Matt Yglesias

Better Lunch, Better Test Scores

I think it’s pretty intuitive that better-nourished kids will do better in school, via Ezra Klein comes Tim Harford explaining that the combination of Jamie Oliver’s drive for better school lunches and the UK’s rather comprehensive testing let us put the proposition to the test:

Their answer – a provisional one, since they are still refining the research – is that feeding primary school kids less fat, sugar and salt, and more fruit and vegetables, has a surprisingly large effect. Authorised absences, the best available proxy for illness, fell by 15 per cent in Greenwich, relative to schools in similar London boroughs. And relative to other boroughs, the proportion of children reaching Level Four in English rose by four and a half percentage points (more than six per cent), while the proportion of children achieving Level Five in Science rose by six points, or almost 20 per cent.

Of course there’s a strain of liberal in the United States which holds that it’s illegitimate to use student test scores as a way of measuring the efficacy of education policies. But from where I sit this looks pretty convincing. Meanwhile on the flipside there’s an unfortunate tendency in some education policy circles to act as if we should only try to improve student performance through methods that antagonize teacher’s unions. But better lunch works too, it seems.

Bloomberg and Obama

Among political operatives there’s a lot of talk about the idea that in the wake of Michael Bloomberg’s surprisingly narrow re-election the White House blew an opportunity to intervene in the race on behalf of Democratic City Comptroller Bill Thompson and pick up a win. Ben Smith writes that the outcome is “a profound embarrassment for a Democratic establishment – from the White House on down — that abandoned his rival, City Comptroller Bill Thompson, as a hopeless loser.”

I think it’s at least worth considering the possibility that this tactics-tinged lens is the wrong way to look at things. What if Obama just preferred Bloomberg on the merits, but felt that political considerations compelled him to offer nominal support for the official Democratic nominee? After all, what are the issues on which Obama’s positions are more closely aligned with Thompson than with Bloomberg?

I can name a few on which Obama and Bloomberg are in sync. For starters, education. Obama and Arne Duncan are clearly in the “education reform” camp of the intra-Democratic split, pushing accountability and charter schools. Today Obama will be touting education reform in Madison, Wisconsin talking up the $4.35-billion Race to the Top (RTTT) fund that was included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This is an agenda totally in line with what Bloomberg and Joel Klein have been doing in New York, and the general fear among reformers has been that absent Bloomberg NYC education policy will be made by the United Federation of Teachers. Similarly, on transportation Obama and Secretary Ray LaHood have been infuriating George Will by pushing transit, walking, and bicycles. You never find an “anti-transit” politician as such in New York, but the Bloomberg administration’s push for congestion pricing and spree of bike lane construction have turned Transportation Commissioner Jeanette Sadik-Khan into a hero of transportation reform. Thompson, by contrast, ending his campaign rallying against Bus Rapid Transit.

Are there some clear examples of urban policy issues on which Obama is pushing an agenda that’s at odds with Bloomberg?

Prospects for Bipartisanship

Reihan Salam talks to the Economist:

DIA: What are some areas where you think Republicans can successfully work with Democrats in the future.

Mr Salam: In the far future, I imagine that there will be bipartisan cooperation on space colonisation and efforts to terraform Mars. In the nearer term, I’d like to see Republicans work closely with the Obama White House on education, an area where Jeb Bush and Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, agree on everything important. I’d also like to see cooperation on Medicare reform, but that won’t happen. Democrats and Republicans should be able to agree on giving states and local governments more flexibility when it comes to designing transportation initiatives and welfare-to-work programmes. Efforts to decentralise government united congressional Republicans and the Clinton White House, and perhaps we’ll see more of that under Barack Obama.

On space colonization, I’m afraid I have to strenuously disagree. The problem is that the Spacers will inevitable become politically independent of earth, and then use their command over superior natural resources and robots to oppress us.

On education, I’m basically in agreement. There are, however, fundamental limits to the potential scope for cross-party cooperation on much of anything as long as conservative activists succeed in making it all-but-impossible for Republican politicians to embrace taxes of any kind. Their current stance toward fiscal issues points in the long run toward their not being any money with which to fund education programs of any kind.

Higher Education Needs a Numerator

Lamar Alexander has a pretty interesting piece in Newsweek pushing the idea that you should be able to get a bachelor’s degree in three years. I think, however, that any innovation around this theme is ultimately going to be hampered by the same problem that befalls nearly all efforts to provide cost-effective higher education: Nobody knows what the numerator is.

