January 18, 2005

Islamic faith schools row

Posted by Chris

In the UK the Inspector of Schools has been criticizing Islamic schools for failing to prepare their pupils adequately for life in a modern society . The message that has been foregrounded by the press has to do with “our coherence as a nation”, which I don’t think of as an appropriate educational goal, and to that extent some of his remarks are regrettable. But when he makes the point that such schools may be reducing the opportunities available to their charges, that’s a concern that all liberals ought to agree with. So there are real issues here, which those schools have to address if they are to be permitted to continue operating. How depressing, then, that various figures have popped up to accuse him of “Islamophobia”, which, in this context, is just a way of trying to wriggle out of answering some tough and legitimate questions about the education that they’re providing.

December 15, 2004

Teacher Pay

Posted by Harry

The latest issue of Education Next has three interesting articles on teacher pay in the US. All three articles attack the uniform salary schedule that is standard in union contracts. Teachers are normally compensated according to three indicators: years of service, numbers of university credits earned, and the welath of their district’s tax base. This means teachers who are better, or in shortage subjects, or work in schools for which it is more difficult to recruit teachers, are not paid more. Gym teachers get paid the same as Math teachers, despite the fact that it is much more difficult to recruit qualified Math teachers; inner citiy teachers get paid less than suburban teahcers even though it is more difficult to recruit to inner city schools.

Al three articles suggest alternatives to the current arrangements, and the first, by Brad Jupp, a Denver union leader, describes the real alternative they have established in Denver. He reports the interesting finding that his own members strongly supported merit pay:

Though Denver had a typical salary schedule (see Figure 1) our data overthrow many of the preconceived notions held by teacher unions, school administrators, policy leaders, and opinion makers about how teachers perceive compensation systems. Since 1998 our union has asked its members what they thought about incentives for “teaching at schools with the highest percentage of high-need students.” By 2003, when the last available survey was conducted, the number of people favoring these incentives had reached 89 percent. The percentage of teachers who favor incentives for “teaching in content areas of short supply” is only slightly less, at 82 percent.

So, to put my cards on the table, I’m completely in favour of paying Math teachers more than Gym teachers, and English teachers more than Guidance Counsellors (not only because I’m married to one, either). I’m also strongly in favour of paying inner city schoolteachers more than suburban teachers. But I am very sceptical, not on principled but on practical grounds, of proposals for paying better teachers more than worse teachers. Here’s why:

There are three ways of deciding who the better teachers are. The first is by using objective indiciators like numbers of college credits. This is already built into the salary schedule and is, I think, less-than-ideal: it provides a nice income for Ed Schools, but teachers can take academically questionable courses, and get bare passes. There will be major resistance to requiring teachers to take worthwhile classes in order to get the salary bumps.

The second way is the increasingly popular ‘value-added’ method (which Kerry, for example, implied in his education platform). The idea is that teachers will be judged better if their students improve more than the students of other teachers, over time. This is, in principle, a great idea, and in practice an incredibly bad idea. If a student takes more than one class in the course of the year it is going to be impossible to know whether the improvements he makes are attributable to one class rather than another. Suppose the English department has several good, very hard working, teachers, who improve their students writing in the course of 10th Grade. Those students also improve dramatically in their Social Studies classes, because they are learning a lot of relevant history and improving their writing in their English classes. Their Math skills stagnate because their Math teachers are as incompetent as their Social Studies teachers, and their English teachers are not improving their Math skills at all. The Social Studies teachers are no better than their Math teachers, but score well on the value-added scale because their coleagues in English make them an inadvertant gift.

On top of that, teachers typically do not have enough students over the course of the year to get statistically significant results: and nor should they. Over the course of an entire career they probably do have enough students; but we are not going to defer raises till retirement. Finally, we do not know enough about the effects of several variables over which teachers have no control (like student mobility, the effects of classroom interruptions, etc) to control for them.

