Oklahoma gettin' smarter, North Carolina gettin' dumber

Cool graph from a group called City Report showing how young educated people are flowing into selected urban areas.

Here the increase in young people with BAs or better in on the vertical axis and the increase in total population is on the horizontal:

As you can see OKC has the second largest increase in young educated people and that increase is large given its overall population growth. Charlotte NC and Raleigh NC are getting relatively dumber as their overall population is growing faster than their young and educated population (Atlanta and Dallas too!).

Interestingly New Orleans, Buffalo and Pittsburgh are losing overall population while gaining a decent amount of young and educated people, while Detroit and Cleveland are stinking in both dimensions.

I guess all those Mungowitz-educated  Duke students are not staying in NC!

Hat-tip to The Upshot!

Taking On the Ivy League

It is possible to do better on education.  Even in higher ed, where the U.S. is pretty good, it is possible to do MUCH better.  An interesting video with some ideas on how.


Also...the Minerva Project

Nod to the Ward Boss.

If you read this post, you're a bad person

Amazing piece on Slate , titled, "If you send your child to private school, you're a bad person"

Here's the thesis:

it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.

According to the article, this happens because it's the activist parents who take their kids out, so if they were in, their activism would be channeled into improving the public school.

As of 2007 (latest data I saw, thanks to Andrew Young), 88% of kids go to public schools. So if they stink at this level of participation, somehow getting the last 12% in would make a long-run difference? This I doubt.

I also think, as Alex T. pointed out many years ago, that exit makes voice effective. Or put another way, voice without exit is of limited use (think about complaining at the DMV).

People, you do not owe the government blind support and cooperation. You absolutely do not.

Breaking down the higher ed wage premium

The wage premium for higher education is high and growing. This is well known. Perhaps less appreciated though is that the average premium can vary greatly by college major and by whether or not the person gets an advanced degree.

Luckily for us, there is a very nice piece from the Cleveland Fed on these questions.

Here's a graph from the paper of the overall premium (clic the pic for an even more educational image):

Median wages for BA/BS and higher have gone from 140% of high school only wages to 180% of high school only wages from 1977 to 2010. Note that the premium for "some college" has stayed fairly flat over the same time period.


So, "go to college, young person", right? Well there is the big issue of whether higher education creates human capital or just serves as a signal of innate ability (phone call for Robin Hanson).


And there's also the issues of "what major" and "what degree".


Here's another graph from that Cleveland Fed piece (clic the pic for an even more self-serving image):

English majors get a wage premium of a bit below 1.5 and if they get an advanced degree, it's around 1.75.  Economics majors get a wage premium of a bit below 2 and if they get an advanced degree, it's around 3.00

Yet the thickness of the bars tells us that there are more english majors than economics majors (of course this could have something to do with labor demand, but I somehow doubt it)!

Electrical engineering is the most remunerative major with an average premium of 2.5. Elementary Education is the least with a average premium well below 1.3.

In sum, a BA/BS is not a guarantee of an 80% wage premium. Not all majors may be "worth it" economically, given the accounting costs and opportunity costs of getting the degree.  

Trying to get a degree and failing can also be costly if multiple years are burned up in the attempt. Dropping out without a degree after 5 years of going to college is on average, an economic disaster.

So, "get a degree in the most remunerative major that you can get through, subject to the constraint that you can do it quickly and cheaply enough to make it worthwhile".

Note that these graphs are equally consistent with both the signaling and capital formation views of higher ed.

What In the World? "Political Foundations"?

What is "political," exactly? It is NOT true that African-American parents don't care about their children's education. So the "political" problem must be that politicians do not validate that desire? Am I missing something?
 
The Political Foundations of the Black–White Education Achievement Gap 

Michael Hartney & Patrick Flavin
American Politics Research, forthcoming

 Abstract: More than 50 years after Brown v. Board, African American students continue to trail their White peers on a variety of important educational indicators. In this article, we investigate the political foundations of the racial “achievement gap” in American education. Using variation in high school graduation rates across the states, we first assess whether state policymakers are attentive to the educational needs of struggling African American students. We find evidence that state policymaking attention to teacher quality — an issue education research shows is essential to improving schooling outcomes for racial minority students — is highly responsive to low graduation rates among White students, but bears no relationship to low graduation rates among African American students. We then probe a possible mechanism behind this unequal responsiveness by examining the factors that motivate White public opinion about education reform and find racial influences there as well. Taken together, we uncover evidence that the persisting achievement gap between White and African American students has distinctively political foundations.