Expensive but prestigious (cc phot by Dan4th)

Which is to say that the claim you’d want to make as a proprietor of a three-year college is something like “our students get 95 percent of the learning in 75 percent of the time and at 80 percent of the cost.” But we don’t have any systems in place to measure, even very roughly or extremely imprecisely, how effective different colleges are at actually teaching people. Instead we have this kind of prestige-based economy of higher education in which basically nothing can change. There’s an aristocracy of fancy private institutions that raise tons of money and get tons of applications and can thus be very selective in their admissions and raise tons more money. And in any given state university system, a couple of campus are designated as the “good” ones so they get the best applicants and thus wind up with the best students and thus stay as the good ones. The other branch campuses tend to languish in semi-obscurity.

When schools invest money in self-improvement, the tendency is not to use the funds to improve the quality of the education but to use it to improve the quality of the students. Offer a more generous aid package to a student who capable of being accepted at a more selective institution, and you can wind up generating a higher quality of graduate through pure selection effect. And that improves your reputation, and thus your fundraising and your applicant pool.

The whole set-up makes it extremely difficult for outside-the-box efforts to improve value to get a toe-hold. You can’t really prove that you are offering value, for one thing, and cutting your price can even serve as a counter-indicator of quality and make your school look like some kind of second-rate, bargain bin institution.

Poverty Matters, But Schools Matter Too!

Ben Adler says we should worry less about the state of education because the outcomes are driven by poverty:

Growing up in New York City I saw a lot of public schools with bad outcomes because the student population was deeply disadvantaged. But the few wealthy kids who went to those very same public schools turned out just fine (not long ago I met one who went to Yale — I guess my parents wasted their money on sending me to private school, because Yale rejected me). Meanwhile, there are “good” public schools in wealthier neighborhoods where the main difference is just that the kids come to school with a full stomach and their parents read to them before they go to bed at night. Then there are all the private schools where some of the teachers are (unofficially) tenured and are pretty unimpressive, but the students tend to turn out (usually) OK. On the other hand, students who come to school poorly rested from a night in a homeless shelter, malnourished, or with untreated illnesses tend to do poorly. All the charter schools in the world can’t solve those problems.

This is, I think, a half-truth as best illustrated by the charts I put together for this post. To see the half that’s true and the half that’s not true, you need to look at the data from NAEP’s Trial Urban District Assessment. For example, how many kids score “below basic” in the 8th grade math assessment? Well:

Boston and New York and Washington all look bad. But they also all have above-average numbers of poor kids. So what happens if we look just at the poor kids?

The New York and Boston data illustrate the half of the demographic determinism thesis that’s true. What at first glance appears to be low performing schools in New York and Boston looks, when you look just at the poor kids, to merely be a reflection of the fact that these schools have more challenging populations. On the other hand, look at the Washington data and you’ll see the half of the demographic determinism thesis that’s not true. Poor kids in Washington do much worse than poor kids a few stops north on the Acela.

And you see this pretty consistently if you look at the TUDA data. No matter how you slice the information demographically, New York and (especially) Boston are performing pretty well and Washington is doing terribly. It’s also true that no matter how you look at it, poor kids do worse than non-poor kids. Unfortunately, TUDA participation is purely voluntary and not all that widespread. So while the available information pretty clearly establishes a large, but far from complete role for demographics we can’t say much specifically about the situation that exists in the vast majority of American cities.

Gotta Close the Bad Charter Schools

Dana Goldstein’s final column for The American Prospect looks at some examples of murky evidence in the education policy realm. The point is well-taken, but I think in one specific example she uses—charter schools—the policy solution is pretty clear:

In the past six months, two high-profile studies of charter schools, both out of Stanford University, have attracted significant media attention. The first, a study of charter schools in 16 states conducted by CREDO, an education research group affiliated with the university, found that in math, only 17 percent of charters increase achievement over traditional public schools. The report’s authors called the results “sobering.”

The second, a close look at 75 New York City charter schools by education economist Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford professor and Hoover Institute fellow, couldn’t have drawn a more disparate conclusion. Hoxby’s study, comparing students who win charter school lotteries to those who lose them, found that New York charter students do 31 points better in math and 23 points better in English than their lottery-losing peers, who remain in neighborhood public schools.

Whatever you think of the methodological dispute here (Goldstein explains it well and I guess I side with Hoxby) the crux of the matter is that there’s substantial variation in the performance of different charters. What you need to do is identify schools that consistently perform poorly and shut them down. Then you create space for more effective models to replicate themselves and also for new ideas to be tried out. The promise of charter schools is that by allowing more experimentation we’ll find some good models. But it’s not as if public education in the United States currently achieves some theoretical maximum of badness—with experimentation we’re also discovering bad models. You’ve got to shut those models down, while at the same time curbing state legislators’ tendency to impose arbitrary numerical caps on the total quantity of charter schools. We should let a thousand flowers bloom and then kill 20-30 percent of them if they turn out to look ugly.

