Public money and schools

A commenter wrote,

Both vouchers and charters are private schools funded with public money, but exempt from all the laws that public schools are mandated to follow.

And they will only be exempt so long as public schools are there to catch the rejects.

1. I think that the case for spending “public money” (i.e., money extracted from taxpayers) on schools is quite weak. Until I see a well-controlled experiment, I will be skeptical of the benefit of schools. And whatever the benefit turns out to be for the child and the parents, the social benefit of schools (that is, the benefit over and beyond the private benefit that parents would be willing to pay for out of their own resources) is only a fraction of that.

2. In theory, there is a case for using schools to mold citizens by imparting social norms. In practice, I don’t agree with a lot of the ideology that goes into the molding nowadays. So for me, the “molding citizens” argument is not as compelling as it could be.

3. I do not think that we need to make taxpayer-funded schooling universal. Take “universal pre-K,” for example. If we had universal pre-K, most of the money would be spent on children whose parents would already send their children to pre-K. As far as I know, the research on pre-K tends to find benefits only for children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. If we are going to spend taxpayer money on pre-K, I would say that we should spend it only on children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds.

4. I would follow the same reasoning with vouchers for primary school. I would only provide money where research shows benefits.

5. It might turn out that no child really benefits from primary school. I firmly believe that human nature has evolved to make us teachers and learners. But are we sure that classrooms are the most cost-effective approach? Again, as far as I know, we don’t have evidence based on randomized, controlled trials.

6. In particular, we should ask whether “the rejects” really benefit from school. If not, then why put them through it? If so, then it should be possible to provide them with sufficient voucher money to induce an entrepreneur to provide the schooling that benefits them.

Why I favor vouchers

Naomi Schaefer Riley writes,

When it comes to the role that teachers’ unions play in the problems of public education, Mr. Duncan doesn’t pull his punches. Upon taking charge of the public schools in Chicago in 2001, he discovered (with the help of the Chicago-based economist Steven Levitt ) that at least 5% of the city’s teachers were helping their students cheat on standardized tests. He was appalled but felt stymied: “If I’d asked Mayor [Richard] Daley to fire 5 percent of all Chicago teachers, then there would have been hell to pay.” The episode is emblematic beyond its particular circumstances: In what other profession is it acceptable to retain people who you know are falsifying results?

She is reviewing the memoir of President Obama’s first education secretary, Arne Duncan.

You will not find me arguing that charter schools do a better job than government schools when it comes to creating better long-term outcomes for students. The Null Hypothesis would say that neither does a better job.

My concern is with the distribution of power.

I live in an area where the collective “bargaining” table has the teachers’ union on both sides. The union controls the election of the officials with whom it “bargains.” The consequences are an enormous cost to taxpayers relative to the number of actual classroom teachers. The big winners are retired school personnel, non-classroom staff, and teachers who would otherwise be recognize as not fit for the classroom and fired, rather than given administrative jobs.

As a matter of principle, I believe that parents should have the power of choice when it comes to their children’s education. For any product, I want sovereignty for consumers, not for the supplier. Consumers will make mistakes, but I prefer the mistakes of consumers to the mistakes of government.

If we stopped sending taxpayer money directly to schools, then I don’t think we need to give vouchers to every parent. I would prefer to see voucher money concentrated on the neediest families, where need relates to income and the specific problems of some children.

Tyranny of Metrics Watch

Frances Woolley surveys a lot of the literature on “outcomes-oriented” education.

In sum, learning outcomes are a relatively new approach to motivating good teaching. Yet, to the extent that they will succeed, it will be in old-fashioned ways: by persuading faculty members to sit down and have conversations about curriculum, teaching, and student assessment, by giving instructors feedback on their teaching performance and methods, and by mandating the teaching of core skills. Yet, in my experience, even achieving these minimal goals for a learning assessment process will not be easy, because of the structural rigidities within the university system.

Jerry Muller would have something to say about the outcomes approach.

Noise and statistical analysis

Tyler Cowen quotes a story in the Atlantic about a study that finds that genetic variation can explain 11 percent of the variation in educational attainment.

consider that household income explains just 7 percent of the variation in educational attainment, which is less than what genes can now account for.

In any statistical study of this sort, I think it helps to think about the sources and impacts of mis-measurement of key variables.

For example, if you measure “educational attainment” as years of schooling, you are ignoring differences in quality. You also have to deal with artificial factors that push people toward specific numbers. If you count graduating high school counts as 12, then a lot people who are actually below that will have been carried along to that point, and some people who continue to teach themselves in a non-school setting will be stuck on that point.

Also, household income is a noisy measure of overall economic status. Maybe this year the household earned much less than usual, or much more.

Measurement error in either the independent variable, the dependent variable, or both, will drive down the percentage of variation that is “explained” by the independent variable.

Also, genetic characteristics and household income may be correlated. If the former is measured more precisely than the latter, then the former will appear to matter more.

Thinking about privilege

A friend’s son has a job orienting college students on the subject of privilege. The highlighted sources of privilege are primarily race and sexual orientation. Parental wealth also may get throw in.

The sources of privilege that are not mentioned, as far as I can tell, include:

–being tall
–having attractive features (or at least not being extremely unattractive)
–being naturally outgoing (extroverted)
–not having mental disorders, such as autism, depression, or schizophrenia
–not having debilitating physical ailments or physical handicaps
–growing up with your biological father (particularly if you are male). See Autor and Wasserman.
–having artistic gifts

Like race or sexual orientation, these characteristics are generally given to a person at birth and during childhood. On average, and other things equal, someone with one of these characteristics will wind up higher on the social scale than someone without them. I would bet that some of them have stronger impacts on average outcomes than race or sexual orientation. So to me, these characteristics look like privilege.

