Bad Journalism, Bloomberg Style

Some days, you just have to wonder. What could be the motivation for an article in Bloomberg news that starts out like this?

U.S. Students Spend More Time Working Paid Jobs Than Going to Class

Facing mounting debt, U.S. college students spend double the time working paid jobs than in the library. 

The rest of the article goes on to explain how awful it is for students, what with all the work and borrowing. But the proof of this assertion is a survey by HSBC in which students were prompted with the question, "On average, how long do you spend doing the following each day?" Here are the answers:

Going to lectures/tutorials/seminars: 2.3 hours
Visiting the library: 1.5 hours
Studying at home: 2.8 hours

That's a total of 6.6 hours on school work.

Working (paid employment): 4.2 hours
Volunteering (unpaid): 0.9 hours

That's a total of 5.1 hours on work unrelated to school. So yes, based on these categories, 4.2 > 1.5 and 4.2 > 2.3, so the facts asserted in the headline and the statement that follows it are true. But 5.1 < 6.6, so what's the big deal?

But wait, there's more. The same survey reports the following responses for the rest of the day:

Texting/messaging/emailing: 2.3 hours
Watching streaming devices: 2.2 hours
On social media: 2.5 hours

So that's 7 hours on screens, more than both school work and paid work. (Also listed are 4 hours of socializing.) I guess if I were going to write a news article in Bloomberg and be objective about it, I would include that. But then how could I make the case that life is somehow unfair to students because, what, between school work and other work, they only get to spend 11 hours socializing or looking at screens?

When I blogged about the media earlier this month, noting that with the increase in quantity we have seen some bad examples of quality, this is the sort of media I had in mind. A survey has been cited selectively and incorrectly to push a point of view. Further, I first came across this in my local paper, which had no link to the survey. This is bad journalism. It is unprofessional. And it erodes the trust we'd like to have in those who bring us the news.

I Guess I Did See This One Coming

About two years ago, I noted that the Los Angeles Superior Court judge in the Vergara v. California case had overreached when he declared that tenure and other job protections for teachers in primary and secondary public schools are unconstitutional. The plaintiffs' logic was that since poor and minority students were more likely to be saddled with ineffective teachers protected by these provisions, there must be a violation of their civil rights. I predicted that this ruling would be overturned on appeal, and last week, that's just what happened.

Echoing the theme of my earlier post, the Appeals Court ruled:

The court’s job is merely to determine whether the statutes are constitutional, not if they are ‘a good idea,’ ... The evidence did not show that the challenged statutes inevitably cause this impact.

Education is like many public policy issues today -- we spend too much, get too little, and either don't yet know how to improve on those outcomes or don't have the leadership skills to implement what we do know.

If I Wanted To Start the New Year Off by Raising College Tuition, I Would Propose This

From yesterday's New York Times:

Lawmakers have proposed requiring that about 90 colleges with endowments of $1 billion or more spend about 25 percent of their annual earnings for tuition assistance — or forfeit their tax exemptions.

Suppose that college costs $65,000 at one of these institutions and that half of the 4,000 students receive financial aid. If the college raises the cost to $66,000, then it gains the $2 million from the students not receiving financial aid and owes $2 million more to the students receiving financial aid. Since the numbers offset, no endowment income has to be reallocated, but the college is now $2 million closer to reaching the lawmakers' objective. "Tuition assistance" is necessarily defined relative to a price that the college controls and not everyone faces. Raising it here confers the double bonus of generating more revenue and more credit against the lawmakers' new requirement.

A minor complication is that some students might qualify for financial aid at the higher cost but not at the lower cost. So the college would owe slightly more than $2 million in additional aid. A more important complication is that colleges cannot raise their prices without facing some market competition, in this case from colleges with endowments under $1 billion who are not subject to the new constraints.

I presume that "annual earnings" here would refer to a multiyear average, since the constraint wouldn't be binding in any year that annual earnings were negative or positive but very small. Or maybe the threshold would be specified as a percentage of the value of the endowment, not its annual income. Better than this policy, I think, would be to place more requirements for overall cost containment on any college that accepts federal funds for particular purposes.

