Comments on: Trading Places

By: britta

britta — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 06:50:06 +0000

I went to school in a school district where a) all public high schools were magnet schools and b) public transportation was subsidized by the city for students, making choice very achievable for students. Moreover, funding was roughly inversely proportional to the success of the school (with some exceptions). The highest performing school, which had an international baccalaureate curriculum and sent 95% of its students to university had the lowest per student funding, whereas the worst off school, which had less than a 30% graduation rate, had one of the highest student funding ratios. The rationale was that the highest performing school did well because of the IB curriculum, caliber of students (predominantly white upper middle class), and quality of its teachers, all of which were not that expensive after an initial investment, and also that sending more money to the worst performing school might create an incentive for students to go there. The result was interesting in that it ended up with a very high performing school with overcrowded classrooms (There were 50 students in my calculus class, and in some classes the last students had to sit on the windowsill or stand. Indeed, some teachers asked their students to attend class in rotating four day shifts and then skip on the fifth day to relieve crowding); substandard classrooms; and worn out/photocopied books. In contrast, the worst performing school had extremely small class sizes, motivated teachers, and was in a beautifully renovated building. It did not have the intended effect of reducing inequality however, and despite the extra funding, the school remained underperforming, with about 40% of neighborhood students choosing not to attend.
While funding is certainly important for good schooling, the correlation between money and quality of a school seems not to be as strong as many people are assuming, especially if it’s a superficial amount. It may not be as strong as the correlation between type of students and school, or perhaps administration and school quality. Of course, if a school could provide to disadvantaged students all the resources available out of school to privileged students (trips to museums and libraries, one-on-one tutoring, music lessons, healthy balanced meals, behavior altering drugs, etc.), which are expensive, funding could neutralize student performance inequalities. This would take a very large amount of funding as well as talented teachers and administrators, not necessarily a given.

By: Terry

Terry — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 06:12:41 +0000

Re “advantaged” versus “undesirable” students.

The fear with charter schools was that they
would skim off the best students. The reality
has been just the opposite. Parents of the
cream of the crop students don’t want to mess
with success, while parents of those who are
struggling are more motivated to try something
new.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/2006/RAND_OP157.pdf

Also, I want to make the point that school choice
isn’t just about getting your child into a better
school. It’s also about getting your child into
a school whose philosophy you agree with.

For example a school which had a strong program
against bullying would hold a lot of appeal for
some parents. But a lot of parents would not care
one way of another what the school’s policy on
bullying was.

By: mythago

mythago — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 20:27:51 +0000

dan, I understand what you’re saying about the poor having just about zero choice. But school choice is really available only to the wealthy. “Using someone’s address” is illegal; homeschooling is not legal, or practical, everywhere; and ‘alternative’ meaning ‘private’ is certainly not available to the poor.

The discussion on choice doesn’t really sidestep the problem of bad schools; you have to assume there are bad schools or there’s no substantial reason for choice.

By: harry b

harry b — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 19:32:38 +0000

2. poor people wouldn’t have the choice even if given a choice. They can’t afford to get across town.

Depends on the design of the choice scheme, population densities, and school size. London (in which schools have powers to select) has free public transport for kids, and most kids are withint reaosnable distance of a reasonable number of secondary schools. Some schemes pay for transport.

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 19:20:36 +0000

Mythago,
my point is:
1. choice is already happening for the rich and middle class.
2. poor people wouldn’t have the choice even if given a choice. They can’t afford to get across town.

This whole discussion on choice is strange because it totally sidesteps the real (alleged) problem of bad schools.

People already have choices. Homeschooling, alternative schooling, moving, using someone elses address, applying for other districts (You can do that in some states, certainly in CA).

The only people who really don’t have a choice are the poor.

By: Ben M

Ben M — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 15:09:39 +0000

daniel (#30),

I think you’re dead right to wonder whether the allocation will, in the end, be optimal, or even good. It’s not obvious what the allocation will be, nor whether that’s good, nor even what “good” actually is. The thing that intrigues me about this proposal is not its “optimalness” or even its “choice”, but simply the fact that it creates incentives within the context of universal, public, free education. At a glance, those incentives seem to push teachers/administrators in the direction of improving their own schools. The manner of improvement (Fiscal efficiency? Teacher quality? Class size?) is wholly up to the schools, and the assay of the improvement is mostly up to the students and parents, rather than test-score-analysts or bureacrats. The presence of re-sorting, while eye-catching, is just the gimmick which makes these incentives possible—-it’s not so important that the sorting be in any way optimal. (Given that the status quo is “sorting by cost of parents’ home”, almost any change is an improvement, no?)

In every other scheme I’ve seen, there are either a) no incentives at all, b) “avoid wrath from above based on test scores” incentives, a la No Child Left Behind, or c) some arcanely-engineered profit motive. I’ve never quite figured out what the incentive structure is under “students go to any school they want”, given that there’s finite capacity at each school.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 10:05:44 +0000

with regard to #19, I think that this demonstrates why I’m suspicious of this one. Professional sports teams’ trading is not meant to achieve an optimal allocation (it’s not even obvious what an optimal allocation would be) and I don’t think that there are many sports economists who would argue that the market for players clears in any meaningful way. It might not be death for the idea (market clearing isn’t the be-all and end-all, and nobody with their head screwed on would ever have thought that the theorems of welfare economics were going to be any help here). But I think that sports teams and draft picks would be a better analogy than emmissions permits.