Nod to Kevin Lewis.

In Other News, Water is Still Wet

The chief bureaucrat of the UNC System announces that there is no need to reduce the size of the bureaucracy he is overseeing.


UNC system President Tom Ross said on Monday that the administration would look at ways to effect more efficiencies, but added he didn’t think closing any of the campuses was a good idea. 

Regarding an idea floated by Senate Republican budget leaders earlier this year that closure of one or more of the UNC campuses had been considered, Ross said that he questioned how much money could be saved by doing so. “We’re happy to look at the idea of closing campuses if you want us to,” Ross said. “The economics of it are not smart for North Carolina." 

So, he hasn't looked at it.  But he will look at it, if we want.  But he knows without looking it is "not smart."  My own view is that if he honestly looked, he might find this.  

Phone call for Bill Niskanen.

Boys Will Be....

Article by C.H. Sommers, "The Boys in the Back"

Boys score as well as or better than girls on most standardized tests, yet they are far less likely to get good grades, take advanced classes or attend college. Why? A study coming out this week in The Journal of Human Resources gives an important answer. Teachers of classes as early as kindergarten factor good behavior into grades — and girls, as a rule, comport themselves far better than boys.

The study’s authors analyzed data from more than 5,800 students from kindergarten through fifth grade and found that boys across all racial groups and in all major subject areas received lower grades than their test scores would have predicted.

The scholars attributed this “misalignment” to differences in “noncognitive skills”: attentiveness, persistence, eagerness to learn, the ability to sit still and work independently. As most parents know, girls tend to develop these skills earlier and more naturally than boys.

No previous study, to my knowledge, has demonstrated that the well-known gender gap in school grades begins so early and is almost entirely attributable to differences in behavior. The researchers found that teachers rated boys as less proficient even when the boys did just as well as the girls on tests of reading, math and science. (The teachers did not know the test scores in advance.) If the teachers had not accounted for classroom behavior, the boys’ grades, like the girls’, would have matched their test scores.

ATSRTWT

Nod to Anonyman

If Demand is Too High....Charge LESS!

Some innovative thinking from Florida, on higher education.

We'll subsidize the degrees that people already want by charging lower tuition, and tax the degrees that are not popular by charging higher tuition.

Or, is it that employers want people with these degrees, but students don't want those degrees?  They prefer useless degrees, and the state is trying to use Pigouvian taxes to get people to want what the state wants them to want?

Either way, I had not heard of price discrimination on tuition, based on the opposite of desirability of the degree.

With thanks to Chateau...

Lockhart's Lament

Raoul sends this nice bit.  It contains a link to "Lockhart's Lament," which is worth reading at length.  You have likely read it before (I did), but it rewards new study.

Background from Keith Devlin:

Lockhart is a mathematics teacher at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, New York. He became interested in mathematics when he was about 14 (outside of the school math class, he points out) and read voraciously, becoming especially interested in analytic number theory. He dropped out of college after one semester to devote himself to math, supporting himself by working as a computer programmer and as an elementary school teacher. Eventually he started working with Ernst Strauss at UCLA, and the two published a few papers together. Strauss introduced him to Paul Erdos, and they somehow arranged it so that he became a graduate student there. He ended up getting a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1990, and went on to be a fellow at MSRI and an assistant professor at Brown. He also taught at UC Santa Cruz. His main research interests were, and are, automorphic forms and Diophantine geometry.

After several years teaching university mathematics, Paul eventually tired of it and decided he wanted to get back to teaching children. He secured a position at Saint Ann's School, where he says "I have happily been subversively teaching mathematics (the real thing) since 2000."

He teaches all grade levels at Saint Ann's (K-12), and says he is especially interested in bringing a mathematician's point of view to very young children. "I want them to understand that there is a playground in their minds and that that is where mathematics happens. So far I have met with tremendous enthusiasm among the parents and kids, less so among the mid-level administrators," he wrote in an email to me. Now where have I heard that kind of thing before? But enough of my words.