Escrow for the Common Good

Years ago, when I was teaching finance more regularly, I read The Squam Lake Report and thought its recommendation to improve corporate governance by requiring deferred compensation (in cash) for top management made sense. Why should a manager with significant oversight responsibility be paid in full today if the firm does not survive well into the future? It is a straightforward approach to moral hazard when the consequences of a manager's actions take some years to be fully realized. Put a portion of the payment in escrow, and hold it there until reasonable performance has been demonstrated.

I'd like to propose two other applications of the same basic idea to areas I have been thinking about for teaching and research of late. Consider the payments that are made by the public sector to organizations that operate prisons. Why should a prison be paid in full today to incarcerate an inmate who recidivates shortly after release? One estimate puts the rate of recidvism at 40% within 10 years. The prison operator has considerable control over the inmate's daily activities while incarcerated. That time should be used to help prepare the inmates to stay out of prison upon their release. If it is not used productively, it shouldn't be just the taxpayer who bears the financial cost to re-incarcerate the prisoner. Why not condition a portion of the payment to the prison operator on the released inmate staying out of the penal system for some period of time? Put the payments in escrow, and release them to the prison operator slowly over time, based on the released inmate's law-abiding behavior. The low cost of interventions like prisoner education and job training compared to the relatively high cost of re-incarceration suggests that prison operators have room to do a better job.

The other example is higher education. Policy makers are currently wrestling with the issue of what to do about student debt repayment. By some estimates, 1 in 6 borrowers are severely delinquent. Why should a university be paid tuition in full based on the proceeds of a loan that may not be repaid? The university has every opportunity to convey knowledge and teach skills that increase the likelihood of repayment. But it does not bear the financial consequences of a loan not being repaid. Instead, put a portion of the tuition payment in escrow, and release it only as the student loan is repaid. This arrangement provides a financial incentive for universities to provide a better education and to avoid enrolling students who are unlikely to be able to convert this education into enough earnings to repay their loans. These two issues are at the heart of our student debt repayment problem. The problem is financial -- the solution should also have a financial component.

The End of Tenure in California Public Schools?

Judge Rolf M. Treu of the Los Angeles Superior Court has ruled in Vergara v. California that tenure and other job protections for teachers in primary and secondary public schools are unconstitutional. I think this is a clear case of judicial overreach -- legislating from the bench.

I don't think it is a hard case to make that the implementation of employment protections in many public school systems is bad policy. However, bad implementation of the policy does not mean that the policy is unconstitutional. The ruling pays lip service to this distinction, but that seems to be all. The key excerpt from the ruling in this case is:

Substantial evidence presented makes it clear to this court that the challenged statutes disproportionately affect poor and/or minority students.

Any policy under the purview of the public sector in which the benefits and costs fall unevenly by race would be deemed to violate the civil rights of the disadvantaged group. It is interesting to me that almost all of the tentative decision focuses on how bad the Challenged Statutes are at their worst, only two paragraphs focus on the effect on low-income and minority students in particular, and none of it discusses potential advantages of the job protections in the Challenged Statutes.

Even if those two paragraphs are the essential part of the ruling, the remedy is to ensure that the policy is implemented better, not necessarily to declare the policy unconstitutional. For example, based on what is presented in the ruling, consider a system in which:

1. The Permanent Employment Statute had a 3-5 year evaluation period (as a defense witness suggested and as is found in most other states), 
2. The Dismissal Statute had protections only at the level described in the Skelly v. State Personnel Board case cited in the ruling, 
3. The "Last In, First Out" Statute were relaxed to having seniority considered as one among many factors rather than the only factor (as the ruling notes is the case in 20 other states), and
4. The State could establish that there was no correlation between a school's incidence of low-income or minority students and the presence of ineffective teachers (where the latter was measured based on performance facing a standardized classroom).

This system would appear to violate no principle identified in the ruling. I don't expect this ruling to survive on appeal. I expect a higher court to require the State to implement a system like what I have outlined here.

College Admissions in Michigan, Again and Again

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent in the Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action case is puzzling to me. She accuses her colleagues in the 6-2 majority of "trying to wish away racial inequality." They do nothing of the kind. It seems very hard to believe that there is anything in the Constitution or judicial precedent that would deny the citizens of Michigan the prerogative to affirm that a public university they support will be constrained to not treat applicants differently based on their race. This says nothing about whether the Michigan policy is a good one -- only that it is within the purview of the citizens to make this requirement. It does not say that every state must affirm such a policy. Is Sotomayor really saying that there is a Constitutional requirement that public universities must treat applicants differently based on race?