By: mythago

mythago — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 06:54:06 +0000

I know people who put down Grandma’s address if it is in a better district.

Then you know people who better have lawyers on speed-dial.

Pretending that poor people can ‘just move’ to a school district where the mortgage on a home is more than their monthly income is a pretty severe case of denial of the problem.

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 03:25:42 +0000

People already have a choice. They can and do move to a different school district if they don’t like the one they are in. I know people who put down Grandma’s address if it is in a better district. If you want to discuss how to make our schools better, I think you have to talk about other things.
People might argue that poor people can’t move. I would argue that many poor people couldn’t get their kids across town to the “better” schools.

By: William

William — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 03:13:54 +0000

The problem with trading rights to admit desirable students is that it misses the real issue . . . the right to exclude undesirable students. That’s the real problem with choice. Who chooses? If you are talking about a system where schools have more choice, that probably isn’t going to win over parents.

Just as a thought experiment, what would happen if a student became more desirable over the course of their career? Would they be put in a position where (for example) their senior year Mom wins the Lotto, so they can’t stay at their high school? They have a growth spurt and become a power forward instead of a shooting guard? They buckle down and get a great SAT score? Or what about a kid that develops a drug problem and falls off? How exactly and how often would desirability be evaluated?

By: harry b

harry b — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 23:45:05 +0000

Brett,

ok, I’ll just say that almost no-one involved in the school choice debate pretends that they are not interested in policymakers exercising control over the way that children are allocated to schools. They differ as to how much choice to allow, and how it should be distributed. A handful of people believe in complete privatisation. A large number say that they oppose choice (but don’t make proposals that would eliminate it). The rest of us may not, by your definition, care about school choice in any fundamental sense. But that’s where the debate is.

By: mythago

mythago — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 23:07:32 +0000

Surely in order to work, this tradeable permits system needs the assumption of no other sources of funds for the schools

Yes. Which is a huge, huge problem for this model. The wealthy schools are in high-income neighborhoods, where residents are far more able to raise supplementary funds.

I used to live in the south SF Bay, which andrew mentions in his post. The PTA in wealthy Palo Alto was able to raise $1 million a year in additional funds for their schools. Adjoining school districts with far less wealthy families were not going to match that. And, of course, the ‘official’ numbers get trotted out to suggest that wealthy Palo Alto can educate students on $X per student a year, so why can’t Sunnyvale?

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 23:02:16 +0000

“In actual educational markets the imperfections are such that some people get what they want, and others don’t get what they want”

That’s not a property of free markets as contrasted with controlled ones, that’s a property of reality as contrasted with fantasy. It’s never possible for everybody to get what they want. And that’s as true of any of the above proposals as it is of an unregulated market.

I’ll stick by my position: Anybody who insists that a system of “choice” has to incorporate incentives and rules to make sure the outcome is to their liking, doesn’t want choice. They want control. And they ought to have the honesty to admit it.

By: Jack

Jack — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 22:30:19 +0000

Setting up a market like this might allow flexibility but it is still set up to allow schools to maximise their utility. The utility of the school is not of much value and without implausibly strong school institutions is only weakly connected with the interests of students, even those of the future when some kind of equilibrium might have been reached.

There is also a problem with spot markets when investment is required if the system prevents commitment. Most markets don’t operate by spot market alone.

I’m also not sure about lotteries. They may achieve the objective of denying advantage to the advantaged but at a cost of reducing incentives to students to do well—what can a student do to get into the school they want to?

By: harry b

harry b — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 21:47:40 +0000

Brett—the problem with “letting people just choose for themselves” is that in actual educational markets the imperfections are such that some people (those whose children have desireable characteristics) get what they want, and others don’t get what they want (they might, sometimes, get what they choose, having chosen not what they wanted but what they thought they could get. Suppose Mr. Smith and Mr. Patel both choose St. Edmunds for their kid, but Lincoln High, being oversubscribed, gets to select which kid it wants to enter the school; Mr. Smith’s kid. They both chose, and one of them got what he wanted, but the other didn’t. Surely, you are not in favour of agents of the state choosing which kid’ll get to attend the better school.

Of course, complete privatisation (withdrawal of any government involvement in education whatsoever) is your preferred alternative. Me, I don’t see that as feasible (and would reject it even if I did, for reasons to do with justice, though I know they won’t carry much weight with you!)

All the mechanisms I mention in the post are efforts NOT to curtial choice, or to achieve a prescribed outcome, but to render choice more equal (and much more equal than in the status quo that many self-styled opponents of choice defend, one in which the government colludes with the most advantaged parents in giving them a great deal of choice, and deprives less advantaged parents of any effective choice).

The rest of you—keep going, this is incredibly interesting to me!