Education: News From the Front

"As consumers wise up about education spending, for-profit colleges are getting schooled. Institutions such as Apollo Group Inc.'s University of Phoenix, DeVry Inc. and Washington Post Co.'s Kaplan — who only a few years ago reported double-digit student gains on a regular basis and posted hundreds of millions in profits — now are hemorrhaging students." [WSJ]

----------------------

"'Our classes are basically completely filled, they're 100% full. And it's maddening for us because we pride ourselves on access,' says [Santa Monica College] president Chui Tsang. Desperate to widen access, last spring he came up with a programme he called Advance Your Dreams. Tsang's plan would enable students to pay up to 400% more for a guaranteed seat in a class, and the money generated would have allowed extra classes to be arranged." [BBC]

----------------------

"What is more surprising — because no one else has looked at this question lately anywhere in the country — is that the laid-off people around Janesville who went to Blackhawk [Technical College] are faring worse than their laid-off neighbors who did not. We discovered this striking fact by comparing the dislocated workers who retrained with a larger group of about 28,000 residents, from the two counties where most Blackhawk students live, who had collected unemployment benefits recently and not gone to the college. For one thing, the people who didn’t retrain are working more. About half of them had wages every season of the year, compared with about one in three who went to Blackhawk. An even bigger gap exists in how much those who have jobs are earning. Before the recession, we found, the two groups – the dislocated workers who went to school and the ones who didn’t – were, on average, getting paid about the same. Afterwards, the ones who didn’t retrain are earning more. Their pay has fallen by just 8 percent – about one-fourth the size of the pay drop among the people who went to school." [Amy Goldstein, ProPublica]

How to interpret?  Sounds like the market is working its magic, and fraudulent for-profit schools are getting what they deserve.  It just makes sense to charge more for new access, and people who doubt that care more about fairness than they care about people.  And the only thing that Obama and Romney agree on, is wrong.  Happy Monday!

Nod to Kevin Lewis

Roth and Shapley Win Nobel in Econ

Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley win Nobel in economics for algorithms for matching.

Everything I know about this subfield I learned from my friend Atila A., here at Duke.  Here is a paper he coauthored with Roth, in the AER.  It's an interesting and important problem, though the "solutions" are highly technical.  But this paper is quite accessible.

 

Not the Onion: Stupid Gun Fears Edition

Really?  The kid is DEAF.  He uses American Sign.  His name sign "looks like" he is holding his hand like a gun."  Why in the world do you idiots want to make a little deaf kid feel bad?

The parents of a 3-year-old deaf boy from Nebraska say his preschool told them he must change the way he signs his name because it looks like a finger-pistol...The family of pre-schooler Hunter Spanjer said officials at the Grand Island Public Schools told them the manner in which the boy signs his name is a violation of its “weapons in school” policy. They claim they were told Hunter had to modify the way he signs his moniker to comply with the school's zero tolerance code against weapons in school.

I have a "sign" for the nuts who have taken over our schools.  It involves the sign of me grabbing my private parts, wiggling around a lot.

Apparently, the school is now denying everything.  But the ACLU found enough cause to take up the case, on behalf of the boy.

Private education for the poor?

Mrs. Angus and I greatly enjoyed "The Beautiful Tree" by James Tooley and have become very interested in the potential making private education available for the poor especially in areas where the public school system has failed them.

So I was happy to see that the Oxfam Blog "From Poverty to Power", was hosting a debate on the merits of private schooling for the poor.

Arguing in favor is Justin Sandefur from the Center for Global Development.

Arguing against is Kevin Watkins from Brookings.

Public education is a real problem in many parts of many poor countries. While enrollment rates are rising, as called for by the Millennium Development Goals, achievement (i.e. actual learning) is often quite poor. Even Watkins concedes this point.

The future of higher ed: an alternative view

Brian Caplan & LeBron have been discussing online higher ed vs. brick and mortar higher ed.

I believe that the future of higher ed is brick and mortar.

 I don't think bad lectures are what is holding back students (self-serving perhaps). It's actually just LECTURES that hold them back, whether they are in a classroom on online.

Kids don't learn a ton, don't retain what they learn, and struggle to apply what they've learned.