In the context of figuring out what is an equitable policy, we often hear questions about non-racial preferences in admissions, like athletes and legacies. Given the racial composition of profit-sport athletes relative to the student body, I don't expect the coalition that is pushing for Sotomayor's worldview to challenge those preferences. But it would not surprise me to see, and I think the day is coming when we will see, a legal challenge to legacy preferences at public institutions based on the claim that they discriminate against racial minorities. Legacy preferences perpetuate a legacy of discriminatory admissions standards (or simply unequal college preparation) that may have existed years ago. I doubt it would be too hard to show that the potential pool of legacy applications to any flagship state university is tilted away from racial minorities relative to the potential pool of applicants statewide. It would also not surprise me if Michigan was once again the battleground for this challenge.

Donating the Voucher

In honor of National School Choice Week, I'd like to highlight a paper I published last year that considers the federal government's tax treatment of private school enrollments. In brief, I'd like to see the federal tax code be as neutral as possible with respect to the funds that are used to meet the requirement that all students have access to primary and secondary education. Neutral with respect to financing helps to promote choice.

The starting point for the paper is the observation that most dollars spent by citizens to educate primary and secondary students are a tax deduction on their federal income taxes. For example, my property taxes and state income taxes are deductions when I file my federal income tax. My payment of these taxes has nothing to do with how much I use the public schools, only that I live in a jurisdiction subject to these taxes and that I have the right to send my children to these schools without additional payment. It also doesn't matter how much the public schools spend -- they could be spartan or lavish, efficient or inefficient. All of the tax payments can be claimed as deductions.

This arrangement contrasts with the funds that support private schools. Some of these funds are tax deductions -- for example, when a charitable donation is given to a private school, even if the donation is from a parent whose child attends the school. But the tuition payments paid by the parents are not tax deductible, and this is where my question arises. What should the federal government's tax treatment of private school tuition be? I think the answer starts with some recognition that enrolling children in a private school reduces the financial burden on the citizens of the state and locality of funding their attendance at the public school which their residence entitles them to attend. If there were no private schools, then public schools and the taxes that support them would have to be higher. Those higher state and local taxes could then be claimed as deductions on federal income tax returns.

We can approximate the amount of higher deductions by the per-pupil expenditures in the school districts of those students who attend private schools, modified to exclude those expenditures that would not follow the typical student and capped at the amount of private school tuition paid. This is what the paper noted above contributes -- an estimate of the tax cost to the federal and state governments for allowing these deductions by combining data from the American Community Survey, Public School Finance data, and the NBER Taxsim calculator. The result of the analysis is that the tax cost to federal and state governments is surprisingly small -- under $10 billion per year in 2010 dollars using the ACS from 2006 - 2010.

The title of the paper is "Donating the Voucher," based on the idea that if every student received a voucher equal to the per-pupil expenditures in his or her district, then 10% of the students are claiming no services with their vouchers and have essentially donated them back to the citizens who fund the public schools. I blogged about the politics of the idea several years ago, before I started work on the paper. The full abstract of the paper is:

Approximately 10 percent of school-age children in the United States are enrolled in private schools, relieving the financial burden on public school systems, and the taxpayers who support them, of the cost of their education. At present, the tax code does not allow families who provide this financial relief an income tax deduction, even though such relief is a gift to governments for exclusively public purposes and thus analogous to a charitable donation. Using the Public Use Microdata Sample of the American Community Survey and the NBER Internet Taxsim calculator, this paper estimates that granting families who enroll their children in private schools an income tax deduction equal to the per-pupil expenditures in their public school district would cost the federal government an average of $7.75 billion per year over the 2006 – 2010 period. This amount is less than one percent of federal income tax revenues. Because private school enrollment, public school expenditures, the likelihood of itemization, and marginal tax rates increase with taxpayer income, the dollar benefits of this change are positively related to income. At the margin, high-income taxpayers would receive about 35 cents in federal and state tax relief for each dollar of per-pupil expenditures foregone. 

On Sending Your Kids to Private Versus Public Schools

Stupidity. Parody. You decide.