Visa Perversity

This is a bit regrettably Friedmanish of me, but last night I wound up randomly meeting a young South Korean guy at a bar who’s in Stockholm as an exchange student and I asked him why he wanted to come to Sweden. He said Swedish people speak English very well and he wanted to improve his language skills. So I asked why he didn’t come to America where we speak better English than the Swedes (no offense) and don’t share Sweden’s perverse aversion to spicy food. He said it was too hard to get a visa to study in the USA.

You hear more and more stories like this in recent years and it’s just very hard for me to see the percentage in adopting visa policies that deter young, educated Asians from coming to the United States. From the very beginning our country has always derived powerful benefits from “brain drain” effects in which a healthy proportion of smart people from all around the world want to come here. There’s no good reason to throw that away.

Education in Sweden

The world standard for measuring educational achievement is the OECD’s PISA scores which reveal that Sweden does worse than world leaders like Finland, the Netherlands, and South Korea but better than the United States:

Nordic countries are often said to be highly homogeneous, which is true of Finland, but Sweden has more immigrants than the United States though of course much less poverty and inequality.

The most noteworthy aspect of Swedish education is a fairly robust school choice system. This is often described in the Anglophone press as involving “vouchers” in that any Swedish parent is entitled to take his or her children out of the state-run schools and put into another school, with the new school assigned the same level of per-pupil funding as a municipal school would have gotten. But these schools are more like what we call “charter schools”—they can’t have exclusive admissions policies and they can’t charge tuition above the value of the per pupil allotment.

The big difference is that many Swedish charters are run by for-profit firms. We’ve had some experiments with that in the U.S. and it hasn’t worked very well. Nobody’s really found a great way of making consistent profits running K-12 schools in America.

It’s not really clear to me, however, if Swedish schools are actually performing at a higher level than ours. If our child poverty level were where Sweden’s is, our kids’ test scores would be way higher. By contrast, in the Netherlands the child poverty rate is much higher than in Sweden—though of course much lower than in the United States—and the test scores are substantially better.

SAFRA

In non-health care domestic policy news, today the House is going to be moving forward on the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, SAFRA, which is aimed primarily at eliminating the waste involved in federal funding of the for-profit student loan agency. The money saved by just doing the lending directly can then be plowed into other worthy endeavors, like more Pell Grants:

The bill also has an important early education component despite being primarily a higher education issue. Basically, a chunk of the money is going to finance challenge grants to states to work on improving quality in early education programs. There’s a considerably body of research indicating that high-quality preschool can do wonders for kids’ performance down the road. But that research has spurred a lot of expansion of early education programs that don’t necessarily keep their eyes on the quality ball. Cutting corners can save money and/or political headaches, but it’s a major case of penny wise point foolish. A preschool program that works is worth investing a lot of money in, but a preschool program that doesn’t work is useless. The idea here is that by giving states an incentive to refocus on quality issues, they can spur the reallocation of money in more useful ways.

Teacher Compensation Experiment in India

Given the wildly different social conditions, it’s hardly clear how relevant it is to U.S. policy disputes, but Karthik Muralidharan and Venkatesh Sundararaman report:

Performance pay for teachers is frequently suggested as a way of improving education outcomes in schools, but the theoretical predictions regarding its effectiveness are ambiguous and the empirical evidence to date is limited and mixed. We present results from a randomized evaluation of a teacher incentive program implemented across a large representative sample of government-run rural primary schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The program provided bonus payments to teachers based on the average improvement of their students’ test scores in independently administered learning assessments (with a mean bonus of 30% of monthly pay). At the end of two years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in control schools by 0.28 and 0.16 standard deviations in math and language tests respectively. They scored significantly higher on “conceptual” as well as “mechanical” components of the tests, suggesting that the gains in test scores represented an actual increase in learning outcomes. Incentive schools also performed better on subjects for which there were no incentives, suggesting positive spillovers. Group and individual incentive schools performed equally well in the first year of the program, but the individual incentive schools outperformed in the second year. Incentive schools performed significantly better than other randomly-chosen schools that received additional schooling inputs of a similar value.

The spillover point is especially interesting. There are a number of subjects for which we don’t have very good testing mechanisms, and obviously you don’t want to base compensation on a bad test. But pretty good tests for basic reading and math are available, and in an optimistic scenario enhanced achievement in those two core skill areas will help kids do better in other subjects as well. That seems to have been the case in this experiment. At the federal level, the Obama administration’s proposed increase in Teacher Incentive Fund funding is the relevant policy fight in this area.

Is Differential Compensation Teacher-Bashing?

(cc photo by dave_mcmt)

When I wrote yesterday that it would make more sense to pay more money to more effective teachers, Steve LaBonne responded in comments that “Merit pay is a way for ‘reformers’ to try to fellate teacher-bashing conservatives. I would have thought that was obvious.”

