Stephen Colbert Should Replace David Brooks at NYTimes

[Update: Aaron Pallas gives a good critical response to the Fryer/Dobbie research here. All that glitters.]

More on NYTimes columnist David Brooks and the generally rampant stenography posing as thinking in the NYTimes op-ed columns these days (see the Thomas Friedman posts for more).

Brooks begins his much-panned mis-reading of the Harlem Children's Zone "miracle" with this:

I was startled when I received an e-mail message from Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist. It included this sentence: “The attached study has changed my life as a scientist.”

Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools operated by the Harlem Children’s Zone.

"Meticulous."  "It changed my life as a scientist." Isn't this all a bit grandiose? Especially when it didn't change a lot of people's minds? And shouldn't Fryer have written "social scientist," anyway? Or has economics become a hard science due to the success of the free marketeers in economic science over the last few decades?

"A scientist." Kill me.

A 21st Century Rule of Thumb: Whenever a pundit drops a name, google it. I did so, and learned that Fryer is perhaps best known for his questionable idea that the way to raise the achievement gap was - hold on - to pay kids cash for grades.

Better still, google led me to Stephen Colbert's beautifully common-sensical fun with the idea in this classic interview:
.

.
I hope reading Ravitch "changed Fryer's life as a scientist" back to whatever it was before he wrote his report.

For a straight criticism of the "pay-for-grades" idea, see Rethinking Schools: "Children as Guinea Pigs: Washington, D.C., bribes its students to perform."