More MOOC Blogging

Echoing some of the skepticism in my most recent post on Massive Open Online Courses, Marc Bousquet writes in "Good MOOCs, Bad MOOCs" in the Chronicle's Brainstorm blog:

Good MOOC’s, in their view, foreground and sustain the social dimension of learning and active practices, i.e., knowledge production rather than knowledge consumption. To a limited extent, certain experiments in MOOC’s that foreground social media participation over “content mastery” realize some of the ideals of Siemen and Downes.

So what’s the rub? Well, the good intentions and featured best practices of Siemens and Downes exist in political and institutional realities. If institutions really wanted to sustain participatory learning, they would already be doing so, for instance, by reducing lectures and high-stakes testing, investing in teaching-intensive faculty and the like. Instead, driven less by cost concerns than a desire to standardize and control both faculty and curriculum, administrations rely more than ever on lectures and tests.

It’s hard to imagine that an education vendor, particularly one driven by profit, will do more than use Siemens’s and Downes’s excellent, sincere efforts as a tissue-paper justification for passing off cheap “social media opportunities” as a substitute for sustained interaction with working professional academics. Like their bricks-and-mortar counterparts, not to mention the community colleges and distance vendors they’re competing with, the heart of Coursera will be in lectures and tests.

That would be a shame -- a real missed opportunity to use online technology to enhance a college education.  Read the whole thing.

Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad MOOC?

The latest venture into the world of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, is a new consortium of research universities headed by Coursera to offer such opportunities.  I'm all for incorporating technological advances to help deliver educational content and opportunities to students.  As I wrote in a recent newsletter on campus,

The question we should ask ourselves is now that such material and experiences can be delivered adequately, if not superbly, online and globally, what does this free us up to do in the on-campus environment?

I think there will be plenty of good answers to that question.  I see online opportunities more as complements than as substitutes for on-campus learning.  So MOOCs just don't get me riled up.  There is quite a lot still left to be determined about them if they are to substitute for what we traditionally regard as a college education. Consider these passages from The New York Times article announcing the venture:

MOOCs were largely unknown until a wave of publicity last year about Stanford University’s free online artificial intelligence course attracted 160,000 students from 190 countries. Only a small percentage of the students completed the course, but even so, the numbers were staggering.

[...]

David P. Szatmary, the university [of Washington]’s vice provost, said that to earn credit, students would probably have to pay a fee, do extra assignments and work with an instructor.

[...]

Coursera does not pay the universities, and the universities do not pay Coursera, but both incur substantial costs. Contracts provide that if a revenue stream emerges, the company and the universities will share it.

Although MOOCs will have to be self-sustaining some day — whether by charging students for credentials or premium services or by charging corporate recruiters for access to the best students — Ms. Koller and university officials said that was not a pressing concern.

[...]

One looming hurdle is overcoming online cheating.

[...]

Grading presents some questions, too.

The hurdles, open questions, and unresolved issues are all the messy parts of running a sustainable education business.

What Should Colleges Do?

I had several reactions to this column in the New York Times on the purpose of a college education. My perspective is that of someone who works in higher education both as a faculty member and as the director of a public policy center that offers many programs to students, both in and out of the classroom.

First, there are the usual laments in the article about the need for colleges to provide a liberal arts education as the basis of an engaged citizenry.  I wholeheartedly agree that a liberal arts education can achieve that end.  I do not necessarily agree that we are best served by having that happen in college.  More specifically, why should we use years 13-16 of a student's education to do that?  Why can we not do most of that in years 9-12 or earlier?  The confusion about what should happen in college is in part derived from a confusion or a failure of execution in earlier years.  Why not set a goal for an engaged citizenry by the time citizens are 18?  We could then relax a bit about the broader implications of whether some universities are not focused enough on the liberal arts or whether they teach some standardized curriculum.  (For more, I recommend this post from the Berkeley Blog.)

Second, the article references recent policy proposals about making the college decision more transparent or financially remunerative, particularly with an eye toward a first job after college.  I understand that federal and state governments should be looking to get their money's worth, given how much of higher education they subsidize or provide.  But I view the efforts as largely inconsequential.  There are thousands of colleges.  Most of them say up front what their philosophies are. Even acknowledging that there is not always truth in advertising, there is no impediment other than time and sophistication to picking a good match.  (This was the original motivation for the article.)  As in other markets, there are intermediaries whom you can pay to economize on your own time or compensate for your own lack of sophistication as a consumer.