I think that’s really nonsense, and the implication that the idea that pay should be differentiated based on effectiveness constitutes “teacher-bashing” is bizarre. When it comes to compensation, it seems to me that there’s an easy way to distinguish between people who have a favorable attitude toward teachers and people who have a negative attitude toward teachers. If I were interested in “teacher-bashing” I would think our society should dedicate a smaller quantity of aggregate resources toward paying teachers. In fact, I think we should dedicate a larger quantity of resources toward paying teachers. That’s because I think education is important and evidence suggests that teacher quality is among the biggest non-demographic factors in determining student achievement. Under the circumstances, it makes sense to invest a lot of money in hiring and retaining teachers.

That said, once we’ve hit upon a given pot of money to spend on teacher compensation, a question arises of how it should be divided up. One way to divide it up would be evenly—each teacher could make the same salary. That would, however, be a bit weird and we don’t do it that way. Instead, we pay teachers more the more experience they have, and we also pay them more when the acquire master’s degrees. As I said yesterday, I think the only way to make sense of these forms of differentiated pay is that they’re already a system of “merit pay.” The point of paying higher salaries to people with advanced degrees has to be the belief that teachers with advanced degrees are more effective than teachers without advanced degree. It turns out to be the case, however, that research says this is wrong. I don’t think it’s “pro-teacher” to be giving teachers financial incentives to essentially waste their time acquiring advanced degrees that don’t help them. This is simply an irrational way of divvying up the compensation pot.

It makes a lot more sense to take that money and try to spread it around in ways that better track actual teacher effectiveness. One objection to this is that it’s hard to do really well. And, indeed, it’s not easy to do perfectly. At the same time, the fact that creating a better system would be difficult isn’t a very good reason to stick with a system that definitely doesn’t work. Either way, I don’t really like the term “merit pay” which I think is silly. Among other things, as I’ve said nobody I’m aware of actually believes in paying teachers on a flat salary schedule so the whole idea is a red herring. Paying more for more experienced teachers makes sense, but currently we seem to be giving more weight to seniority than it deserves. Paying more for extra degrees makes no sense. Paying more for people with in-demand technical skills makes sense. Paying more for people who take on more challenging assignments in high-poverty classrooms makes sense. And trying harder to directly measure and reward effectiveness also makes sense. But if I’m “bashing” anyone it’s purveyors of useless M. Ed. degrees.

What is Merit Pay For?

(cc photo by kevindooley)

Dana Goldstein offers some skepticism about so-called “merit pay” for teachers:

Consider this TED talk on career motivation from Dan Pink, a former Al Gore speechwriter who is now a business journalist. If you can get past the MBA lingo, there’s a lot here that is really consequential for education policy. Forty years of psychological research demonstrates that when someone is faced with a complex, creative task — like teaching — money is an ineffective motivational tool, and may even delay progress. Professionals engaged in creative work are more likely to be motivated by autonomy, and by the feeling that they are part of a larger, socially important enterprise.

That seems plausible to me. But I think it mistakes the purpose of offering higher salaries to more effective teachers. I don’t think the idea is that ineffective teachers are going to suddenly will themselves into becoming great teachers in order to grab some incentive pay. The point is that if you’re employing a bunch of teachers, any of whom might depart in favor of employment elsewhere, you want to make sure that it’s your most effective teachers who are least likely to quit. And one way to do that is to make sure that it’s your most effective teachers—rather than simply your longest-serving ones—who are getting paid the most money.

Indeed, for all the controversy around differential pay schemes at some level I don’t think even the most old-school of teacher’s union leaders seriously dispute this logic. After all, it’s extremely common for collective bargaining agreements to offer enhanced salaries to teachers who have more educational credentials. The logic here, presumably, is that more educated teachers are more effective teachers and thus it makes sense to pay extra to retain them. The diplomas, in other words, are a proxy for quality. Similarly, veteran teachers get paid more than brand new teachers on the theory that a more experienced instructor is a better instructor. The principle that it makes sense to pay extra for quality isn’t seriously in dispute. The problem is that diplomas and time served turn out to be bad proxies for quality: “Recent research, however, suggests that such paper qualifications have little predictive power in identifying effective teachers.”

The reform proposal, ultimately, isn’t all that radical. Rather than paying extra for very weak correlates of effective teaching, why not just pay extra for effective teaching? To the extent that such a compensation scheme creates incentives for teachers to improve their own performance, that will be nice. But the real benefit to paying for quality is that, over time, it will encourage effective teachers to keep teaching while encouraging ineffective teachers to find jobs to which they’re better-suited, thus improving the overall quality of the instructor pool.

More Lies from Barack Obama

From today’s socialist indoctrination speech:

And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

My father dropped out of tenth grade and has had a totally solid career as a novelist and screenwriter. These smears against the dropout community need to stop!