Is there a non-politically-motivated justification for only looking at race, sexual orientation, and economic class as sources of privilege?

The business model of a new university

Reviewing Warren Treadgold’s The University We Need, John Leo writes,

Mr. Treadgold thinks that a new private university may be needed, not an explicitly right-wing one but one that reflects the intellectual opinions of a spectrum of educated Americans outside academe. When Leland Stanford founded Stanford University in the 1880s, Mr. Treadgold notes, he possessed a considerable fortune, though it would be too small in today’s dollars to put him on the Forbes 400. A lot of even wealthier donors are now available, and many of them are troubled by universities’ hostility to free speech, capitalism, religion and traditional education. A gift of $1 billion, he believes, would trigger the rest of the donations needed to launch such a university. A planning group could seek and find roughly 1,000 good scholars willing to join the faculty. The college itself need not, he says, be larger than Princeton—i.e., about 5,000 undergraduates.

My thoughts:

1. The proposed student/faculty ratio is 5. If each student takes 10 courses a year, then each faculty member has to teach 50 students a year. A faculty member could do this by teaching one course a semester with 25 students in each course. That sounds like a low bar. Maybe the student-faculty ratio could be a little higher.

2. Suppose you pay each faculty member $200K per year. If there are 5 students per faculty member, then each student has to pay $40K per year to cover that.

3. So you don’t need a $1 billion endowment to compete on the basis of bread-and-butter teaching. You need it to compete on amenities. Some of the “amenities” at existing colleges are administrators who seem from the outside to be superfluous. Others, like fancy sports facilities and coaches, appear to be expensive relative to any educational value.

4. If everybody woke up tomorrow with no memory of our higher education system, and educators had to start from scratch, chances are we would settle on a very different model. The problem is that students and parents know the current model, and from their point of view, any deviation from that model is risky. If you define complacency as an unwillingness to try significant innovation, then our higher education system is steeped in complacency.

Null Hypothesis Watch

From a report on a site called Straight Talk, on a study by Dale Farran and Mark Lipsey, who write

Our initial results supported the immediate effectiveness of pre-k; children in the program performed better at the end of pre-k than control children, most of whom had stayed home. The press, the public, and our colleagues relished these findings. But ours was a longitudinal study and the third grade results told a different story. Not only was there fade out, but the pre-k children scored below the controls on the state achievement tests. Moreover, they had more disciplinary offenses and none of the positive effects on retention and special education that were anticipated.

Those findings were not welcome. So much so that it has been difficult to get the results published. Our first attempt was reviewed by pre-k advocates who had disparaged our findings when they first came out in a working paper – we know that because their reviews repeated word-for-word criticisms made in their prior blogs and commentary. We are grateful for an open-minded editor who allowed our recent paper summarizing the results of this study to be published (after, we should note, a very thorough peer review and 17 single-spaced pages of responses to questions raised by reviewers).

Social desirability bias is a major factor in what gets published as research into poverty. That is why even when I see studies that seem to refute the null hypothesis, I am doubtful that they will replicate.

The Los Angeles school district

A report from the Reason Foundation says,

in four years the combination of pension costs, health and welfare costs, and special education costs are projected to take up 57.5 percent of unrestricted general fund revenue (LAUSD’s main operational funding) before the district spends a single dollar to run a regular school program.

. . .this structural deficit forged from hiring surges, burgeoning and unaddressed pension and benefit obligations, unaddressed low attendance, overextended facilities, and antiquated management and financial structures— all during a precipitous fall in enrollment.

My guess is that the financial condition of the Montgomery County, Maryland school system is similarly affected by pension costs.

Can the academy be saved? part 2

Tyler Cowen thinks that at least part of higher education should be redesigned from scratch.

especially those tiers below the top elite universities. Completion rates are astonishingly low, and also not very transparent (maybe about 40 percent?). I would ensure that every single student receives a reasonable amount of one-on-one tutoring and/or mentoring in his or her first two years. In return, along budgetary lines, I would sacrifice whatever else needs to go, in order to assure that end.

I am not sure I would exempt the elite schools. Just because they have better graduation rates does not mean that the benefits exceed the costs. Depends on how you measure, especially “compared to what.” You can’t just take two people and say this one went to Harvard and that one didn’t and compare their earnings. You have to figure out what would have happened had both taken the same educational path. My reading of the relevant literature is that it supports the Null Hypothesis.

I think that the idea of close personal mentoring is the model that existed hundreds of years ago. It might still be the best model.

Can the academy be saved? part one

Can it be restored as a home of free speech and free inquiry? The Open Mind conference, put on by Heterodox Academy, says yes. At the very least, I would recommend watching the video of the wrap-up session with Jonathan Haidt and Deb Mashek.

I think that the very name “heterodox” is a give-away that their prospects or success may be slim.

I have liked Wendy Kaminer for many years, ever since I read I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional. She recently had an op-ed on the ideological turn of the ACLU. In her panel remarks at the conference, she indicates that she is worried that she is part of a generation of liberals who is aging out of the system, to be replaced by a generation that has grown up to expect and embrace speech codes. I fear that on campus, demographics is destiny. The diversity uber alles crowd is going to drive out the truth-seeking uber alles crowd. The HxA’ers may not realize it, but they could just turn out to be a tenured version of the IDW.