Category Archives: Economics of Education

Null hypothesis watch

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Kevin Mahnken reports,

Thirteen-year-olds saw unprecedented declines in both reading and math between 2012 and 2020, according to scores released this morning from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Consistent with several years of previous data, the results point to a clear and widening cleavage between America’s highest- and lowest-performing students and raise urgent questions about how to reverse prolonged academic stagnation.

…NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr told reporters that 13-year-olds had never before seen declines on the assessment, and the results were so startling that she had her staff double-check the results.

…when average scores for most students were stagnant, scores for the lowest-performing students were down; when scores for most students were down, scores for the lowest-performing plummeted.

Read the whole thing. Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who points out that the results are from before the virus closed schools.

The fact that the United States has much higher health care spending than other countries but no higher life expectancy is frequently talked about in left-wing circles. But the fact that the more we spend on K-12 education the less we get in terms of better test scores is never mentioned. Conventional wisdom is that we need to spend less on (private-sector providers of) health care and more on (government-run) schools. Even the Niskanen Center paper on “cost-disease socialism,” while it has an entire 5-page section decrying the bloated expense of higher education, only mentions K-12 education in a couple of relatively innocuous paragraphs.

Perhaps the strongest indictment of K-12 education is the movement to get rid of SAT scores as a requirement for college applications. Would this idea have gotten anywhere if test scores for minorities were improving rather than getting worse?

The Null Hypothesis says that we cannot get better results by increasing spending. But it also says that we could spend less and get the same results.

Schools and restorative justice

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Michael Goldstein writes,

Here’s sort of what you wanted to read about: Rand Corporation RCT of “Restorative Justice” which includes measures of achievement.

“The most troubling thing: There were significant and substantial negative effects on math achievement for middle school students, black students, and students in schools that are predominantly black.”

As background, I had come across an article about a high school in my old neighborhood. The school was troubled, and it tried a “restorative justice” program. The article reported that the program reduced suspensions and absenteeism. This smelled to me like “p-hacking,” in which you measure a bunch of different outcomes and only report the ones with good news. I hinted at my suspicions near the end, and Goldstein’s comment, which has more than what I excerpted here, confirmed those suspicions.

My essay is mostly wistful and autobiographical, and you’re welcome to read it if that appeals.

An ethnic studies curriculum

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From FAIR. A few topics:

The Declaration of Independence and the Problem of Slavery
Native Americans and the American Revolution
“Indians” vs. Many Tribes: Native American Diversity
Chief John Ross and the Cherokee
American Jews During Early Independence
E Pluribus Unum: 4th of July Celebrations Across American Cultures
Learning From The Amistad
Sarah and Angelina Grimke: First American Women Advocates for Abolition and Women’s Rights
National Anthems and American Ideals
Immigration and Hyphenated Americanism
John L. O’Sullivan, The Democratic Review, and “Manifest Destiny”
Abraham Lincoln’s Life and Legacy
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” Speech
Human Rights, Civil Rights, Group Rights

More may be found at the link. The point is that the curriculum for such a course does not have to be set by Critical Race Theory. The question is whether school boards can be persuaded to adopt the FAIR approach instead of the CRT approach.

Why math education has suffered

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Percy Deift, Svetlana Jitomirskaya, and Sergiu Klainerman write,

Far too few American public-school children are prepared for careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This leaves us increasingly dependent on a constant inflow of foreign talent, especially from mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, and India. In a 2015 survey conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Graduate Record Examinations Board, about 55 percent of all participating graduate students in mathematics, computer sciences, and engineering at US schools were found to be foreign nationals. In 2017, the National Foundation for American Policy estimated that international students accounted for 81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical engineering at U.S. universities; and 79 percent of full-time graduate students in computer science.

That report also concluded that many programs in these fields couldn’t even be maintained without international students. In our field, mathematics, we find that at most top departments in the United States, at least two-thirds of the faculty are foreign born. (And even among those faculty born in the United States, a large portion are first-generation Americans.) Similar patterns may be observed in other STEM disciplines.