My favourite method of evaluating teachers is by having principals make actual judgements about quality. The principals would know something about what made a teacher a good teacher, and would visit classrooms, and observe teachers, and promote good teachers but not bad ones….Well, you can already see the problems with this one. Unions are very resistant to contracts that would allow this mechanism to work, and I ahve a great deal of sympathy for them. The transition problem would be huge. We currently have principals who have very little experience and understanding of teaching, and who would predictably behave in arbitrary and/or ill-informed ways. Unions fear that giving these people the kind of power I think Principals should have would be a recipe for cronyism, unfairness, and divisiveness. And from my limited expereince of actual schools they are right. Principals would not know how to use, and do not want, this power. There’s a kind of deadlock, and its hard to see how to overcome it. Value-Added ‘objective’ measures of quality are almost certainly NOT the right way forward, though.

December 02, 2004

Brio

Posted by Kieran

Eugene Volokh complains that a recent draft of one his papers is missing something:

Verve. “Energy and enthusiasm in the expression of ideas . . . . Vitality; liveliness.” My writing was the usual lawyerese, flabby and clausy. The substance was getting there (though it still needs a lot of work), but it was missing vigor, concreteness, punch. So I’ve been doing Vervification Edits as part of my substantive editing passes.

“Verve” is a good word for the quality he’s after, but I think “brio” is better, if only because its roots are mostly Italian and those people know how to live it up. In Jonathan Coe’s terrific novel, What a Carve Up (published in the United States as The Winshaw Legacy) the narrator phones in a book review. Its chief complaint is that the book’s author “lacks the necessary brio” to carry off the story. Unfortunately something goes wrong in the transcription and the published version claims that the author “lacks the necessary biro,” instead. Just as debilitating to the writing process, to be sure, but as a critical observation of character perhaps not so incisive.

I’m recovering from a bad cold, so I’ve been feeling a little short of brio myself. I have three papers to draft, a review to write and a book manuscript to revise (I sign the contract this week). So if anyone has any strategies for revivifying oneself, let me know in the comments.

December 01, 2004

International AIDS day

Posted by Chris

I’ve been looking through the headlines on international AIDS day. The BBC discusses the disproportionate impact on women in Africa . India has 5.1 million people infected with HIV , and nobody really knows how many victims there are in China (CNN). “HIV and Aids are expected to kill 16 million farm workers in Southern Africa by 2010” reports the South African Independent Online . In Britain the Guardian tells us that a fifth of respondents to a poll blame the victims. In Lebanon , only a quarter of victims receive any kind of treatment. In Uganda a government minister warns the UN not to give advice to gays on safe sex because homosexuality is illegal. Please add more links in comments throughout the day.

November 25, 2004

Hoist on their own petard

Posted by John Quiggin

Having been involved in the debate over schools policy for quite a few years, I’m enjoying a bit of schadenfreude following the publication of a couple of regression analyses showing that students at charter schools (publicly funded US schools operating independently from the main public school system) score worse on standard tests than students at ordinary public schools1. I don’t have a particularly strong view on the desirability or otherwise of charter schools, but I have long been critical of one of the most prominent rationales for charter schools and other programs of school reform2.

This is the claim that “regression analyses show that students in small classes do no better than those in large classes”. If you believe this claim, you should believe the same claim with “charter schools” replacing “small classes” since both are supported by the same kind of evidence.

The class size claim goes back to the pioneering attempts of James Coleman to estimate “educational production functions”, which came up with the conclusion that almost everything is insignificant. A lot of other studies had similarly negative findings, and the natural interpretation, that this was because there was no effect, was promoted vigorously by a number or writers, notably including Ric Hanushek, who collected a bunch of studies and summarised the results as showing no effect.

An alternative interpretation is that the dependent variable in these regression analyses is so noisy as to make the results highly suspect. We want to know how much the kids learnt in a given period in school, but what we can typically measure is the difference between two test scores, before and after the relevant schooling3. A test score is a pretty noisy measure of how much someone knows; the difference between two test scores is so noisy as to be close to useless.

Of course, problems of this kind arise in lots of contexts, and there’s a big literature on meta-analysis as a way of extracting meaningful results from disparate studies. Hanushek’s “counting studies” approach is a very crude kind of meta-analysis. A more sophisticated version, undertaken by Hedges, Laine and Greenwald4 shows that there is a significant relationship.

