Category Archives: Economics of Education

Rhetorical Questions About Education, Grades 7-12

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Responding to stories about police and student discipline, how hard it is to sit in class all day, and how many high-school graduates are unprepared for college.

1. How much would somebody have to pay you to be a teacher in the middle school that you attended?

2. How well do you think that evolution trained the human adolescent to sit in a desk and pay attention?

3. When you were aged 13-18, how easy was it for a teacher to gain your respect?

4. When you were aged 13-18, did you only take rational risks?

5. When you were aged 13-18, did you want your friends to shut up so that you could listen to the teacher?

6. When you were aged 13-18, did you do what you would advise an adolescent to do today?

A Thought From Marc Andreessen

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He says,

what if we had Math 101 online, and what if it was well regarded and you got fully accredited and certified? What if we knew that we were going to have a million students per semester? And what if we knew that they were going to be paying $100 per student, right? What if we knew that we’d have $100 million of revenue from that course per semester? What production budget would we be willing to field in order to have that course?

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I might push back and say that the same course is unlikely to work well for all one million students. As I have said before, the key is not so much in presenting content. It’s giving students feedback in a way that maximizes their rate of progress.

Undebunkable

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Jesse Rothstein writes,

Like all quasi-experiments, this one relies on an assumption that the treatment – here, teacher switching – is as good as random. I find that it is not: Teacher switching is correlated with changes in students’ prior-year scores

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Thus, Rothstein hopes to debunk a famous paper by Raj Chetty and others which claimed to shows that great teachers add a lot of value. My guess is that Rothstein will fail. It reminds me of when Bill Wascher and others debunked the Krueger-Card paper claiming to show that higher minimum wage laws do not reduce employment. Once a result is put into the literature by a high-status economist and the result supports progressive policy preferences, it becomes undebunkable.

And you’re right, I’m not being charitable to those who disagree.

Heritability of Academic Performance

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Reporting on a study conducted by researchers at King’s College, this story says,

The team found nine general groups of traits that were all highly hereditary—the identical twins were more likely to share the traits than nonidentical twins—and also correlated with performance on the GCSE. Not only were traits other than intelligence correlated with GCSE scores, but these other traits also explained more than half of the total genetic basis for the test scores.

…In all, about 62% of the individual differences in academic achievement—at least when it came to GCSE scores—could be attributed to genetic factors, a number similar to previous studies’ findings

The reporter, Sarah C. P. Williams, writes,

The results may lead to new ways to improve childhood education.

She does not explain how. If anything, the results seem to me to reinforce the null hypothesis.

And note that in this article on the high correlation between parents’ wealth and childrens’ SAT scores, it’s like the writer is thinking, “I know that wealthy people buy good SAT scores for their kids, but I can’t figure out how they do it.” There is not one mention of anything related to heritability of traits. This bothered James Pethokoukis, also.

The Null Hypothesis Strikes Again

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Timothy Taylor looks at an OECD report on the effect of making a student repeat a grade. He quotes this sentence:

In practice, however, grade repetition has not shown clear benefits for the students who were held back or for school systems as a whole.

One interpretation of this is that the marginal benefit of an additional year of schooling is zero. However, that interpretation is not something that anyone wants to discuss.

And I could put the same headline on Tyler Cowen’s post about a study in France.

Lifted From the Comments on the Craft of Education

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Michael Strong referred to his post from two years ago.

An alternative interpretation for the failure to replicate pedagogical genius might focus on the fact that there are no institutions in our society that support the replication of pedagogical success. Teaching is fundamentally a performance art – real time interactions in chaotic and complex human situations. There are no institutions in our society that provide for an environment in which master practitioners of this performance art systematically transfer their expertise.

Read the whole thing. The question I have is whether it is possible for master practitioners to “systematically transfer their expertise.” Elizabeth Green offers some examples–Deborah Ball and Doug Lemov–of master practitioners trying to transfer their expertise. That was not enough to convince me that this is a scalable process.

Teaching, Batting, Craft, and Science

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Today I happened to have lunch with Russ Roberts, so we discussed his talk with Elizabeth Green. Some notes:

1. I like his analogy between the task of teaching and the task of hitting a baseball. In both cases, there is a limit on what you can learn by studying books or videos. At some point, you have to learn by trial and error. In baseball, a coach can do a lot to make a hitter’s practice more productive. Green, influenced by Doug Lemov and others, argues that a coach can do a lot to help a teacher.

2. This helps to bring out the difference between a science and a craft. You can learn a lot about science, such as chemistry, without trial and error. You can learn a lot through reading and through ordinary instruction in the classroom and in the lab. But you cannot learn much about hitting a baseball that way. Or you cannot absorb much of what you learn. Instead, you learn best by trying to hit and by being coached on how to hit.

3. My experience as a high school teacher have convinced me that these issues of “craft” are important. I think of most pedagogical theory as something that you could apply to writing a textbook or creating a MOOC. But actually getting a classroom to function takes a lot of skills that one can acquire only through practice and by responding to feedback. Green’s point is that American education methods tend to minimize teachers’ opportunities to receive coaching and feedback.