Homeless Schoolkids

There’s a great piece in the NYT about the challenge facing school districts burdened with a surging number of homeless kids:

Charity is one child in a national surge of homeless schoolchildren that is driven by relentless unemployment and foreclosures. The rise, to more than one million students without stable housing by last spring, has tested budget-battered school districts as they try to carry out their responsibilities — and the federal mandate — to salvage education for children whose lives are filled with insecurity and turmoil.

The instability can be ruinous to schooling, educators say, adding multiple moves and lost class time to the inherent distress of homelessness. And so in accord with federal law, the Buncombe County district, where Charity attends, provides special bus service to shelters, motels, doubled-up houses, trailer parks and RV campgrounds to help children stay in their familiar schools as the families move about.

There’s a lot we could do in the United States to improve the quality of education that kids coming from troubled households receive. But it’s an inherently challenging enterprise, far beyond the task of teaching to kids who have a stable home to reliably return to every night. And there’s also a lot we could be doing to directly cut down on the number of children in poverty.

Price Signals in Higher Education

Wellesley College (cc photo by thelehegarets)

Catherine Rampbell reports on a new study of what makes colleges appealing:

Traditional economics would suggest that raising the price of an item (such as a college education) would reduce demand for it. But instead this study found that raising tuition — as well as instructional expenditures — actually improves the demand to attend liberal arts schools and schools in the bottom half of the top 50. For example, for liberal arts colleges ranked 26th to 50th, a $1,000 increase in tuition and fees was associated with a 12.9-point increase in SAT scores and a 3.5 percent increase in the proportion of top freshmen admitted.

This is because such costs “serve as markers of institutional quality and prestige,” the authors write.

Ryan Avent offers the slightly different hypothesis that “education at a pricey institution could be a Veblen good, such that an increase in tuition makes the school more desirable as a status symbol.”

The underlying issue, either way, is that there’s very little in the way of reliable information about the quality of undergraduate education in the United States. Our major schools get to select which students they admit, which means that when you’re looking at data about the achievement of graduates it’s hard to know if you’re looking at quality education or just quality inputs. We know that it’s much harder to get into The University of Texas at Austin than the University of Texas at El Paso, so the mere fact that graduates of the flagship campus do better doesn’t tell us much of anything about the quality of instruction. Consequently, “signals” and prestige wind up being hugely important. This, in turn, is an important driver of ever-higher-tuition. There’s basically no numerator of school quality that would allow school administrators to demonstrate that they’re providing more efficient education than their rivals. Consequently, there’s little incentive to pursue efficiency as a goal.

Voucher FAIL in Arizona

Where public funds are expended, people normally desire public accountability. This has always been the hidden flaw in the scheme to dismantle the public education system via vouchers. Voucher systems in the United States have always been implemented only on a very small scale. And it’s impossible for me to imagine them being really scaled-up without coming to look a lot more like charter school schemes or the kinds of school choice that you see in some European countries. In either case the point would be that schools that are mostly funded by taxpayers are going to wind up being pretty heavily regulated.

The cutting edge loophole around this is the idea of education tax credits which, as Kevin Carey explains, are “a shell game whereby Taxpayer (A) donates $X to Non-Profit Foundation (B), which then turns around and gives $X to Private School (C). Taxpayer (A) then gets a tax credit from the government equal to $X.” The hope is that by hiding the expenditure in the tax code the funds can flow without any public oversight or accountability. And that’s how you get the kind of massive scandal unearthed by the East Valley Tribune about the operation of Arizona’s tax credit scheme.

The way the system works is that “taxpayers give money to nonprofit charities called school tuition organizations, or STOs for short. STOs give scholarships to children for private school tuition, and the state provides donors a dollar-for-dollar tax credit in exchange for their contribution.” Some key bullet points:

— An untold number of STOs, schools and parents are using the tax credits in ways that violate federal tax laws governing charitable donations.

— Nearly two-thirds of all STOs failed to spend 90 percent of their donations on scholarships – as required by state law – since 2003, the year the STOs began filing annual reports with the state Department of Revenue.

— Executives at two of the largest STOs have used tax credit donations to enrich themselves, buying luxury cars, real estate and funding their own outside for-profit businesses.

— A majority of tax credit donations are earmarked to give scholarships to students already enrolled in private schools, no matter how much money their parents earn. Just seven of the state’s 55 STOs use financial need as the primary factor in deciding who gets tuition money.

— Even as they took in millions of dollars in scholarships, the state’s private schools hiked tuition dramatically, pushing the cost of private education further from the grasp of middle- and low-income families.

