Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein today announced the appointment of Dr. Roland G. Fryer, Jr. as Chief Equality Officer for the New York City Department of Education (DOE). Dr. Fryer will advise the Chancellor on strategies for achieving a more equitable distribution of resources throughout the New York City public school system. In this capacity, his responsibilities will include conducting a thorough review of all enrollment and student choice processes of the Department as well as analyzing the distribution of the Department’s financial and physical plant resources. He will review principal and teacher recruitment and training initiatives to ensure that all schools are equitably staffed with talented teachers and school leaders who help students succeed. Dr. Fryer also will develop and implement a range of new initiatives designed to increase student motivation and foster a desire for learning and achievement in City students. In these and other areas, Dr. Fryer will be responsible for developing a set of “equity metrics” against which the Department’s performance can be measured.
Dr. Fryer is Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard University. From now until June of 2008, he will work principally at the DOE on a pro bono basis while he also continues his teaching duties at Harvard. For the 2008-2009 academic year, Dr. Fryer will take a leave of absence from Harvard and formally join the DOE staff.
“Over the past five years we have laid the groundwork for achieving equity for all City students and schools, but we still have a long way to go,” Chancellor Klein said. “Roland Fryer brings bold thinking and innovative solutions that will help us tackle inequities in the system that people have long thought insurmountable. His prior work in this area convinces me that he has precisely the right stuff to move us forward on this critical set of issues.”
“Equality in education is one of America’s most pressing social concerns, and I am absolutely thrilled that the Chancellor places such a high priority on these issues,” Dr. Fryer said. “There is a lot of hard work ahead to make schools work for all children, but using the tools of social science and a healthy dose of common sense, I am confident that we can make real progress. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, and I can’t wait to get started.”
Dr. Fryer brings extensive expertise and experience to his new role at the DOE. In addition to serving on the Economics faculty at Harvard, he is also Associate Director of the university’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and a former junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows—one of academia’s most prestigious research posts.
Dr. Fryer’s published work has focused on understanding the causes and consequences of inequality. He has explored such topics as the racial achievement gap, the use of names that may appear to be “distinctively black,” affirmative action, the role of historically Black colleges and universities, and “acting white.” Dr. Fryer also founded the American Inequality Lab, a research group whose primary objective is to ask relevant, targeted questions about inequality, drawing on the full range of empirical, experimental, and theoretical tools to analyze these questions and improve public policy-making in the United States.
Dr. Fryer first attracted widespread attention in a 2005 The New York Times Magazine profile describing his path from childhood poverty to becoming one of the youngest economics professors in Harvard’s history. Named one of Fortune Magazine’s “most influential minorities” and featured in Esquire's “Genius Issue,” Fryer’s work has been extensively profiled in national media including the Washington Post, The Economist, Scientific American, the Boston Globe, and Black Voices.
Initial funding for one of the incentive pilot programs, which is part of Opportunity NYC and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s anti-poverty agenda, was provided by The Broad Foundation.
Dr. Fryer’s appointment begins immediately.
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Contact: David Cantor (212) 374-5141