The GiveWell Blog

Where I stand on education, my former favorite cause

Education used to be my favorite cause. My enthusiasm waned as I saw both the cost-effectiveness of international aid and the apparent futility of education. (Elie’s 2007 post captures many of my thoughts.) The study that I’ve been blogging about today (here and here) provides a firmer grounding for our optimism about high-intensity charter schools,…

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Fryer and Dobbie on the Harlem Children’s Zone: Significance

My last post summarized a very recent paper by Fryer and Dobbie, finding large gains for charter school students in the Harlem Children’s Zone. (You can get the study here (PDF)). I believe that this paper is an unusually important one, for reasons that the paper itself lays out very well in the first couple…

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Fryer and Dobbie on Harlem Children’s Zone: What they found

The Fryer/Dobbie study on the Harlem Children’s Zone is, in my view, an extremely important work that should seriously affect how donors think about the cause of promoting equality of opportunity in the U.S. (Longtime readers of this blog know that we don’t often say something like this.) This post will simply summarize what it…

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Harlem Children’s Zone closes achievement gap?

Fascinating claim reported by David Brooks. The study (by Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie) doesn’t seem to be available anywhere as of this writing. Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools operated by the Harlem Children’s Zone. They compared students in these schools to students in…

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