Maclean’s Interview: Roland Fryer

Q: You’ve said education is “the civil rights battleground of the 21st century.” What are the battle lines?

A: I think battle lines are drawn [around] who the sacred cows in the system are going to be. For me, there’s only one sacred cow: the children. I don’t know if unions are the problem, but I am not wed to unions. I don’t know if the current curriculum is the problem, or if the structure of the school day or how we organize the days across the year are the problem, or if 30 kids in the classroom is good, but I’m not wed to any of that. My only constituency is children. We have 15 million kids in the United States who are not reading at grade level.

Q: Let’s talk about the racial achievement gap. In a study a few years ago, you decided to test the argument that perhaps blacks are genetically predisposed to lower intelligence, and found that no, black and white babies are about equal. When does a testing gap begin to appear?

A: Age 2 or 3, we don’t know why. It could be things like nutrition. We know, for example, that diet differs substantially between racial groups and especially among income groups. We also know that reading to your kids and doing mathematical puzzles with your kids at age 2 to 3 matters a lot. A complicated genetic story that doesn’t appear early but somehow appears late could be another reason there’s an achievement gap around age 3.

Q: Was socio-economic class a mitigating factor?

A: It was a mitigating factor, but there’s a big misconception out there that somehow income is more important than race for these test scores, and it’s just not true. Typically in these studies, socio-economic status would knock out about one-third of the gap; the two-thirds remaining is wholly a function of race.

Q: As black kids grow up, what happens to that difference you see at age 3?

A: It expands. Year by year, black kids fall behind their white counterparts, regardless of socio-economic class.