EDLab’s mission is to provide reliable scientific evidence to support impactful decisions in education in the United States, particularly the education of minority students and students living in poverty.
In 2008, Dr. Roland Fryer, a celebrated young economist at Harvard, founded The Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard (EdLabs). What sets EdLabs apart is the determination to drill down and discover what really works and then determine whether and how these answers can be applied in large urban district settings where most low-income children are educated.
As an innovation lab, EdLabs performs rigorous research to understand the underlying causes of the achievement gap (in order to inform potential solutions), evaluates others’ work in order to identify high impact interventions, and designs and implements experiments to test new approaches. Putting academic research into practice to create a learning feedback loop makes Dr. Fryer’s work very different from a traditional approach to educational evaluation.