Third, the most interesting part of the article is the discussion of what some schools are doing to create more interesting learning experiences through multidisciplinary courses or sequences of courses on a given topic.  This part is worth quoting:

One example, she said, is the Pathways program at Santa Clara University in California, in which students in all majors take thematically based sequences of courses that draw together several disciplines. Sustainability, the idea that the current generation can meet its needs without sacrificing future generations’, can be studied, for example, from the point of view of business, history, philosophy and politics. And at Indiana University, the Liberal Arts and Management Program offers interdisciplinary courses like “The History of the Automobile: Economy, Politics and Culture.” This program enables students to learn their specialty in the context of history, literature and other liberal arts.

“Universities need to be more creative in their thinking,” she said. And while internships can help bring a practical piece, faculty members need to oversee what is being learned and connect it back to the rest of the academic learning — something that is not done enough, she said.

This is something that we try to do at my Center in our public policy minor, but we and the rest of my institution could be more focused on thematic learning in this way.

Fourth, the most damning indictment of higher education in the article is that nowhere is the possibility of a student graduating into a life of entrepreneurship even remotely considered. Why are we not taking the smartest people and encouraging them to create something new, rather than wait in some form of a queue for a job to open up? I have taken to saying that education does not create jobs, it just qualifies you for a job. If you want to make the article author's life easier, create a system that facilitates job growth, rather than focusing on job types. This is a very important problem colleges should focus on.

Someone Has To Make War

Click through and read to the end of this article in The New York Times to learn who spoke the title of this post.  The battle lines are being drawn in the emerging race to succeed New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  And one of the biggest issues will be whether the educational reforms started under his leadership will continue. 

I am wired to be hypersensitive to the excesses of teachers' unions.  Michael Mulgrew, president of the city's teachers' union, does himself no favors in my opinion with this remark:

“If these 1-percenters want to mount an AstroTurf campaign with their deep pockets, they’ve done this before,” he said. “But let’s be clear: the public school parents have not bought into the Bloomberg education reform movement.” 

I would much prefer that teacher unions, along with everyone else engaged in public education, stay focused on improving educational outcomes, not merely the outcomes for educators.

Udacity -- A Preview of Education to Come

Felix Salmon's post about the model of online education exemplified by Udacity is a must read.  People in my business are supposed to feel threatened by the idea that online education might replace traditional education.  I don't feel threatened at all.  Instead, what a good online interface challenges us all to do is to figure out how to improve on the traditional residence-based college experience given the ability to digitize and widely disseminate more content than we previously could.  The post states it well:

What Khan and Thrun and others are creating is a new educational paradigm, which promises not only much greater scalability than anything we’ve had until now, but also higher-quality education. That’s the real lesson of Thrun’s Stanford students taking his class online: it means that the online model really can have its cake (reach millions of people) while eating it too (be better for students than the courses offered at elite institutions).

An example of how to do this well in a more traditional environment than Udacity or Khan Academy is the new online MBA program at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business at UNC.  Here's the marketing pitch for it:

MBA@UNC is uniquely designed to empower you with the business knowledge and relationships you’ll need to accelerate your career wherever you may work and live. The program format is comprised of three learning environments:

• Asynchronous or self-paced course content and interactive case studies and collaborative activities;
• Synchronous or live, face-to-face online class sessions; and
• Three-day global immersions held each quarter focused on developing your leadership skills.

The MBA@UNC program is delivered using an advanced online learning platform that includes original broadcast-quality video, self-paced lectures, interactive case studies and collaborative activities that foster teamwork. Our interactive social technology allows you to study and interact 24/7 with professors and fellow classmates who live and work around the globe.

With these opportunities on the horizon, it makes sense to embrace the technology-driven opportunities, not to fear them.

The Need for Efficient Public Institutions

I'll score this column by David Brooks, "Midlife Crisis Economics" as a win.  His thesis:

In the progressive era, the economy was in its adolescence and the task was to control it. Today the economy is middle-aged; the task is to rejuvenate it. 

He offers three pieces of evidence, which I'll summarize as:

1. Our economy is not prone to creating jobs as much as it is to boosting productivity to grow without rapid job creation.
2. Our government today has the tools to confront social challenges, but it lacks the institutional effectiveness to make progress against them.
3. Our moral culture has deteriorated, requiring government institutions to carry a larger burden than in prior eras.