— Tax credits have failed to increase minority students’ access to Arizona’s private schools. Students at the schools receiving the most scholarship money remained overwhelmingly white at a time when the state’s Hispanic population boomed.

Read the whole thing. This is the kind of serious investigatory work that, unfortunately, we’re seeing less-and-less of.

Read What You Love, But You Should Love Moby Dick

Motoko Rich had an interesting piece in the NYT about the “read what you love” approach to teaching kids to read. In essence, the idea is to let them pick whatever books they like rather than putting them through the paces of certain school classics. Diane Ravitch plays the curmudgeon:

What child is going to pick up ‘Moby-Dick’?” said Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University who was assistant education secretary under President George H. W. Bush. “Kids will pick things that are trendy and popular. But that’s what you should do in your free time.”

I’m with Kevin Carey in thinking that this is misguided. As he says “being well-read is the work of a lifetime; the most important thing schools can do is get that project started and heading in the right direction.” And the necessary prerequisite for that is knowing how to read. There’s a very big problem in the United States with people who have very limited literacy capabilities, so anything you can do to get young people actually knowing how to read books is valuable.

The other thing is that I think curmudgeons need to try to think more clearly about having realistic expectations for reading in one’s free time. Between 1939 and 2009, human ingenuity has invented a lot of new things one can do with one’s time. Human ingenuity has not, however, invented a method for stuffing more hours into the day. Consequently, if you look at just about anything that people could do in 1939—read for pleasure, take care of children, cook, etc.—they do somewhat less of it in 2009. People who are really into books, or cooking, or natalism, or what have you tend to interpret this inevitable crowding of the timespace as a sign of cultural crisis and decline but it’s an inevitable result of heterogeneous preferences and innovation.

All that said, I love Moby Dick. Every American should read Moby Dick, it’s our great national epic and you can’t understand the country without it.

Layoffs, Productivity, and Jobless Recoveries

(cc photo by DeclanTM)

It’s famously difficult to fire public school teachers once they’ve gotten it through their first couple of years on the job. This leads to a lot of problems for kids, and sometimes to wacky scenarios like New York’s “rubber rooms.” That said, as Kevin Drum says even though the private sector is formally very different, in practice it often seems quite similar:

On the other hand, I’d also say that, at least in the places I’m familiar with, virtually everyone who got fired was let go within the first year or two they were with the company. Very few who had been around for more than three years got fired. On the third hand, occasional layoffs often provided excuses to get rid of poor performers, so perhaps that shrank the pool of people who would otherwise have eventually been axed.

I think the evidence suggests that layoffs are playing a pretty big role here. A big part of the story of recent business cycles is the rise of the “jobless recovery” in which the employment-population ratio doesn’t start rising until long after GDP has pulled out from its trough. Another way of putting this is that recessions are now associated with spikes in the average productivity of the workforce. It would be extremely strange if that was because economic distress was leading people to invent better stuff. It’s much more plausible, however, that when economic distress forces managers to lay people off they take the opportunity to clear out some of the dead wood.

Related to that, it’s clear that the nature of contemporary office works affords a large slice of the workforce with ample opportunities to waste time while at work. That, in essence, is the economic foundation of the blogosphere. But layoffs could also very plausibly reduce wastage of time since people don’t want to look like dead wood.

The application of this to education policy seems limited, since there are perfectly sound macroeconomic reasons to discourage states from engaging in pro-cyclical teacher layoffs during recessions. That said, big recessions normally do lead to some teacher layoffs, and as Robin Chait argues here the layoff procedure is normally done with no attention whatsoever to teacher quality, which is not a very good idea. For the economy as a whole, I think it mostly means that we’ll need loose monetary policy for a good long while now.

School for Rich Kids Isn’t Charity

Grace Church, New York City (cc photo by Barbara Hanson)

Felix Salmon raises a long-time bugaboo of mine—the madness of giving private schools the same tax status as charities. It’s true, of course, that someplace like the schools I was sent to aren’t for-profit businesses. But they’re certainly not charities. And as best one can tell, their main impact on the common weal is negative, drawing parents with resources and social capital out of the public school system and contributing to its neglect.

You’d have to believe that New York City’s public schools would be both better funded and free of this kind of nonsense if a larger portion of the city’s elite were sending their kids to them. Arguably private school tuition ought to actually be taxed, but at a minimum for your donations to a school to count as charitable they school ought to be made to demonstrate that it’s providing a service to people in need (as many Catholic schools are) and not just to the small number of families who can afford the tuition. Gossip Girl is fun, but not in need of large implicit tax subsidies.

