Category Archives: Economics of Education

Essay on Charles Murray and the Null Hypothesis

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I put it up on Thinkspot, which is sort of like Medium, but without all the lefty drivel. Of course, Thinkspot could easily go under. The essay relates the Null Hypothesis to Charles Murray’s new book.

To gain access to Thinkspot, you have to first go here: https://www.ts.today/ and sign up as a beta user. Let me know how that process goes.

All I know about Thinkspot is that Jordan Peterson was involved in starting it. The revenue model for now appears to be not to charge readers but to charge writers a “pay what you will” amount, initially suggested at $48 a year.

How to reduce the racial gap in reading scores

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According to this study, the problem is worse in progressive cities.

Progressive cities, on average, have achievement gaps in math and reading that are 15 and 13 percentage points higher than in conservative cities, respectively

Pointer from Stephen Green, who sees it as an argument for cities to start to vote Republican.

The study compared test scores in the 12 most progressive cities (according to an independent measure) and the 12 most conservative cities. They report the results in tables. I saw a red flag in that they focused on the achievement gap, rather than black achievement scores per se.

From a Null Hypothesis, perspective, one way to reduce the racial gap is to start with dumber white students. Then when differences in schooling have no effect, you wind up with a smaller racial gap.

Using their tables, I got that for reading, the median score in the conservative cities for blacks was 24.5, and in the progressive cities it was 20.5. The median score in the conservative cities for whites was 61.5 and in progressive cities it was 69. Since much of the difference in the gap seems to come from lower test scores for whites, I am inclined to go with the Null Hypothesis interpretation.

A religion that persecutes non-believers

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John Cochrane writes

I’m interested here in the politicization of our institutions. It is interesting that not everyone is on board this project, even in the UC system. There are still Jerry Coynes and Abigail Thompsons at major universities. Much of the project is to force political conformity and silence their dissent within the institution.

I recommend the whole post, which covers the controversy over the requirement of the UC system for faculty to submit “diversity statements.”

One more excerpt:

The game is no longer to advance candidates who are themselves “diverse.” The game is to stock the faculty with people of a certified ideological stripe, who are committed to advancing this cause. Tom Sowell need not apply. In case the litmus test is not perfectly clear:

Sowell, of course, is a distinguished economic conservative who happens to be black.

If you don’t say the right things in your diversity statement, you can be denied a promotion, a raise, or even a job. I think it is fair to say that this is a religion that persecutes non-believers.

How is this going to play out? For 250 years, Americans resisted religious persecution. It seems to me that either universities have to change, or America has to change. Which will it be?

An ominous sign for higher education

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Joanne Jacobs reports,

Confidence in college dropped the most in adults 18 to 29 years old. Only 41 percent said it’s very important, compared to slight majorities in older age groups.

That is down from 74 percent in that age bracket in 2013. There appears to be some combination of alternatives to college now seeming plausible and recent college experience seeming unimpressive.

Note that the effect of this will really be felt in about 15 or 20 years, when these young people have children who are graduating from high school. At that point, colleges had better hope that attitudes turn around.

When newspapers experience a similar generational loss of confidence, the consequences were predictable, and the predictions proved true.

Race and higher education

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Heather MacDonald writes,

Social-justice pedagogy is driven by one overwhelming reality: the seemingly intractable achievement gap between whites and Asians on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics on the other. Radical feminism, as well as gay and now trans advocacy, are also deeply intertwined with social-justice thinking on campus and off, as we have just seen. But race is the main impetus. Liberal whites are terrified that the achievement and behavior gaps will never close. So they have crafted a totalizing narrative about the racism that allegedly holds back black achievement.

Starting from a premise that racial gaps are due entirely to white oppression, the social justice movement is deforming higher education. Even if it is true that white oppression is the root cause of the racial achievement gap, that gap is not going to be closed at the college level by social justice methods. Colleges cannot manufacture successful graduates out of unprepared students, where successful means learning according to standards of excellence and preparation means a combination of ability, conscientiousness, and knowledge.

If Harvard takes minority students who are not prepared for Harvard (in addition to those minority students who are sufficiently prepare), but who might be prepared for the University of Michigan, then Michigan has to take minority students who are not prepared for Michigan but might be prepared for Nebraska, etc. The result is racial gaps everywhere, and a perpetual-motion machine of social justice complaints.

PISA scores by race and country

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A reader points me to Steve Sailer’s breakdown.

I ritually point out that each race within the U.S. (see the red bars in my graph) did pretty darn good compared to the rest of the world.

PISA scores are measures of educational attainment or 15 year olds. Sailer points out that American Asians do pretty well compared with Asians in other countries, American whites do pretty well compared with whites in other countries, and so on. If you are trying to explain differences, race appears to be a more powerful variable than country.

Of course, this is consistent with the Null Hypothesis, which is that differences in education systems do not matter. Of course, as Sailer points out, most folks prefer to disregard the Null Hypothesis and instead condemn the “poor performance” of our education system.

Null hypothesis watch

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A report from RAND on a Gates Foundation experiment called the Intensive Partnership for Effective Teaching (IP) to try to help low-income minority (LIM) students.

Overall, the initiative did not achieve its stated goals for students, particularly LIM students. By the end of 2014–2015, student outcomes were not dramatically better than outcomes in similar sites that did not participate in the IP initiative. Furthermore, in the sites where these analyses could be conducted, we did not find improvement in the effectiveness of newly hired teachers relative to experienced teachers; we found very few instances of improvement in the effectiveness of the teaching force overall; we found no evidence that LIM students had greater access than non-LIM students to effective teaching; and we found no increase in the retention of effective teachers, although we did find declines in the retention of ineffective teachers in most sites.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

The grievance studies game

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Peter Boghossian writes,

Within their academic ecosystems, grievance scholars hire new faculty members with similar moral commitments who’ve written for the same journals. Eventually, they institutionalize their ideas in the larger academic system. This process, which has been propagating laundered ideas for at least three decades, now has enough “scholarship” behind it to have a significant cultural impact.

But what can be done?

Adversity and SAT scores

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The WSJ, had an article in the print edition on November 27 that I cannot find on line (their search function is not helpful). The print article was called ‘Adversity’ Has Big Effect on SAT Scores. What I can find online instead is this:What Happens if SAT Scores Consider Aversity? Find Your School.

Anyway, the WSJ uses a Georgetown education researcher’s regression equation relating SAT scores to “adversity scores” to make inferences such as

Top public magnet schools performed exceptionally well in adjusted SAT scores, meaning their scores jump when adversity is accounted for.

To see why this is not a valid inference, suppose that there were two students of identical backgrounds but different ability levels. Presumably, the magnet school would select the student with higher ability, leaving the other student to attend a regular school. The more able student would get a higher SAT score, but that would say nothing about the magnet school’s “performance.”

I sent a letter to the editor of the WSJ about this, but they did not print it. But I hope that someone there gets the message that this was statistical malpractice.