http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3953668.ece

WHEN a group of New York schools published their latest test results for
reading and maths, Cynthia Baptiste had 218 reasons to celebrate. After
working hard throughout the year, the 13-year-old Brooklyn student had
earned $218 (£111) from an incentive programme that is helping to
transform the anguished debate about racial difference in America.

Baptiste’s class at the predominantly black Family academy in Brooklyn
is part of an intriguing project aimed at encouraging African-American
and other disadvantaged students to try harder at school. Its broader
goal is to narrow the notorious gap between black and white education in
America, where the average 17-year-old black student has the academic
skills of a 14-year-old white pupil.

The programme is the brain-child of one of America’s most intriguing
academics: Roland Fryer, a 30-year-old African-American professor at
Harvard whose father was convicted of sexual assault, whose great-aunt
went to jail for dealing cocaine and who once thought of becoming a drug
dealer himself.

As New York’s recently appointed chief education “equality officer”,
Fryer is searching for an educational breakthrough that will put an end
to more than 40 years of failed experiments, barbed antagonism and
lingering racism that has continued to afflict the black community since
the segregation era ended with the civil rights act of 1964.

Even as Barack Obama aspires to become America’s first black president,
the African-American community remains painfully divided over the causes
and possible cures of not only a damaging education gap but a social and
moral crisis: black men are seven times more likely than whites to go to
prison; two out of three black babies are born out of wedlock; the
proportion of black men with jobs fell from 74% to 69% last year.

Can all these problems still be blamed on the familiar evils of white
discrimination? Or are black people themselves responsible for the
miseries so many of them face?

Some of the answers may lie in the progress of Baptiste and her
classmates, who can earn up to £255 a year from their grades in a series
of 10 tests. The programme includes about 6,000 poor black and Hispanic
children among the 1.1m students in the New York school system.

Critics have complained that by offering children cash if they get good
grades, Fryer is merely replacing teaching with bribery. The scheme is
still in its first year, but previously sceptical teachers have already
begun to report marked improvements in their children’s attendance and
attention.

“I have to say that my first reaction when I heard of this project was,
‘I can’t believe they are doing this’,” said Sheila Richards, the
principal of the Brooklyn school. “I’m old school – I worked hard for
good grades and no one ever gave me money.”

Yet Richards has seen a “very good” increase in her students’ grades and
is thrilled that many of them are choosing to open bank accounts to save
their earnings. “It’s more than just an incentive,” she said. “It has
taught them the value of saving.”

The education initiative has pushed Fryer to the forefront of a national
debate that has previously owed more to emotional political bias than
scientific rigour. On Fryer’s left is the black “ghettocracy”, the angry
old guard of black liberation. Led by rabble-rousing preachers such as
Al Sharpton and Jesse Jack-son, it tends to blame everything on racism
or white malice.

On his right is the “Afristocracy”, the conservative black elite led by
Bill Cosby, one of America’s most popular comedians, who has repeatedly
taken black youths to task for being stupid, ill-mannered slackers.
“They think they’re hip,” Cosby once said. “They can’t read, they can’t
write, they are laughing and giggling and they’re going nowhere.”

Fryer, who became an assistant Harvard professor at 27, belongs to
neither of those groups. He claims never to have voted and does not
support Obama or any other presidential candidate. “I don’t do politics;
I’m a scientist,” he told me.

He defended his incentives as a crucial tool in encouraging black
students who receive scant support at home. “Yes, of course learning for
learning’s sake sounds great in theory,” he said. “And it works very
well for kids who come from affluent families. They only need to look
around the family dinner table to see the value of education.”

Fryer argued that many well-to-do parents routinely offer their children
incentives, from pocket money dependent on good grades to new cars for
graduation. Little of that is available to black families with an
average household income of $32,400 (about £16,500) a year.

Fryer readily acknowledges it is a big leap from small-scale New York
incentive programmes to nationwide community solutions. Yet he is
convinced that education has become “the fundamental civil rights battle
of the 21st century”.

More high-school diplomas for black students should inexorably lead to
more university degrees, better jobs, less despair, less crime and
ultimately an end to what Larry Elder, a black conservative columnist,
has dubbed the community’s BMW syndrome - “bitching, moaning, whining”
about supposed discrimination.

In a recent book, Stupid Black Men - named after those who blame
everything on whites - Elder noted that “crying racism takes less effort
than exploring why black children underperform compared to their white
and Asian counterparts”.

The columnist accused black leaders of being “stuck in a time-warped,
decades-old fight . . . the battle against racism takes precedence over
personal responsibility, hard work, pursuing an education”.

Fryer’s research had previously focused on some of the most contentious
aspects of race in America, notably the oft-repeated assertion that
black intelligence is genetically inferior to that of whites. He tackled
that issue by studying one-year-old babies of both races and found that
they displayed no significant mental differences, suggesting that the
intelligence gap is nurtured and not natural.

He then studied the damaging claim that black schoolchildren tend to
shun academic endeavour because they regard it as “acting white” -
traditionally a contemptible offence for blacks.

When Fryer found that blacks with good grades had fewer friends than
mediocre performers, he concluded that highflying blacks were indeed
being ostracised. Not the least of his aims for New York schools is to
persuade black students that hard work should be encouraged, not mocked.
Fryer escaped his drug-dealing relatives, won a sports scholarship to
the University of Texas and discovered that he was good at studying.

Other young black community leaders have been trying to bring about
similar shifts in attitude. A few miles from Manhattan, Cory Booker, the
mayor of Newark, has been presiding for more than a year over an
eye-catching attempt to transform one of America’s most blighted
black-majority cities.

Newark sits only a few miles from Manhattan on what should be some of
the most valuable property in America. Yet rows of houses are derelict,
shop fronts are boarded up and poverty is endemic.

Booker, 39, has wooed corporate investment, beefed up his police force
and introduced a range of what have been dubbed “postracial” reforms.
The homicide rate seems to be falling and this summer Newark will even
introduce etiquette classes for black people who want to learn table
manners.

Yet in some quarters Booker is regarded as a “sell-out”. Martin Kilson,
another black professor from Harvard, described him as “a black Trojan
horse . . . an errand-boy black politician for [the] conservative
Republican power-class”.

Similar accusations may lie in wait for Obama, who has already been
criticised by black radicals for “not being black enough”. He has tried
in his presidential campaign to present himself asa candidate for all
Americans, not just blacks.

Fryer has met Obama and considers him a “nice man”, but he noted last
week that he had heard few proposals from any of the presidential
candidates for dealing specifically with African-American problems. “I
listened to the debates,” he said. “There was nothing on black students
who don’t read as well as whites. There was nothing on the fact there
are more black men in prison than in college.”