Category Archives: Economics of Education

Two Long-term Trends in Education

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1. More administrators.

Administrative positions at K-12 schools increased by 700 percent since 1950 — seven times faster than the growth of student enrollment.

2. Fewer school districts.

We’ve gone from 127,000 school districts in 1932 to fewer than 15,000 today

In theory, the consolidation of school districts should reduce, rather than increase, the administrative burden.

If you multiply a 7-fold increase in administrators by an 8-fold decrease in school districts, we have seen a 56-fold increase in administrators per school district over the last several decades. That is, for every 10 administrators in a typical school district in 1950, there are over 500 administrators today.

The History of American Education

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Kevin Carrie-Knight reviews The American Model of State and School, by Charles Glenn.

At root, The American Model of State and School tells the story of a gradual centralization of many local models of schooling in America into an increasingly uniform system with increasing government involvement. Before the Whig reformers of the 1830’s and 1840’s succeeded in ushering in common schools, “the state role in schooling – apart from the rhetoric of state constitutions – was long a matter of financial bookkeeping than of determining how education would be provided and for what purposes” (p. 125). Using a wide array of primary and secondary sources, Glenn shows how reformers (with the best of intentions) evolved a school system that became more centralized and standardized and less responsive to American diversity and parental input.

Some random thoughts:

1. Goldin and Katz describe the expansion of schooling in America from the early 1800s through 1950 as a highly decentralized process.

2. I do not know if Glenn gets into this, but the consolidation of school districts since the 1940’s has played a major role in making schools more centralized and less responsive to parental input. It is doubtful that school district consolidation resulted from the sort of grass-roots reform movements that drove earlier efforts to standardize education.

3. When I saw this:

American public education should be “disestablished,” just as state churches were in the decades after the revolution.

I thought of Ivan Illich, who used the same term and made the same plea in 1971. It appears (based on a search at Google books) that Glenn mentions Illich, but only once and not in the section of the book quoted in the review.

4. Lately, I have been puzzling over the relationship between coercion and education. Do we not often act as if we believe that education must involve coercion? If left to themselves, young people would not learn what “we” think they should? If left to themselves, parents would not educate their children? If left to themselves, teachers would not teach the “right” curriculum? If left to themselves, local school principals would not promote quality education? It seems to me that beliefs like this implicitly underly the American education system today.

The Dark View of Schooling

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Bryan Caplan thinks that schooling is not about education. He thinks instead it is about signaling.

Bryan’s view is benign compared with John Holt.

society demands of schools, among other things, that they be a place where, for many hours of the day, many days of the year, children or young people can be shut up and so got out of everyone else’s way. Mom doesn’t want them hanging around the house, the citizens do not want them out in the streets, and workers do not want them in the labor force. What then do we do with them? How do we get rid of them? We put them in schools. That is an important part of what schools are for. They are a kind of day jail for kids.

Thanks to a commenter on this post for the pointer.

Bryan is also mild in comparison with Ivan Illich.

A political program which does not explicitly recognize the need for de-schooling is not revolutionary; it is demagoguery calling for more of the same.

Illich’s DeSchooling Society starts with a chapter “Why We Must Disestablish School,” which opens

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. [Does this foreshadow the classic “not about” post by Robin Hanson?] Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends…

the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence…this process of degradation is accelerated when nonmaterial needs are transformed into demands for commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or psychological healing are defined as the result of services or “treatments.” I do this because I believe that most of the research now going on about the future tends to advocate further increases in the institutionalization of values and that we must define conditions which would permit precisely the contrary to happen. We need research on the possible use of technology to create institutions which serve personal, creative, and autonomous interaction and the emergence of values which cannot be substantially controlled by technocrats.

The New Left had its vices. As with the Occupy Wall Street movement, within their smoldering discontent it is difficult to discern how they would address economic organization. In The Mind and the Market, p. 345-346, Jerry Muller writes of New Left icon Herbert Marcuse,

his work, unlike Keynes’, was less than useless in providing tangible institutional solutions. For Marcuse was fundamentally uninterested in institutions, whether economic or political….Marcuse proceeded as if these fundamental issues of modern political and economic life could simply be ignored.