I am becoming convinced that "peer instruction" or "the flipped classroom" is the way to go. This approach combines classroom work with online work, but the main thing it does is take the lecture out of the classroom.

Students do required reading or watch a required video before the class and then take a pre-class quiz on the material. Instructors use that feedback to generate discussion questions and instant feedback quizzes to help students work out their issues with the material. Instructors can pair up students who are getting it right with those getting it wrong for some peer to peer instruction.

Eric Mazur of Harvard is the guru of this approach. Mrs. A and I are hoping to transition onto his bandwagon. Here's a link to an article about Mazur.  Here's a link to an excellent blogpost on how the method can work.

Nudging Students?

The Behavioralist Goes to School: Leveraging Behavioral Economics to Improve Educational Performance

UPDATE:  Mark S. sends this ungated version...

Steven Levitt et al.
NBER Working Paper, June 2012

Abstract: A long line of research on behavioral economics has established the importance of factors that are typically absent from the standard economic framework: reference dependent preferences, hyperbolic preferences, and the value placed on non-financial rewards. To date, these insights have had little impact on the way the educational system operates. Through a series of field experiments involving thousands of primary and secondary school students, we demonstrate the power of behavioral economics to influence educational performance. Several insights emerge. First, we find that incentives framed as losses have more robust effects than comparable incentives framed as gains. Second, we find that non-financial incentives are considerably more cost-effective than financial incentives for younger students, but were not effective with older students. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, consistent with hyperbolic discounting, all motivating power of the incentives vanishes when rewards are handed out with a delay. Since the rewards to educational investment virtually always come with a delay, our results suggest that the current set of incentives may lead to underinvestment. For policymakers, our findings imply that in the absence of immediate incentives, many students put forth low effort on standardized tests, which may create biases in measures of student ability, teacher value added, school quality, and achievement gaps.

Nod to Kevin Lewis...

hang up the phone, Calderon

People, I never realized all the dimensions in which Felipe Calderon has been a bad president for Mexico.

This recent article in the Washington Post reveals another; He sold his soul to Elba Esther Gordillo, condemning Mexican public schools to another sexenio of misery.

The article details the misery,

 "The country is a member of the Group of 20 and boasts of the world’s 14th-largest economy, but only a quarter of its children graduate from high school. Sixth-graders in Mexico get 562 hours of “instructional learning” a year. In South Korea, it’s 1,195 hours...


 Yet Mexico’s lame performance is not about money. A generous 20 percent of the country’s budget goes to education, about $30 billion a year. More than 90 percent goes to salaries — negotiated by the teachers union, which dictates policy.


 “It was — and sadly still is — a very corrupt system,” said Carlos Ornelos, a specialist in education at the Autonomous Metropolitan University who was one of the first, in the 1990s, to expose the practice of teachers buying and selling their jobs. An elementary school teaching post, a tenured position for life, still sells for as much as $20,000 in the resort city of Cancun, and a post in a rural village can be had for $2,000, Ornelas said."

Yikes!

Links

1.  The Dub-MOE runs away from giving money to pols

2.  Anonyman claims this may be why I am not Governor:  cute people win, tall people win.  Even in the AEA, of all things.  Ewwwwwww.

3.  The Vatican is fighting with the nuns.  The nuns are being led by Mick Jagger in a wig.  Check it out.

4.  UNC-CH decides to go along with idiotic "Dear Colleague" thugs.  The threat is that the feds will sue or hold up money if schools don't go along with the "new policy."  But the new policy makes criminal charges follow from the civil standard of evidence, "preponderance of evidence."  Here is why that is a bad idea.

The End of College?

Not sure if I am the problem, the solution, or just confused.  But I'm a "member" of five departments:  Duke Econ, Duke Poli Sci, Duke Public Policy, UNC Poli Sci, and UNC Public Policy.  That's not really a silo.  A two-part series in Bloomberg.  Interesting.

Part I: Competition Kills Colleges

Part II:  The College Cave Age

Politics and RCTs

Justin Sandefur and longtime KPC friend Mwangi Kimenyi along with Tessa Bold, Germano Mwabu & Alice Ng’ang’a  have written a remarkable paper about the non-uniform results of an educational intervention in Kenya. The paper is well-deserving of discussion, but so is the story of its evolution.