Although not everybody at CT likes it, there’s also revealed preference to consider. If small class sizes are educationally valueless and are adopted as a response to, say, teacher union pressure, we’d expect to see a very different allocation of resources in private schools. In fact, though, wealthy private schools typically go for small classes - the share of budgets going to teaching staff doesn’t vary much between public and private schools.

Anyway, I’ve been hammering these points for years, without much of an impact. But now, I expect, a lot of people are suddenly going to discover that comparisons of school performance are tricky, that regression analysis is not infallible, and that there’s more to educational outcomes than test scores. I hope they will be consistent enough to revise their prior beliefs about class sizes.

1 As you might expect, there’s another study that gets the opposite result.

2 As always, I use the term ‘reform’ to mean ‘structural change’, without any connotation of approval or disapproval.

3 Sometimes, there’s only one test score, which makes everything even worse.

4 Hedges is one of the big names in meta-analysis

November 09, 2004

Whole language

Posted by John Quiggin

The war between advocates of whole language and phonics as methods of teaching reading has broken out again in Australia. I have no particular axe to grind in this dispute. In the spirit of wishy-washy liberal compromise, I suspect that both have their place.

But it strikes me as a rather odd feature of the debate that advocates of phonics should also be the ones most concerned about spelling. The vast majority of spelling errors arise from the use of the obvious phonetic spelling rather than the “correct” spelling that is part of the whole language. So one of the costs of the phonic approach is the need to learn, by rote, the vast number of exceptions and special cases that make spelling English such a miserable experience for the uninitiated.

Phonics phans never seem to recognise this.

Here, for example, is Kevin Donnelly in today’s Sydney Morning Herald
Advocates of whole language argue the critics are wrong and that the overwhelming majority of students are successful readers. Often cited are the results of the PISA literacy test in 2000, which covered 32 countries, in which Australian 15-year-olds came out at the top of the table.

But students were not corrected for faulty grammar, punctuation and spelling. One Australian researcher involved with the study stated: “It was the exception rather than the rule in Australia to find a student response that was written in well-constructed sentences, with no spelling or grammatical error.”

Whole language advocates also point to the apparent improvement in the numbers of students reaching the reading benchmarks as evidence that all is well. In 1996, the first year of the national benchmarks introduced by the Howard Government, 73 per cent of year 3 students reached the set standard; by 2000 it was 92.5 per cent.

However, such standards represent minimum acceptable standards, and raising the success rate from 73 per cent to 92.5 per cent in just under four years is somewhat suspicious. There is some evidence to suggest that the education bureaucrats have simply lowered the bar by redefining what constitutes an acceptable standard.
This piece is riddled with logical errors and unsupported factual claims. What relationship is there between the way a student was taught to recognise words and their capacity to construct a grammatical sentence? And if he has evidence that the standards have been lowered, why not give us some hint as to the nature of that evidence?

Following Donnelly’s general line of reasoning, it seems appropriate to blame his incapacity to construct a logical argument on the way he way was taught to read. I’m guessing he was taught phonics.

October 12, 2004

What is a Qualified Teacher?

Posted by Harry

I’m a fan of rules and regulations. But they should be designed so that, if there is a strong case for doing that they are basically designed to prevent, someone who pushes hard enough will succeed in doing it. Here are two stunning stories of people being prevented from working in the state (i.e. public) schools in the UK, because, although one of them has run a well-regarded private school, and the other has pursued a successful career as a professor of physics (a shortage subject), they are not properly qualified. I can see reasons for the regulation, and I do think it unfortunate that the Telegraph gave evidence in favour of Mr Jones-Parry that told us a great deal about the kinds of children whose parents can pay £15,204 a year on their schooling, and nothing at all about his abilities as a school leader. But this is hilarious:

“The silly thing is that I have people from industry who are training to be teachers at Westminster. I have to sign them off to say that they are suitable. I suppose I could sign myself off.”

