Michael Kremer: recommendation

Transcript context

…Does it work just to pay the students for better grades? I’m not an expert on that type of work. Let me give you two contrasting results. I think some of Roland Fryer’s work on that — if I remember right — in the US wasn’t so encouraging. But I’ll tell you one thing that I am reasonably excited about. I’ve done some work with Rebecca Thornton, Willa Friedman, and Ted Miguel on scholarships, where a lot of developing countries — you have to pay something, at least to go to secondary school if not primary school. Even primary school — it’s officially free, but there are often fees. There is a program in Kenya that said if kids did well at sixth grade, their fees would be covered for seventh and eighth grade. These were in poor schools, so you know this was going to poor kids. What we saw was, obviously, there’s a direct benefit of allowing more kids to go on to the higher grades of school. But we also saw that kids were putting in more effort in response to this, and not just the kids at the top of the distribution, but throughout the distribution. It also looked like teachers were putting in more effort, as well, because they were motivated to try and help their students do better. So I think having some sort of merit scholarship program is something . . . There are some flaws in our paper. I don’t know whether we should scale up. Maybe we should, because saying that kids who do well in school can go on to the next level of education doesn’t seem that controversial, so maybe we should scale it up. I don’t want to claim the evidence is totally dependent upon it. We could test this more, learn about how to make it work, but this is the type of program that also deserves . . . Probably, it should be part of a system and certainly deserves more testing. One strand of your work concerns peer effects. There’s your paper on the Hajj. Influence on college roommates — your paper on alcohol use. If peer effects are so strong in the United States — again, say, in high school — how should we restructure how we treat honors classes? Should we have more of them? Fewer of them? What’s the right way to think about what you might call intellectual segregation in this country?…

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