Adventures in Malaportionment

Raegan Miller’s CAP paper on “Secret Recipes Revealed: Demystifying the Title I, Part A Funding Formulas” is very interesting but quite complicated and I’m having some trouble fully understanding the whole thing. The main point, however, is that the actual allocation of Title I education money (meant to help with schooling for poor kids) is handing out according to four separate formulae, each of which is pretty opaque, and the overall effect does a bad job of targeting money in needed ways. One source of perversity that I understand perfectly well is this one:

Second, recognizing the special funding challenges faced by small states, the formulas provide for minimum allocations.25 In other words, small states are guaranteed a non-trivial slice of the pie. Since small states tend not to serve concentrations of children in poverty, this adjustment provision detracts from the proper targeting of funds.

When people look at the data and don’t see a clear ideological skew to the Senate’s over-representation of low-population states, it’s important to recognize that the demographic characteristics of low-population states actually do create certain systematic quasi-ideological biases in the political system. In theory, you could have a low-population state featuring high levels of poverty, high levels of urbanization, many minority students, or some combination of the above. The Bronx, for example, has more than enough people to be a state. But it’s not a state, it’s just a part of a city that’s a part of a state.

Instead in the real world the low-population states are disproportionately rural, have very few non-white students, and few high-poverty school districts. Thanks to these states’ over-representation in the senate, however, federal education funding is distorted away from what ought to be high-priority districts in need of help and toward places that don’t really need it. This doesn’t show up as a partisan or ideological bias since many low-population states are represented by Democrats (Kent Conrad) and even very liberal Democrats (Pat Leahy). But the fact of the matter remains that this winds up systematically disadvantaging minority students and even left-wing Vermont Democrats aren’t so high-minded as to be inclined to vote for a change that would direct money away from their state and toward others that objectively need it more.

Just Give Up on the Bad Charter Schools

Cardozo High School, Washington DC (cc photo by Mr. T in DC)

Kevin Drum expresses frustration with the very mixed evidence on charter schools:

I’ve been modestly favorable towards charter schools for a while, and I still think they’re worth trying. It might take more than a few years to get the formula right, after all, and most of the research suggests only that charters don’t outperform public schools, not that they’re actively worse. (The Stanford study showed mixed results, with better results for charters in grade school and middle school but worse results in high school.) Still, time is running out. If charters can’t start demonstrating systematically better results soon, the experiment is going to run aground.

I think that’s really the wrong way to think about it. If you look at the charter school system in a typical jurisdiction with low-performing public schools, what you usually have is an oversubscribed charter sector combined with a statutory cap on the number of charters that are allowed to open. Some of these charter schools may perform well and others perform poorly. And since the public schools are performing poorly, even the low-performing charters have an okay time attracting students. Meanwhile, the higher-performing charters are helping the kids who attend them, but it’s necessarily a small number of people.

The solution to this isn’t to say that “the charter school experiment” has “run aground.” The solution is to scrap the existing cap policies and replace it with something more like smart caps that are actually focused on school quality. I don’t think it should surprise anyone that charter schools, as currently administered, perform about the same as public schools. But it’s the very averageness of currently existing charters that provides the opportunity for improvement. On average the charters are about the same as public schools, but there’s a range of outcomes within the charter sector. We need to get more aggressive about shutting down the low-performing charters, more aggressive about allowing successful charters to expand or replicate, and committed to always permitting space for people to try something new.

The “something news” that people try probably won’t be any better, on average, than existing public schools. They might even be worse! But then you shut down the models that don’t work and let the models that do work replicate. There’s no “charter magic” that makes schools good, but the greater openness and flexibility of the charter sector lets us experiment and discover which things work. What we need to do is take that to step two where we act on the basis of that knowledge.

Teacher Quality Money Should Be Spent on Things That Improve Teacher Quality

(cc photo by Rob Shenk)

Title II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the main federal law for basic education, provides funds that are supposed to support state- and district-level initiatives to improve the quality of teachers and principals and, therefore, educational outcomes for students. It’s a good idea. Short of changing a student’s parents, which education policy can’t really do, the best thing you can do for a student is upgrade him or her from a low-performing teacher to an average one, or from an average teacher to a high-performing one.

But as is ever the case with government programs, though it would be worth spending a lot of money on initiatives that actually achieved this purpose, what we’re currently doing is spending a modest amount on initiatives that mostly don’t work. As Robin Chait and Raegan Miller write, there’s very little focus on efficacy in making these decisions:

Specifically, in the 2008-09 school year, districts used 39 percent of funds to support professional development activities for teachers, paraprofessionals, and administrators, and 38 percent of funds to pay highly qualified teachers to reduce class size. Districts have used their Title II, Part A funds primarily to support professional development and class-size reduction since they were first surveyed in the 2002-03 school year, but they have reduced their spending on class-size reduction and increased spending on professional development during that time period. [...]

So it’s clear that there isn’t sufficient research to help districts design effective professional development programs. The research that does exist finds that the duration of professional development is extremely important, and from all indications, most professional development programs are not of sufficient duration.

