You decide which of the two is right. 

Roland Fryer, a professor of economics at Harvard and a self-identified conservative, believes that student achievement can be boosted by giving K-12 students short-term monetary rewards for showing up on time, paying attention in class, and completing homework.

Fredrik deBoer, a professor with a PhD from Purdue and a self-identified Marxist, believes that increased education spending causes inequality instead of equality, and is thus a failed anti-poverty tool.

Who’s right?

In my opinion, neither. But I’ll provide more information on the two and their theses so you can judge for yourself.

Roland Fryer

Professor Fryer is the author of a 91-page study on the subject of incentives in K-12 schools and recently published a Wall Street Journal commentary based on the study.  The full study can be found at this link:

The study suggests that short-term incentives narrowly applied can have a positive effect on study habits and thus grades. There are two flaws with Fryer’s study, however.

First, it does not establish that financial incentives will be long-lasting. They may be like other interventions, such as early childhood development programs, which have been shown to have diminishing returns in later grades and result in no discernible improvement by the twelfth grade.

The study’s main point is that the incentives might be more cost-effective than other interventions, but without knowing their staying power, it’s possible that they could be a complete waste of money.

Second, practical considerations are not addressed in the study. Can lumbering, hidebound school districts be trusted to administer the incentives with the necessary flexibility? Will schools be accused of discrimination if certain racial/ethnic groups get greater incentives than other groups?  If it is later determined that the incentives don’t have a lasting effect, will the program be ended or become a permanent fixture?

Incidentally, Fryer, a black man, is also the author of two other very controversial studies. One addressed the achievement gap between black and white students, showing that the gap would be nonexistent if it were not for socioeconomic factors. This went against the prevailing orthodoxy that racism explains the gap. 

The other study showed that shootings of blacks by police are not disproportionate to shootings of whites by police when relevant variables are taken into consideration. This study led to attempts by Harvard to cancel him.

An article on these two other studies can be found here.

Fredrik deBoer

Professor deBoer is the author of the following book:

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, by Fredrik deBoer, 276 pp, hardcover, $16.79, ISBN-13: 978-1250200372, All Points Books, 2020.

I reviewed the book for the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

A major premise of The Cult of Smart is that intelligence is hereditary and inherited to the same degree across all races. Genes help to explain why some people excel in school and in abstract thinking, and some people don’t. Therefore, ever-increasing spending on education, especially on higher-education, only serves to benefit those who are blessed by hereditary and who would rise to the top of society regardless of spending levels.

As I wrote in my review:

DeBoer is merciless in his criticism of liberals who feign concern for the poor and social justice but engage in selective breeding and do whatever they can to get their kids into the best K-12 schools and into elite universities, so that their ticket is punched for the rest of their life—and, as deBoer’s Marxist thinking goes, at the expense of the less fortunate. He questions whether the education is any better at elite schools, and posits that the schools are key members of the “Cult of the Smart,” where credentialing takes precedence over other considerations and leads to self-reinforcing and self-replicating elitism.

Naturally, being an academic, he buys into the progressive Zeitgeist about white privilege, the goodness of wokeness, and America being racist, sexist, and classist. At the same time, he lambastes his “fellow leftists” (as he calls them) for their phony virtue-signaling. He writes that if they were “simply a new kind of nouveau riche with culturally liberal politics, they would probably be harmless, if somewhat obnoxious. But there’s a far larger problem: simply by living upper-middle-class lives, these woke go-getters perpetuate inequality.”

What is de Boers solution?  It is a political and economic system based on the Marxist principle, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

In Conclusion, Who Is Right?

•  a) Roland Fryer
• b) Fredrik deBoer
• c) Neither
• d) Both

Why did all those well-armed, trained men, stand down for almost an hour, leaving the killer with little kids in a safe gun-free zone? It was a mistake they tell us.

It appears that a bureaucratic change from “active shooter” to “hostage situation” may have led to the mistake. But the shooter wasn’t holding the children and issuing demands, he was shooting them in a room like rabbits in a cage.

For conservatives that pride themselves in support of local police, this was a terrible embarrassment. In addition to the human loss, allowing the slaughter to reach such magnitude, has unleashed another emotional attack on the Second Amendment.

The Border Patrol agent who ended it, what authority was he operating under? Why did he not stand down as the rest of the officers did? What’s the explanation?

Who was the teacher who propped the door open? How can one teacher destroy all the security protocols?

Why did the school “resource officer” have to drive in, missing the suspect in the parking lot? If a resource officer has to drive in from off-site, how can they be called a school resource officer?

Some additional questions we pose may not be the typical question asked by members of the press. Most are focusing on the cowardly and unprofessional behavior of the local police department, which is well worth asking. After blaming the police, they want to blame guns, the NRA, and the Constitution.

Press reports suggest the murderer purchased two AR-15-type rifles on May 18, in a “legal manner.” He also reportedly purchased 375 rounds of .223 ammunition and at least seven magazines. In brief, it was premeditated murder, and apparently, he was making online noises about violence for some time.

Nobody did anything.

It is reported the shooter was a marijuana user, which would mean he lied on the federal paperwork required to be filled out when purchasing a gun. Thus, the purchase may not have been legal. But someone who plans to murder children will break all kinds of laws. Line 11 e.  on the ATF form 4473 asks if you use marijuana or any other controlled substance. That applies whether the state in question has legalized it or not as it remains an illegal substance for Federal purposes. But other provisions could have come into play if mental health and police officials had reacted to earlier signs of mental illness. He had been arrested before for making threats.  Why no restraining order?  See lines f. and h.

