Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org where you can

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Today is November 21, 2013, and my guest is Doug Lemov, a managing director of Uncommon schools,

a chain of charter schools in the Northeast. Before that, he founded a charter school in Boston.

He is the author of Teach Like a Champion and Practice Perfect. Doug, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thanks for having me, I'm glad to be here. Now, in a recent talk you gave, you tell the origins

of your book Teach Like a Champion. You were looking at New York State Test scores,

and there's a negative relationship between school performance and how many of its students

come from homes below the poverty level. But you notice something interesting beyond that

negative correlation. Tell us what you noticed and what you decided to do about it.

Sure, well, you know, like you said at first, there's a lot of hand-wringing because you can see

that the zip code that you're born to often determines the, you know, the scholastic outcome

schools you go to. While we're ringing our hands, someone pointed out, you know, for any level

of poverty, even a hundred percent of kids in the school living in poverty, there are always

schools that defy expectation. There are always teachers who defy expectations. And despite all

the difficulties and challenges and ravages of poverty, there are people who beat the odds.

And so what we realized is we can worry about the problem, or we can worry about the problem,

or we can worry about the solution. And so, you know, it struck us that we could be out there

looking for those teachers who were in the upper right hand corner of the graph, people who have,

...