The New Left also bequeathed to us an academy where the oppressed-oppressor narrative becomes the sum of all scholarship. As Muller puts it on p. 344,

Scholarship, in this understanding, was not about objectivity…The model of the professor as critical intellectual, liberating his or her audience from one or another variety of false consciousness, became institutionalized in some academic disciplines, above all literary studies and sociology. Three decades after the zenith of the New Left and the publication of Marcuse’s Essay on Liberation, for example, the annual convention of the American Sociological Association was devoted to the theme of “Oppression, Domination, and Liberation”; it focused on racism as well as “other manifestations of social inequality such as class exploitation and oppression on the basis of gender, ethnicity, national origin, sexual preference, disability and age.”

But one thing I will say for the New Left is that they were not the hard-line statists that we see on the left today. On the contrary, they viewed government technocrats as part of what they called “the system,” and opposition to this system was a centerpiece of New Left ideology.

Ken Kesey, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, coined the term “the Combine” to describe forces of control that deprived people of freedom supposedly for their own good. Interestingly, John Taylor Gatto, another anti-schooling radical, wrote a Cliff Notes version of the novel that emphasized its anti-authoritarian aspects.

I imagine that if universal pre-kindergarten had been proposed by Richard Nixon, the New Left would have denounced the scheme as fascist. In that sense, I miss them.

The Narrative of American Public Education

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On p. 153 of Why Philanthropy Matters, Zoltan J. Acs writes,

Early Americans in New England and the Chesapeake region, and later throughout the West, established schools in the majority of towns and villages. There was no legal requirement to do this, nor any norm adapted from other countries. Among white Americans, the literacy rate was arguably the highest in the world by 1800.

This contrasts with the Goldin-Katz narrative of American exceptionalism in education, which is that universal public schooling was our unique contribution. This made me wonder whether universal public schooling was a sui generis innovation or a government take-over of a system that already was working well. Searching around, I found an article from The Freeman in 1983, by Robert A. Peterson.

for two hundred years in American history, from the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s, public schools as we know them to day were virtually non-existent, and the educational needs of America were met by the free market. In these two centuries, America produced several generations of highly skilled and literate men and women who laid the foundation for a nation dedicated to the principles of freedom and self-government.

…A study conducted in 1800 by DuPont de Nemours revealed that only four in a thousand Americans were unable to read and write legibly.

The Heckman Manifesto

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David Warsh praises it.

9. Experimental evidence on the positive effects of early interventions on children in disadvantaged families is consistent with a large body of non-experimental evidence showing that the absence of supportive family environments harms child outcomes.

10. If society intervenes early enough, it can improve cognitive and socio-emotional abilities, and the health of disadvantaged children.

11. Early interventions promote schooling, reduce crime, foster workforce productivity, and reduce teenage pregnancy.

12. These interventions are estimated to have high benefit-cost ratios and rates of return.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

I should point out that this does not make a case for universal pre-school. Assuming Heckman is correct, it makes a case for pre-school for disadvantaged children.

However, it is universal pre-school that will be the political winner, because it gives a subsidy to affluent for what they already do. This reminds me of an encounter I once had at an event hosted by the late Eunice Shriver (no, I do not travel in those circles, and I cannot remember how I came to be invited). One of the rich parents from Potomac went on a rant about how the County was only providing all-day kingergarten to children from poor families when in his view everyone deserved all-day kindergarten.

So if you are tempted to offer pre-school only to the children for whom it will benefit, don’t even try. You’ll get killed politically.

Did Jewish Genius Really Decline?

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Andrew Gelman summarizes some criticisms of the data that went into the Ron Unz article that I cited in this post.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Some of the criticisms seem powerful to me, others less so. Basically, it possible to come up with disparate measures for the proportion of Jews in a segment of the population. Unz appears to have over-estimated the proportion of Jews admitted to elite colleges and under-estimated the proportion with high achievement (such as wins in the Putnam math exam). Note, however, that the people proposing revised estimates may be stretching things in order to prove their point.

Pre-School Education

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Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst writes,

I am concerned that preschool education has become like organic food — a creed in which adherents place faith based on selective consideration of evidence and without weighing costs against benefits. The result may be the overselling of generic preschool education as a societal good and a concomitant lack of attention to the differential impact of different types of preschool experience on different categories of children. So just as some but not all foods grown under some but not all organic conditions may be worth their price because of their extra nutritional benefits and lower environmental impacts, some but not all children exposed to some but not all preschool programs may experience lasting benefits. And because preschool education like organic food is expensive, it pays to know what works best, for whom, under what circumstances.

He proceeds to cite Head Start as an example of a program with high costs and negligible long-term benefits. See also Timothy Taylor.