How come this young man never got evaluated? Do online statements not count in the evaluation process?

Because of his status prior as a minor, did his earlier infractions not show up in the database for the background check?  If they had, the background check might have prevented him from purchasing the rifles.

Then there is the question of how he got the money to carry out this attack.

The weapons used were made by Daniel Defense and reportedly had Eotech red dot optics mounted on the rifle. The second weapon he left was in his grandfather’s wrecked truck. It is not clear if it was fitted with an expensive optic.

It is noteworthy that this is a high-end rifle in the market place and so is the optic. He bought two of them. Just one would cost in the range of $3,000 and could be higher, depending on the model. If optics were on both rifles, that would bring just the rifles to around $7,000 purchase.

That ammo is about 50 cents per round or $187 for ammo, plus about $150 for magazines. If you include Texas state sales tax of 6.25%, that brings the tab to over $7,500. How does a part-time hamburger flipper get that kind of money?

When he brought them home, nobody saw these items?

It is reported the shooter’s pot usage was a point of contention with his grandmother. Pot is supposed to make you sleepy and dumb, right? Not in all cases.

Alex Berenson, who has made quite a name for himself exposing the medical scams in Covid treatment and policy contends pot is not benign, but often makes users paranoid. Berenson’s book is called, “Tell Your Children the Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.”

No doubt this suggestion that cannabis use had something to do with his behavior will cause a ruckus with the people at Rolling Stone magazine and some libertarians. But today’s readily available marijuana is so much stronger today and we don’t know how long and how much he was using.

So far, there is no evidence the shooter was on psychotropic medication, but since he had been “troubled” for years, reportedly cutting his face, killing and torturing animals, this connection needs pursuing because quite a number of other mass shooters were on such drugs. 

Some friends also have told the press that the shooter was not bullied as reported earlier, but in fact, was a bully himself. This contradicts relatives that say he was bullied because of a stutter and the fact he wore eyeliner.

Yet, many school officials seem to feel that what is needed at schools is an inclusive environment, welcoming to all, rather than trained police and armed teachers. Maybe schools should not welcome every psychotic with a record of killing animals and making threats.

Insofar as policy, if we defund the police as Democrats suggest, who is going to protect the schools and the rest of us? That is what the Democrats have been calling for. How does that square with their claim of protecting our kids?

The fault lines are predictable. The Left wants to blame guns and bullying as the cause.  But guns are just objects and lots of us got bullied on occasion without resorting to the mass murder of people who were not doing the bullying.  Besides, in our society, the Left is the biggest bully of all.  Just ask a young conservative on a college campus.

Conservatives want to blame the lack of a family, father, too much time online, drugs, violent video games, and evil. We side more with the conservatives.  Activities online do need to be restricted and monitored by parents, not the government.

Guns are ubiquitous in our country and have been for centuries. Before the mid-1960s and you could buy a used M1 carbine by mail order with no restrictions whatsoever.

No, something has changed in our society, not in the nature of guns. And yes, high capacity, semi-automatic weapons have been around a long time, since before 1900 if you count the Mauser Broom handle. There were many handy semi-automatic guns available for mass murder in years past, but such shootings did not take place.

He had a father but apparently, Dad was not active in the young shooter’s life. His mother was a purported drug user and that is perhaps why he was living with his grandmother. So, drugs show up at least twice in this story. He rewarded his grandmother by shooting her in the face, then stealing and wrecking his grandfather’s pick-up truck.

A bit of an ungrateful, mean, evil person, it would seem.

But you can’t say that. Neither can his mother.

One can feel for the mother, but she speaks in the language of the current psychobabble. Her son “had his reasons”, he was “not a monster”, and “don’t judge him.”

Huh? What reasons could a person possibly have to shoot up little school children as a response to anything that might have gone on in his life? He was a monster to do this. Monster is not even a strong enough term. And don’t judge him?  If we can’t judge a person, who with premeditation, stone-cold kills little kids, then nothing can be judged.

That is one of the troubles today. We are not allowed to judge people and the mom wants us to know that murder was not the totality of his life. OK, we are not judging his life; we are judging his actions in the final minutes of his life.

We have defined deviancy so far down today that we have obliterated the entire concept.

Sorry, Mom, you raised an evil murderer, and although it is not all your fault, your drug issues, and your broken home, most likely contributed to the problem. You might have gotten him some help.

That twisted home life likely played a bigger role in the young killer’s life than the NRA.

But we can’t blame the murderer? However, if he was taken alive, he would have been tried as a killer and judged by a jury. But it would seem, that you can blame and judge a person if they are alive for what they did, but not if they are dead?

That makes no sense at all.

There is one guilty party here. Not the governor of Texas, not the NRA, and not even the mother. The guilty party is the killer himself.

Why should such an evil person make me lose the right to protect myself and my family with a gun? Constitutional rights are not suspended because some idiot out there abuses that right. Nor are they suspended because some people become hysterical and want to blame everyone and objects rather than blame the killer.

I will hopefully keep my guns. As demonstrated, the police are slow to show up and there is no guarantee they will act to protect any of us more than they did for the poor kids at Robb Elementary School.