So let me get this straight...

Wall Street billionaire Eli Broad, fresh off his successes as a director of AIG, is now donating $44 million to Harvard to set up the Educational Innovation Laboratory, headed by Dr. Roland G. Fryer Jr.

If you don’t know about Fryer, he’s the Harvard economist and former NY schools bureaucrat who thought up the brilliant idea of paying kids for grades. The Broad funding will now pay for Fryer to evaluate his own program.

Conflict of interest? Diane Ravitch thinks so :

As I read the story in The New York Times, I learned that Dr. Fryer’s plan to reward 3,000 middle school students with cell phone minutes for test scores and behavior was canceled because the city was unable to raise enough money from private donors to pay the cost. This is the first time that it has been revealed that this controversial pay-the-student plan was canceled.

Dr. Fryer, with Mr. Broad’s millions, will now proceed to evaluate the cash-for-scores plan that he designed for students in 4th and 7th grades. Maybe someone will remind Dr. Fryer that it is not customary for social scientists to evaluate their own programs.