I think he is correct on all three.  You can read and judge for yourself.  The one that offers the most straightforward opportunities for better public policy is #2.  He mentions specifically:

The United States spends far more on education than any other nation, with paltry results. It spends far more on health care, again, with paltry results. It spends so much on poverty programs that if we just took that money and handed poor people checks, we would virtually eliminate poverty overnight.

Spending a lot to achieve paltry results is inefficiency on a large scale.  These three issues (and one other) -- health, education, the environment, and poverty -- are the big issues in domestic public policy.  More and more, they appear to be ones that our political system is incapable of handling.

There will always be an element of each one that remains in the public realm.  Our political system is set up for a split-the-difference approach among two factions that share a common belief that the policy outcomes should be improved.  That approach has broken down (and, in prior posts, I have laid the blame on the political right's connectedness problem.)  In its absence, the quality of the public institutions that are invariably tasked with addressing them has declined, leading to the inefficiency that Brooks is observing.

Gaps and Redundancies

There is some irony to be found in the title of Tamar Levin's excellent article in Friday's edition of The New York Times, "Report Urges Changes in Teaching Math." To do anything other than what the report recommends would hardly qualify as teaching math. Here's the crux of the matter:

Closely tracking an influential 2006 report by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the panel recommended that math curriculum should include fewer topics, spending enough time to make sure each is learned in enough depth that it need not be revisited in later grades. That is the approach used in most top-performing nations, and since the 2006 report, many states have been revising their standards to cover fewer topics in greater depth.

It was the frequent revisiting of earlier topics in later grades, with little increase in the sophistication of the approach, that drove me crazy in primary and secondary school. And it wasn't just math--it was virtually every subject. And despite this revisiting in later grades, students' achievements lag those in other countries. So much redundancy in instruction, and yet so many gaps in knowledge. That's strong evidence of the possibility of making gains in outcomes without additional resources.

There is more of interest in the article, particularly in this passage:

After hearing testimony and comments from hundreds of organizations and individuals, and sifting through a broad array of 16,000 research publications, the panelists shaped their report around recent research on how children learn.

For example, the report found it is important for students to master their basic math facts well enough that their recall becomes automatic, stored in their long-term memory, leaving room in their working memory to take in new math processes.

“For all content areas, practice allows students to achieve automaticity of basic skills — the fast, accurate and effortless processing of content information — which frees up working memory for more complex aspects of problem solving,” the report said.

Dr. Faulkner, a former president of the University of Texas at Austin, said the panel “buys the notion from cognitive science that kids have to know the facts.”

We needed cognitive science to figure that out? There was some competing notion, masquerading as an educational philosophy, that suggested that kids did not have to know the facts? The recommended approach all sounds very familiar, if not widely utilized.

Read the whole thing.

Don't Blame this on Math

In yesterday's New York Times, we are told "Math Suggests College Frenzy Will Soon Ease." Actually, I don't get the math in a couple of places. Let's start here:

Projections show that by next year or the year after, the annual number of high school graduates in the United States will peak at about 2.9 million after a 15-year climb. The number is then expected to decline until about 2015. Most universities expect this to translate into fewer applications and less selectivity, with most students probably finding it easier to get into college.

The article cites projections from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. How can there only be 2.9 million high school graduates per year?

We know from the American Community Survey that in 2006, there were 17.5 million students enrolled in high school and that enrollment rates for those under age 17 are 95% or higher. We also know that only 7% of teens 16-19 are classified as high school dropouts. So we are looking at a graduation number that's in the neighborhood of 17.5*(1/4)*(0.93) = 4.1 million.

So I don't trust the WICHE projections, but it is worth considering the simple population movements. Here is a graph of the number of 18-year olds by year, based on Census projections:

So there is a dip coming up in the population of 18-year olds that will turn back the clock by about 10 years.

Is that a lot or a little? As one example, for the Class of 2010 at Dartmouth, there were 13,938 applicants, of whom 2,186 or 15.7% were admitted. If this were the peak, and we applied the changes in the projections (a drop to 90.7% of the peak), that would boost the admit rate to 15.7/0.907 = 16.9% before it began to fall again. I don't think we'll notice any easing in the frenzy here in Hanover.

Good Jobs at Good Wages

I know, the employment report has no good news in it, but this front page story in The New York Times is sure to get some attention. The concept:

Would six-figure salaries attract better teachers?