4. Coaching itself is very much a craft. In the case of hitting, how many people really know how to teach hitting really well? And can any of those people convey their knowledge of coaching well to others, so that other people can learn to coach hitting really well? The analogous problem exists in education. If “building a better teacher” is a scalable solution in education, then you need to find people who can teach teacher-coaching in a scalable way, so that there are enough good coaches of teachers to build lots of better teachers. I am skeptical that this is the case.

5. Coaching can improve any hitter. But it cannot make just anybody into a really good hitter. So I am also skeptical that you can make almost anyone into a really good teacher.

6. For me, the hardest things for a teacher include:

–understanding how students get things wrong, so that you can steer them from wrong to right.
–dealing with the trade-off between introducing new concepts and trying to solidify the concepts you taught last week, particularly when you have students who are at different levels of mastery
–trying to engage in cognitive instruction and deal with behavioral issues at the same time
–motivating students to reveal to themselves what they do not know and to work on those deficiencies

Russ Roberts interviews Elizabeth Green

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She says,

when universities took over teacher training and created the first real professors of education, what they did was they recruited people from other disciplines to do this job. So, they would recruit people who studied psychology, for example–that was one of the first major fields to be imported into schools of education. And then they would have these psychologists. .. You are studying learning, and teaching is very related to learning. But the professors of education, even in psychology, did not have any interest in teaching. In fact, the guy who is known as the father of Educational Psychology, Edward Thorndike, he told people that he thought schools were boring; that he didn’t like to visit them. And when he once was speaking to a group of educators and a principal asked him a real problem of practice–you know, this thing happened in my school today, what should I do, what would you do, Professor Thorndike? And Professor Thorndike told him: ‘Do? I’d resign.’ He had absolutely no interest in real problems of practice. And I think that’s carried through. Today we have, in education schools, we have people in the history of education, the psychology of education, the economics of education. But we have very few people who study teaching itself as a craft. And as a result, the folks who are left to train teachers in teaching methods are drawing on a very impoverished science. And they have very little to draw on. There’s been a little bit of a change in the last 20 years, and that’s what I write my book about. I think there are emerging ideas about what teachers should be able to do. But kind of no surprise that teachers don’t leave teacher training prepared for the classroom when we haven’t really put any resources into figuring out what we should be preparing them to do.

As a teacher, you need to know things like how to explain something to a student who is not getting it, or when to keep reinforcing a concept and when to move on to something else, or how to manage a classroom so you can accomplish what you intend to accomplish. Those are “craft” issues, as opposed to “theory” issues.

There is an analogy with business management. A business school can bring in economists to teach profit maximization using calculus, but that is of little practical value in the business world. Harvard and other business schools try to use case studies rather than rely on pure theory. And there are many books on management that are “craft” oriented with respect to handling people or improving sales.

I say that teaching equals feedback. That means that teachers need feedback in order to improve their teaching. I agree with Green that there are better ways to organize schools so that teachers get faster feedback and incorporate it more effectively. How rapidly that can improve teaching is less clear to me.

Listen to the whole thing.

UPDATE: Her book is also reviewed in the New Republic (pointer from Mark Thoma). The review, by Richard D. Kahlenberg, is tendentiously political and uninformative. He says that Green has “one big idea” and then fails to mention what it is, and in fact he seems to have missed it completely. Kahlenberg really likes the idea of raising teacher salaries a lot. But if Green is correct that good teaching is not just a talent you are born with, then you should not need to attract talented people into teaching by paying them more. Instead, you should put those resources into giving teachers better feedback and training.

I see Kahlenberg’s review as an illustration of the way that people look at education through biased political lenses (not that I claim to be innocent here). This only increases my skepticism about anyone’s solution.

Another Education Peculiarity

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Neerav Kingsland writes,

the wealthy are paying for status (and perhaps peer effects) more so than they are paying for educational programming.

Schools respond when people pay for status: we get beautiful buildings, wonderful extracurriculars, and a lot of social events.

Of course, these things don’t spread to all schools because they involve costly goods rather than innovations in instruction.

So instead of the wealthy subsidizing the early adoption of innovation, the reverse seems more likely true: it’s the practices of urban charter schools (Teach Like A Champion, Leveraged Leadership, blended learning, etc.) that will end up spreading to the suburbs.

Read the whole thing. If elite schools are status goods, then it will be difficult to dislodge them from their perches–until it becomes easy. I have suggested before that you could see a very rapid “tipping” away from elite schools. Once enough parents decide that there are other ways to achieve parenting status than sending kids to erstwhile elite schools, the elite schools collapse.

A Schooling Peculiarity

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Joshua Gans writes,

There was nothing this calculator did that you could not do for free on the web or through Wolfram Alpha. My teenager, with surprising patience, explained to me that (a) they weren’t allowed to be on the Internet during class and (b) even if they could be, they couldn’t be on it during exams and they needed a calculator they were familar with there. And when you are thinking about SATs or ACTs, that isn’t changing any time soon.

The reaction of schools to the Internet is to try to ban its use during school, particularly during tests. I do not think that these sorts of policies will hold up for very long.

Imagine that the printing press had just been invented. Schools would be telling students that they are not allowed to bring books to school, because books foster cheating. The proper reaction of students would then be to stay home and read, so that they can learn something.