Not good. The class size reduction stuff isn’t much better either. Smaller classes can have positive effects, but the effect is much smaller than the impact of having effective teachers. In other words, if you have 100 kids it’s better to have four good teachers teach them in groups of 25 than to have four good teachers and one bad one teach them in groups of 20. And not only better, it’s also cheaper. And since it’s cheaper, you could use the money you saved by not hiring the fifth teacher to make sure you pay the four good teachers enough to keep them in the classroom.

“Race to the Top” Funds Structured to Encourage States to Drop Restrictions on Performance Data

Albuquerque High School (cc photo by cjc4454)

The extent to which American schools perform well is a legitimate topic of national concern. But education policy is largely set at the state level in this country. Which means that in terms of federal policy there’s a premium on finding clever ways to nudge state governments toward dropping misguided policies. Dana Goldstein reports on one such clever initiative:

The complicated dance between Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the national teachers’ unions continued today. On a conference call to officially roll-out the $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” education reform competition, Duncan said states are “ineligible” for the grants if they have laws on the books prohibiting student performance from affecting teacher assessment. New York and Wisconsin are two such states, and teachers’ unions have long lobbied for such laws. In an attempt to encourage states to overturn these prohibitions, the Department of Education will be handing out Race to the Top grants in two phases over the next two years, allowing state legislatures time to revisit issues of teacher compensation.

The New York version of this rule, at a minimum, was snuck onto the books with no debate or public awareness and it’s bad news. You certainly could imagine a scheme to use student performance data in compensation or tenure decisions that wasn’t a good idea. But the idea that all such schemes should be categorically prohibited is nuts. The research is pretty unambiguous that some teachers produce much better students achievement than others. Insofar as schools are able to find ways to identify the highly effective teachers and give them incentive to stay, while declining to tenure the ineffective teachers, the quality of school performance should get substantially better over time.

Unfortunately, developing good systems for gathering and analyzing data isn’t all that easy. But we desperately need to be working on ways to do that job better, not throwing new roadblocks in the way.

Against The “Master’s Bump”

A lot of issues related to teacher compensation are extremely controversial. But Marguerite Roza and Raegan Miller have a great brief out about one aspect that shouldn’t be, the nonsensical practice of paying teachers more for acquiring a master’s degree in education even though there’s no evidence that acquiring such a degree helps people teach better:

Decoupling salary from experience is a tall order, but forward progress on school reform requires school districts to revamp their spending habits somehow. One habit related to experienced-based salary is the practice of paying a teacher with a master’s degree more than an otherwise identical teacher with only a bachelor’s degree. The long-cherished “master’s bump” makes little sense from a strategic point of view.

On average, master’s degrees in education bear no relation to student achievement. Master’s degrees in math and science have been linked to improved student achievement in those subjects, but 90 percent of teachers’ master’s degrees are in education programs—a notoriously unfocused and process-dominated course of study. Because of the financial rewards associated with getting this degree, the education master’s experienced the highest growth rate of all master’s degrees between 1997 and 2007.

At a minimum, if you did away with the “master’s bump” for M. Ed.’s and just evenly distributed the money saved across all teachers, you could prevent teachers from wasting their own time on picking up worthless degrees in order to earn a bit more money. Even better, of course, would be to use the money to create incentives for things that are related to student achievement so as to ensure that the most effective teachers are also the ones least likely to leave the profession. But really the status quo is so far from ideal that almost anything would be an improvement.

America’s Best Schools

DoDEA Director Dr Shirley Miles (US government photo)

I once remarked at a somewhat crowded restaurant that the United States military’s comparative advantage seems to be running schools rather than winning wars. Turned out the guy next to me was a Marine and he took the remark in the wrong spirit. Rapid backpedaling ensued. But snark aside, the fact remains that the DoDEA schools have an extremely impressive record. You can find public school districts that outperform DoDEA on the National Assessment of Educational Progress but they’re invariably districts with very favorable demographics. The military schools’ population is decidedly downscale, “Forty percent of students are minorities, 50 percent of the students eligible for free lunches, and a 35 percent annual mobility rate.” And yet, DoDEA gets good results and has a much smaller achievement gap between white and minority students than you see elsewhere.

It’s not entirely clear what lessons you should take for public school reform from these facts since the DoDEA schools are run in a totally different way from public schools in the United States. But one lesson is that there’s a decent case that public education in the United States really ought to be radically different from how it is; much more standardized and centrally directed rather than seen as basically a local community amenity.

DoDEA does a lot of early childhood, operates a uniform six-year curriculum cycle, has a lot of parental involvement (the ability to issue orders to parents helps), and even though soldiers are often from low-SES backgrounds they and their families have access to very comprehensive social services.