A New York City charter school set to open in 2009 in Washington Heights will test one of the most fundamental questions in education: Whether significantly higher pay for teachers is the key to improving schools.

The school, which will run from fifth to eighth grades, is promising to pay teachers $125,000, plus a potential bonus based on schoolwide performance. That is nearly twice as much as the average New York City public school teacher earns, roughly two and a half times the national average teacher salary and higher than the base salary of all but the most senior teachers in the most generous districts nationwide.

The school’s creator and first principal, Zeke M. Vanderhoek, contends that high salaries will lure the best teachers. He says he wants to put into practice the conclusion reached by a growing body of research: that teacher quality — not star principals, laptop computers or abundant electives — is the crucial ingredient for success.

“I would much rather put a phenomenal, great teacher in a field with 30 kids and nothing else than take the mediocre teacher and give them half the number of students and give them all the technology in the world,” said Mr. Vanderhoek, 31, a Yale graduate and former middle school teacher who built a test preparation company that pays its tutors far more than the competition.

I would much rather see that, too. At this school, teachers will be paid so well that they'll make more than the principal, an inversion which generated this:

Ernest A. Logan, president of the city principals’ union, called the notion of paying the principal less than the teachers “the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s nice to have a first violinist, a first tuba, but you’ve got to have someone who brings them all together,” Mr. Logan said. “If you cheapen the role of the school leader, you’re going to have anarchy and chaos.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, called the hefty salaries “a good experiment.” But she said that when teachers were not unionized, and most charter school teachers are not, their performance can be hampered by a lack of power in dealing with the principal. “What happens the first time a teacher says something like, ‘I don’t agree with you?’ ”

Presumably, the principal listens to what the teacher has to say and then makes a decision, which may or may not accommodate the teacher's disagreement. Millions of businesses, and even some educational institutions, operate on this principle. Those that operate in competitive markets don't prosper by ignoring good advice or treating talented employees as if they are inconsequential. And the teacher is not an indentured servant here--"nothing" prevents a teacher dissatisfied with a principal from starting a rival school with better policies.

The Age of Friedman is not dead yet.

The Play's the Thing

Why am I not surprised by this?

Harry Potter, James Patterson and Oprah Winfrey’s book club aside, Americans — particularly young Americans — appear to be reading less for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores are declining. At the same time, performance in other academic disciplines like math and science is dipping for students whose access to books is limited, and employers are rating workers deficient in basic writing skills.

That is the message of a new report being released today by the National Endowment for the Arts, based on an analysis of data from about two dozen studies from the federal Education and Labor Departments and the Census Bureau as well as other academic, foundation and business surveys. After its 2004 report, “Reading at Risk,” which found that fewer than half of Americans over 18 read novels, short stories, plays or poetry, the endowment sought to collect more comprehensive data to build a picture of the role of all reading, including nonfiction.

Despite the problem of establishing the direction of causation, I am inclined to believe that it is the reduction in reading for pleasure that has caused the deterioration in reading and writing competency. It is so much easier to teach young people to do something when they get to take some ownership of and responsibility for what they are learning. Within some loose constraints regarding length and degree of difficulty, students should simply be encouraged and expected to read, with adults leading by example. As I've blogged before, force-feeding students a steady diet of stuff that doesn't interest them is a losing strategy. And, sadly, there can be a vicious cycle here: loss of interest leads to more regimentation; more regimentation further erodes interest; and on it goes.

I came across the article linked above shortly after reading this story in the Sunday paper, from which the following is an excerpt:

As Richard [Louv] notes in "Last Child in the Woods," the obesity epidemic coincides with a record-high increase in organized sports for kids. How does that correlate with the need for more outdoor play?

[Martha] Erickson: Obesity relates not only to activity level but also to the type and quantity of food we eat. That said, in organized sports, kids often have little actual playtime. But watch a group of children in a wooded area, and you'll see them running, climbing over things, then dashing over to whatever captures their attention next.

[Tedd] Mitchell: Last summer, my sons built a fort out of storage pallets and hay at our ranch. That project took them all weekend. They were like beavers, constantly moving back and forth between our barn and the woods. Sports are more about following directions to the letter. They're great for discipline -- and can have mental and physical benefits -- but they don't leave room for the imagination. Kids get bored so easily because they don't have the amount of time we did, when we were young, to just play.