The paper studies an intervention that adds "contract teachers" to schools. Contract teachers are meant to be teachers outside of the main educational bureaucracy who in some way have close ties and more accountability to the local community than the "regular" teachers. In the study, some of the intervention was run by the government, and some was run by an NGO (Worldvision). Test scores in math and reading went up by 0.2 standard deviations compared to the control schools when the intervention was run by the NGO and this increase was statistically significant. However, the intervention had no effect on test scores when it was administered by the government.

This result alone points out the difficulties involved in scaling up education intervention that have been tested by RCTs run by NGOs. Size means government and government might not work.

But people, there is so much more to the story!

The concept of contract teachers initially involved remedial teaching. Banerjee, Cole, Duflo and Linden (QJE 2007) study an NGO-run program in India where the contract teachers tutored remedial students (which raised test scores 0.28 standard deviations). Duflo, Duplass, & Kremer study a contract teacher RCT in Kenya that included the concept of "tracking" where contract teachers were added to a specific class. In some cases the class was randomly split into two groups; in others it was split into low and high scorers on an initial test. This split into more homogeneous classes produced the biggest positive results in the trial.

In an email exchange, Justin told me that while Duflo encouraged him to include a tracking component in his study, she said that it was very unpopular and hard to administer. It is also hard to imagine a government run program that would allow such a component. Think about the USA. What would parents do if they found that classes were being segregated by test scores and their kid was in the "dumb" group?

Because they were explicitly interested in the idea of scaling up a program that could be run by the government, Sandefur et. al. did not include any idea of tracking in their study. In other words, they judged a key element of the success of contract teachers in previous RCTs to be politically unviable ex-ante.

But there's more!

The Sandefur study was part of a pilot program in Kenya. However, things didn't go according to plan:

the Ministry opted to scale-up the contract teacher program before the pilot was completed. Thus the randomized pilot program analyzed here was launched in June 2010, and in October 2010 the Ministry hired 18,000 contract teachers nationwide, nearly equivalent to one per school. These 18,000 teachers were initially hired on two-year, non-renewable contracts, at salary levels of roughly $135 per month, somewhat higher than the highest tier for the pilot phase. In 2011 the Ministry succumbed to political pressure and agreed to allow the contract teachers to unionize and subsequently to hire all 18,000 contract teachers into the civil service at the end of their contracts.

In other words, 18,000 supposed "intervention" teachers became "control" teachers! In plainer terms, they switched from being part of the solution to being part of the problem. Although maybe not, because as Sandefur et. al showed, the government administered contract teachers had no positive impact on outcomes.

In sum, the Sandefur et. al paper shows that while small scale contract teacher RCTs produced modest but positive results, it is not likely those results will survive scaling and government administration.

So what to do? Well Justin & Mwangi along with Tessa Bold and Germano Mwabu have another paper that points to what I believe is the solution at least in the short and medium term. They show that in Kenya, being in a private school raises test scores by one full standard deviation relative to public schools, other relevant factors held constant (this is not an RCT but rather uses "observational" data).

So on the one hand we have these interventions in public schools that raise outcomes by a couple tenths of a standard deviation when implemented on a small scale by NGOs and that may will have no effect when scaled up and implemented by governments.

On the other hand we have an institution (private schools) that raises test scores dramatically more by effectively solving the teacher accountability problems that seem to be behind the outcome problems in public schools in Kenya and other developing countries.

Let me channel Milton Friedman and James Tooley and suggest expanded private schooling with a public voucher program as potentially the greatest pay-off educational intervention available in such situations.

Duke Beats UNC, Again

Duke has some admittedly questionable rules on suppressing free expression. But by and large we do pretty well. (I would credit our Provost, Peter Lange. He has very solid common sense on what a university is supposed to be, and he actually likes the idea of free expression and due process. May other universities have such academic officials, 'cause there aren't enough like Dr. Lange. If you have forgotten, check this video, starting at about 1:05. Peter faced a mob, alone.).

UNC on the other hand.... Well, UNC sucks. I say that as a UNC fan, as someone whose older son (the EYM) is graduating from UNC. UNC, stop it. What are you afraid of?