Later,

China pursues none of the equity programs that are sweeping the United States. Quite the contrary: It is building on the kind of accelerated, explicitly merit-based programs, centered on gifted students, that are being repudiated by American educators. Having learned its lesson from the Cultural Revolution, when science and merit-based education were all but obliterated in favor of ideological indoctrination, China is pursuing a far-sighted, long-term strategy to create a world-leading corps of elite STEM experts.

Have another nice day.

Null Hypothesis watch

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Scott Alexander writes,

Some parents “unschool” their children. That is, they object to schooling as traditionally understood, so they register themselves as home schooling but don’t formally teach much, limiting themselves to answering kids’ questions as they come up. When adjusted for confounders (ie usually these parents are rich and well-educated), their young children lag one grade level behind public school students on average – but only one (though these students were pretty young and they might have lagged further behind with time). By the time these unschooled kids are applying for college, they seem to know a decent amount, get into college at relatively high rates, and do well in their college courses. I think there’s some evidence that not getting any school at all harms these children’s performance on some traditional measures. But it doesn’t harm them very much. Given how little effect there is from absolutely zero school ever, I think missing a year or two of school isn’t going to matter a lot.

I suspect that the further down the socioeconomic scale you go, the more likely it is that missing school matters. I am willing to doubt the Null Hypothesis for very poor children.

Contra Alexander

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Scott Alexander writes,

In this model, we end up with Woke Capital because Apple and Amazon are run by programmers, by managers who used to be programmers, and by MBA finance people – and all of those groups are highly educated and therefore liberal.

I am pretty sure that the “woke” in Woke Capital comes mostly from the HR departments. They derive their power from their ability to protect the corporation from bad PR and lawsuits having to do with race and gender.

I have a hypothesis that education has become a political dividing line because there are now very many college graduates who have second-rate minds, what Tyler Cowen once called lumpenintellectuals. These second-raters have no natural ability to take on jobs that require a lot of cognitive skill. They have spilled over into jobs that require credentials but where they do not have to compete with people of genuine intellectual ability. These include many government positions, K-12 teaching, academic administration, and corporate HR. The lumpenintellectuals have to work hard to protect their status against both those who have fewer education credentials and those with more genuine smarts.

Woke ideology has emerged as a solution to this problem. Lumpenintellectuals can use Wokeism against both genuine intellectuals and the less educated. I think at some point the really smart people will get tired of being bossed around by the second-raters. Perhaps there will be coups at some universities, in which the real intellectuals take them back. More likely, colleges and universities are a lost cause, and true intellectuals will coalesce around alternative institutions.

Contingent U

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The AAUP reports,

In fall 2019, 63.0 percent of faculty members were on contingent appointments; 20.0 percent were full-time contingent faculty members and 42.9 percent were part-time contingent faculty members. Only 26.5 percent of faculty members were tenured and 10.5 percent were on tenure track.

If you are a student, the chances that all of your courses in a semester are taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty are close to zero. But you won’t lack for administrators:

From fiscal year 2011–12 to fiscal year 2018–19, the numbers of staff classified as “management” increased 12 percent per FTE student, real average salaries increased 7 percent, and salary outlays per FTE student increased 19 percent, including an extraordinary 24 percent increase in real salary expenditures per FTE student in public colleges and universities.

Don’t send your kids to college

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From a poll of recent college grads:

Nearly one in five (17%) college grads polled still don’t know how to cook or do their own laundry. Twenty-six percent are also feeling lost when it comes to basic apartment maintenance too – like unclogging a toilet or resetting a Wi-Fi router.

Before you allow your children to go to college, make them take at least a year to live in the real world first.

Have a nice semester

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My latest essay says,

I worry that civil discourse around CRT is not going to happen. Instead, parents who most believe in civil discourse will simply pull their children out of public schools, rather than wade into the controversy. Teachers who are not “woke” will be treated as pariahs by other teachers and administrators. Public schools will end up serving the children of parents who are either very progressive or apathetic. There will emerge another school system, a separate but equal school system if you will, for children of parents who are conservatives or old-fashioned liberals.

[UPDATE: Read Bonnie Snyder’s essay. Also, Richard Hanania writes that legislative bans will fail to achieve their attended purpose.

the only real option for conservatives is to attack public education and encourage a larger migration to private schools and home schooling.