Again, there could be reverse causality, but I am inclined to think that the organized sports, when they come at the expense of disorganized play, are the critical factor here. If there is no imagination involved, we don't get the full body and mind involved, and we don't get the long-term benefits.

Narrowing, Widening, and Polarizing

This new NBER working paper by Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz just made it to the top of the must-read pile. The title and abstract (with my emphasis added):

Long-Run Changes in the U.S. Wage Structure: Narrowing, Widening, Polarizing

The U.S. wage structure evolved across the last century: narrowing from 1910 to 1950, fairly stable in the 1950s and 1960s, widening rapidly during the 1980s, and “polarizing” since the late 1980s. We document the spectacular rise of U.S. wage inequality after 1980 and place recent changes into a century-long historical perspective to understand the sources of change. The majority of the increase in wage inequality since 1980 can be accounted for by rising educational wage differentials, just as a substantial part of the decrease in wage inequality in the earlier era can be accounted for by decreasing educational wage differentials.

Although skill-biased technological change has generated rapid growth in the relative demand for more-educated workers for at least the past century, increases in the supply of skills, from rising educational attainment of the U.S. work force, more than kept pace for most of the twentieth century. Since 1980, however, a sharp decline in skill supply growth driven by a slowdown in the rise of educational attainment of successive U.S. born cohorts has been a major factor in the surge in educational wage differentials. Polarization set in during the late 1980s with employment shifts into high- and low-wage jobs at the expense of the middle leading to rapidly rising upper tail wage inequality but modestly falling lower tail wage inequality.

The sentences that I have highlighted seem directly relevant to this earlier discussion in August 2006 about whether Paul Krugman was right to accuse Treasury Secretary Paulson of "falsely implying that rising inequality is mainly a story about rising wages for the highly educated." (See follow up posts here and here.)

I'll look forward to reading the paper and revisiting the broader issue.

Public Education Reform in the Presence of Monopolies

Via Ezra Klein and Mark Thoma, I am directed to a very good post by Kevin Carey at The Quick and the Ed on the relevance of teacher's unions to fixing the problems in public schools. I'll first take issue with a theme that emerges in the commentary, expressed by Mark as:

Public schools in higher ranked socio-economic areas do very well, even with unions present, so I don't think unions are the major issue.

The statement is worded so loosely that I can't really falsify it. However, the issue is not whether a union is present but whether the union's presence is a binding constraint on improvements to the educational system. In higher socio-economic areas, there are far fewer underlying challenges to the educational system and thus fewer opportunities for the union's pursuit of its own interests to interfere with addressing those challenges. The appropriate counterfactual to consider is whether the public schools--whether in higher or lower ranked socio-economic areas--would do even better in the absence of unions. The answer can certainly be "yes" if the unions were using their monopoly power to constrain the behavior of other stakeholders in the system.

But the monopoly that's relevant is not primarily the teacher's union, it is the monopoly of the school board over the educational choices of the families in the area (which itself may facilitate the unionization of the labor force). Of the several elements that characterize the public schools in my town:

I do not object to the generally progressive manner in which educational funds are raised within the district. We have a local property tax. In this community, the value of the house is a pretty close analogue of permanent income. (I don't necessarily advocate property tax funding more generally given the disparities across districts, but that's a different matter.)

I do not object to the use of some of those monies to run our highly regarded public schools that my children could attend without additional payments from K-12.

However, I strongly object to the constraint that all of these monies go into just these three schools (covering K-5, 6-8, 9-12). I have no choice of provider if my views of the best educational program for my children are at odds with those of the school board, acting on behalf (hopefully) of the other members of my community. I don't begrudge them their views, but I simply may not share them. I don't see why I should have to forfeit all of the tax monies that would be spent on my children's behalf to put them in private schools.

The money that is allocated to my children's education--not the tax money I pay--should follow the children rather than being constrained to be spent only at the government-run schools. That's the key monopoly problem, whether in high-ranked socio-economic areas like mine where additional expenditures are a desirable luxury good or in more disadvantaged areas where the consigning of low-income students to poorly performing schools is catastrophic. If the money followed the children, then multiple providers would compete, and members of the community could be better served by that diversity.

I may post more on implementation of such a system at a later date.