In a follow-up post that discusses research into other programs, Whitehurst writes,

This thin empirical gruel will not satisfy policymakers who want to practice evidence-based education. Their only recourse if they have to act is to do so cautiously and with the awareness that they are going to make some mistakes and need to be in a position to learn from them. They and the general public need to be wary of the prevailing wisdom that almost any investment in enhancing access to preschool is worthwhile. Some programs work for some children under some conditions. But, ah me, which programs, children, and conditions?

Nicholas Kristof also talks about research into cost-effectiveness of anti-poverty programs. He wants to see taxpayers spend more money on the pre-school programs that have been shown to have success. But he does not want to spend any less on worthless programs. He even insists on hanging on to Head Start.

The Scope of Universities

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My earlier post on administrative bloat has found some echoes. For example, Niklas Blanchard writes,

Bloat, or creep is the organizational manifestation of this phenomenon. Whereas organisms will die, organizations without active management will stagnate, become bloated and inefficient, and (from the perspective of a product) continue adding features that sound good in an echo chamber, because there is too much gridlock everywhere else to get consumer feedback to product design. From an S-curve analysis perspective, this problem is endemic at the top of the S curve, when a market participant is dominant (or in econospeak, maximally monopolistically competitive).

Here is the problem: universities won’t fail. The threat of failure is the single best way to insure against institutional sclerosis.

Read the whole thing. Also, Matt Kuhns writes,

Instead of the centralized, monolithic single-point-of-failure model for colleges, why not a new concept of a college or university as an ecology? Instead of a single organization, e.g. Iowa State University, you could have a living network of independent organizations, within which a student could experience much if not more of the familiar diversity of ideas and opportunities at various geographic clusters of those organizations, e.g. Ames, Iowa. Replace a centrally-run, hermetic Soviet Science City with Silicon Valley, in other words.

I wonder whether the Claremont Colleges or the college community at Amherst have a had start at this.

Good News: School Doesn’t Matter!

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Derek Thompson cites what he calls an “eye-opening” paper breaking down international test score data by social class. The result, if you look at the various graphs, is that across countries there is no meaningful difference by social class. However, across social classes, the differences are huge.

As I read it, the most likely reason for this pattern is that schooling makes no difference, taking innate characteristics as given. I am not saying that this particular study proves this hypothesis, but it offers no evidence to the contrary.

On the page at the Economic Policy Institute that discusses the study, the authors highlight this:

The performance of the lowest social class U.S. students has been improving over time, while the performance of such students in both top-scoring and similar post-industrial countries has been falling.

To my eye, the gains and losses are not quantitatively significant (if the sample sizes are large enough, you could argue that they are statistically significant, although the authors’ own doubts about the consistency of sampling procedures would suggest caution there as well). So the “good news” about American education, if any, is close to zero.

These results are hardly surprising. Most studies of education show that variation in outcomes has almost nothing to do with variation in teaching methods.

In my view, the policy implication is that we should spend a lot less on classroom education and instead spend more on better research, including randomized controlled trials, to find out what, if anything, makes a difference. For now, I see no evidence that the money we spend on education is anything other than an enormous waste.

Scope and Administrative Bloat at Universities

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This topic came up at lunch yesterday with Tyler Cowen. Could universities cut costs by firing half of their administrators?

I argued that administrators did not just descend on universities like a plague of locusts. In the economy as a whole, the ratio of middle managers to production workers is rising. You can see this by looking at the ratio of white collar workers to production workers in specific industries, such as automobiles.

In universities, I would argue that the growth in administrators is symptomatic, not an independent cause. The problem is what is known in the software business as scope creep or feature bloat. The more you add features to software, the more complex it becomes, and the harder it becomes to manage. Organizations are the same way.

Universities, like government, add new programs with alacrity, while almost never discarding old programs. Any university today has many more majors, many more activities, and many more technologies in use than was the case 30 years ago.

How do you introduce efficiency and cost saving at universities? Narrow scope and reduce features. Do students choose your school because of the chemistry department? If not, then get rid of it. Better to have three excellent departments than dozens of mediocre ones. Let students take courses on line in the ones that you do not cover.

What if a university unbundled its non-academic activities? Instead of using tuition to subsidize athletics, social events, and clubs, make students pay to participate in each of these activities. My guess is that participation would plummet. Students would find less costly ways to socialize.

If you want to reduce administrative overhead, you have to think in terms of radically reducing scope.