Category Archives: Economics of Education

Solution Disconnected from Problem

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From a WSJ profile of Raj Chetty.

High-mobility metro areas have a combination of greater economic and racial integration, better schools and a smaller fraction of single-parent families than lower-mobility areas. Integration is lagging in Atlanta, he said. “The strongest predictors of upward mobility are measures of family structure,” Mr. Chetty said.

His proposal: move poor children to high-mobility communities and remove the impediments to mobility in poor-performing neighborhoods. He now is working with the Obama administration on ways to encourage landlords in higher-opportunity neighborhoods to take in poor families by paying landlords more or guaranteeing rent payment.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

The problem is family structure. The solution is engineering the spatial/income distribution of households. The connection is not there for me.

And if the problem is a need to improve teacher quality, then the solution is not for economists to run regressions on test scores. The solution is to put the power in the hands of people who care about quality and are close to the situation (i.e., parents), not in the hands of teachers’ unions.

Judging Performance from Outside an Organization

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Adam Ozimek writes,

I do think that those who are skeptical of our ability to meaningfully measure school performance are expressing a level of data and empirical skepticism that is not applied elsewhere.

You should read the whole post. I’ve seen excerpts from Tyler Cowen and Don Boudreaux, and neither their excerpt nor mine really conveys what Ozimek is complaining about.

My own view is that judging an organization from the outside is hazardous. I remember when Harvard’s David Cutler was touting pay-for-quality as the solution for compensating doctors, and I considered the notion absurd. If people in Washington know what individual doctors should be doing and how they should be paid, then they must also know what individual middle managers throughout the business world should be doing and how they should be paid.

Organizational outcomes should not be judged by statisticians running regressions. They should be judged by consumers voting with their dollars (using vouchers would count as voting with their own dollars).

Individual performance in the context of an organization should not be judged by Harvard economists. It should be judged by their managers, who know the context in which they work.

The problems with education and medical care is that we insulate consumers from paying with their own money for those services. This imposes a socialist calculation problem, with adverse consequences in both areas.

Earnings of College Graduates

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Kevin Carey reports,

The Department of Education calculated the percentage of students at each college who earned more than $25,000 per year, which is about what high school graduates earn. At hundreds of colleges, less than half of students met this threshold 10 years after enrolling. The list includes a raft of barber academies, cosmetology schools and for-profit colleges that often leave students with few job prospects and mountains of debt.

But some more well-known institutions weren’t far behind. At Bennington College in Vermont, over 48 percent of former students were earning less than $25,000 per year. A quarter were earning less than $10,600 per year. At Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, the median annual earnings were only $35,700. Results at the University of New Mexico were almost exactly the same.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Against the Null Hypothesis

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Andrew Flowers reports on the Chetty, et al study showing differences in teacher value added,

Their numbers are being replicated in many different settings. Even in Rothstein’s paper critiquing their method, he replicated their results using data from North Carolina public schools. “I’m not aware of another area of social science where there has been so much replication, in such a short time, and they’ve all found the same result,” Kane said. On the consistency of replicability, Staiger said “it’s just astounding, actually.” Even Rothstein grants this: “Replication is an extremely important part of the research process … I think this is a great success, that these very complex analyses are producing similar results.”

We’ll see. My money is still on the null hypothesis.

The Null Hypothesis Strikes Again

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Jason Richwine writes,

Now a new report from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), a research division of the Education Department, has poured more cold water on the idea that pursuing better teachers automatically translates to better student performance. The Chicago public-school system implemented a “whole-school” intervention called the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), which was supposed to raise the quality of its teacher workforce. Teachers were given the opportunity to earn performance pay and promotions through a special system of mentoring and observation. Although the literature on TAP is extensive, IES focused on the most reliable study — an experimental evaluation conducted by Mathematica a few years ago. There are questions about how faithfully TAP was implemented in Chicago, and the control group was small, but here is the study’s bottom line: There were no significant gains in student test scores, regardless of grade level or subject area.

Incidentally, I hate the way that the National Review Corner page loads (or doesn’t). Is there some plug-in I should be using that can refuse to download all the junk that they are trying to send me?

