Hey podcast listeners, Stephen Dubner here. Last week we brought you an episode from our archives called

Is America's Education Problem? Really just a teacher problem. Today we're bringing you the

follow-up episode. It is called How to Fix a Broken High Schooler in four easy steps. It focuses

on the demand side of the education equation, the students, as opposed to the supply side, the teachers.

I hope you find this topic as interesting as we do whichever side of the equation you're on.

My name is Carolyn Acker. I was the executive director of the Regent Park Community Health Center.

Regent Park in downtown Toronto is known for having one of Canada's oldest, biggest and worst housing

projects. So we're doing all this work. We're investing more and more dollars. When I went to

Regent Park Community Health Center 1992, the budget was about 2.8 million. By about 1996, 97, the

budget was close to 6 million. Instead of things improving, things were getting worse in terms of

crime and murder and violence, this kind of thing. We were very distressed over what was happening

to our young people and we didn't really understand it. We were doing more and more, always investing

more and we weren't seeing an improvement. There were about nine murders in Regent Park in 2000,

which was the year before we started Pathways to Education. Pathways to Education was a voluntary

program for high school kids in Regent Park. It wasn't an education program exactly. It was more like

life support. The Pathways program they say has four pillars. Those are counseling, academic,

social, and financial. Let's fill up Oriopolis. He's an economist at the University of Toronto with

a particular interest in education. Over the years, Oriopolis had heard about Pathways to Education,

that it was something of a miracle cure for low performing high schoolers. He wondered if that could

possibly be true. Pathways to Education had a pro bono study done in the mid-2000s by a consulting

firm and the director that did the pro bono study was a member of the board of Pathways and came out

with a report. I can feel your antenna as an empirical economist already going up, right? A nice

...