fryer has described himself as a “full-fledged gangster” in his teenage years (though his criminal activities, selling marijuana and counterfeit purses, wouldn’t be out of place among any number of college kids). But Fryer excelled at high school sports, and went to college on an athletic scholarship. It was there, at the University of Texas at Arlington, that he discovered his true passion was not athletic, but academic. Thus began a meteoric rise that saw Fryer earn a Ph.D. in economics, and go on to collaborate with so