Tyler Cowen Interviewed

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The transcript is interesting. I could have annotated almost any one of his answers with comments of my own. One example:

the best way to “educate yourself,” for most people at most stages in your life, is to make marginal adjustments in your peer group. That means more mobility along particular dimensions, including geographic. Yet in most ways our current mobility is going down.

Recall that my suggested way to speed the formation of new patterns of specialization and trade is to increase social mixing.

What’s Wrong with Liberal Arts?

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John Agresto writes,

To restore the liberal arts, those of us who teach should begin by thinking about students. Almost all of them have serious questions about major issues, and all of them are looking for answers. What is right? What is love? What do I owe others? What do others owe me? In too many places these are not questions for examination but issues for indoctrination. Instead of guiding young men and women by encouraging them to read history, biography, philosophy and literature, we’d rather debunk the past, deconstruct the authors and dethrone our finest minds and statesmen.

The essay is not novel or shocking. I merely note that he describes himself as a former college president. Looking him up on Wikipedia, his Ph.D is from 1974.

My hypothesis is that over the past 15 years in academia, a lot of true intellectuals have aged out of the system. The successor generations cannot really think independently. They are in the habit of using mental shortcuts and bumper-sticker phrases.

Obviously, not every young scholar in the social sciences and humanities is a mindless conformist. And not every old scholar who retired over the pas 15 years is a model of careful reflection. But I think that the generalization applies well enough to account for the rapid deterioration in the quality of American higher education.

The Null Hypothesis, Compounded

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In the WaPo, Lindsey Layton reports

A new study of 10,000 teachers found that professional development — the teacher workshops and training that cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year — is largely a waste.

The Null Hypothesis is this:

1. Take any educational intervention
2. Conduct a rigorous controlled experiment.
3. Look for results that do not fade out within a year or two.
4. If you find apparent success, try to replicate it
5. You will not find significant effects in all of steps (1) – (4)

For teacher training to work, you have to deal with the null hypothesis at two layers. First, you have to find an intervention that significantly affects teachers. Then that intervention has to significantly effect students. This is the null hypothesis compounded. In Building a Better Teacher, education journalist Elizabeth Green claims that some methods of teacher training survive (1) – (3), but I remained skeptical of (4). Green was interviewed by Russ Roberts in an econtalk episode about a year ago.

Teach Yourself

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Tyler Cowen said,

But the second skill, and this is a tough one, is to be very good at teaching yourself new things. Right now, our schools are not so good at teaching this skill. The changes we’ve seen so far are just the beginning; 20-30 years from now, we’ll all be doing different things. So people who are very good at teaching themselves, regardless of what their formal background is, will be the big winners. People who do start-ups already face this. They’ve learned some things in school, but most of what they do they’ve had to learn along the way; and that, I think, is the future of education. I’m not convinced that our schools will or can keep pace with that; people will do it on their own.

Several months ago, I had this odd desire to recover some of the gymnastic skills of my youth. I soon developed rib-cage muscle problems, which I never had way back when. I ended up reaching out on Facebook for advice and going to YouTube for instructions on exercises that would help. Note that I could have taken a Yoga class, but that is not the direction I went. That may tell you something about the future of learning.

Possibly related: Gary Vaynerchuk on entrepreneurship. Right off the bat, he says he does not think that it can be taught. He says that the most important thing is to know yourself. It reminds me of what ‘Adam Smith’ (George Goodman) wrote in The Money Game about the stock market:

If you don’t know who you are, this can be an expensive place to find out

Vaynerchuk reminds me of my main former business partner. Lots of smarts (with zero educational credentials), lots of passion, lots of testosterone. Our partnership clicked because we aligned in terms of intuition and competitive drive, but it was a good thing that we were separated by thousands of miles. If you watch the video, let me know what you think, and see if you can identify/articulate what I find off-putting.

Partially Vertebrate College President

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From a statement by the University of New Hampshire:

The associate vice president for community, equity and diversity removed the webpage this morning after a meeting with President Huddleston. The president fully supports efforts to encourage inclusivity and diversity on our campuses. He does not believe the guide was in any way helpful in achieving those goals. Speech guides or codes have no place at any American university.

Pointer from Alex Tabarrok, who commends President Huddleston.

An even more vertebrate college president would remove not just the web page but also administrators with titles like “associate vice president for community, equity and diversity.”