(Hat Tip: Michael Otsuka)

October 10, 2004

Women in computing

Posted by Eszter


As I scanned the hallway for signs of the party, an arch of red, yellow, green and blue balloons extended a welcome. I entered the grand ballroom where fun sounds of karaoke and a sea of neon green glassware greeted me. To the left was a large screen with random words scrolling quickly: Elmers glue effect on skin; [Hebrew characters]; [Chinese characters]; pokemon cards. Scattered across the room were people forming small lines for massages, caricature drawings and tarot card readings. Ninety-five percent of those present were women. It reminded me of my college years – having attended a women’s college – and what a blast you could have putting a group of women in a room with great music. This is probably a cliché, but you really could feel the excitement and energy especially when people – whether in their 20s or 40s – crowded the dance floor for the Macarena and the electric slide. I couldn’t help but think that the songs for karaoke were not randomly selected as I listened to people sing the words to “I’m a Barbie girl” and “I’m a bitch, I’m a lover”.

Welcome to the party hosted by Women of Google at this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Chicago. The meetings were sponsored by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and the Association of Computing Machinery. Anyone doubting whether there are still social barriers for women in computing fields needs only talk to the attendees. The young women – undergraduates or just a few years out of college pursuing graduate degrees in computer science and related fields – cannot contain their excitement of and appreciation for what this meeting offers them. Unlike the vastly male-dominated conferences and classrooms that make up most of their professional experiences and that are still often hostile to women, the Grace Hopper Celebration affords them a chance to see and meet extremely successful women in their fields – corporate VPs, university deans, inventors, inspiring mentors – who are supportive of their pursuits.

I never met Anita Borg, but listening to people makes her contributions to women in technological fields obvious. As one of the hosts put it: he had never felt her presence as much as in that ballroom.

Although I am not a computer scientist, my interests are closely related to many of the issues relevant here (e.g. I study technology use where questions about gender come up quite often). I owe much of my training with technology and invaluable initial mentoring about academia to one of my college professors, Joseph O’Rourke of the Computer Science Department at Smith College. Joe’s contributions reach well past his own students. He was instrumental in the early 90s in setting up a mentoring program that matches female college computer science majors with female faculty at other schools for summer projects. I worked with Joe one summer tabulating information about the applicants. You could tell it was a popular program. Since then the project has grown manifold to fund these important experiences of even more young women. My colleague Justine Cassell hosted two students this summer on this program. One of them was able to make it back to the celebrations this weekend and talking to her at the party made the value of this experience extremely clear.

The party hosted by Google was both fun and inspiring. It is great to see important companies so supportive of women in technological fields. Among the gifts given to guests was a copy of Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing. I suspect many present will have already read it, but it is always good to have an extra copy on hand to give away. It is important to help people understand that there is nothing inherent in computing as a male field. It is the myriad of social interactions that people face from a very young age that lead girls and boys down different paths. In the end this can cost us a lot as it may channel very talented women out of fields in which their contributions may well be very significant.

October 01, 2004

Minority Achievement and Involuntary Therapy

Posted by Harry

As Dave explains, I’ve spent part of the week getting embroiled in local affairs. Our school district devoted another in-service training to the Courageous Conversations program; every employee (except the many who took sick days) had to participate. Dave’s own experience reflects pretty accurately the experiences I’ve had related to me. It’s a kind of involuntary therapy session — the kind of thing that my friends who used to be in obscure Maoist organizations report having gone through regularly. The pretext is a concern with minority underachievement, which the District regards as being caused by institutional racism, on which the day’s conversation focused. You might expect that a focus on institutional racism would look at the racism in the criminal justice system and the labor market, which deeply affect the prospects of minority males and, presumably, therefore indirectly effect their aspirations and marriageability (with predictable consequences for family structure). But: no mention of these things. It is all about the racism inherent in the schools, and particularly in the attitudes of teachers.

Prompted by one very pissed off, but honest, left-wing, and good, teacher, I wrote an op-ed for the local paper, simply arguing that the focus is misplaced and suggesting some rather dull measures which, unlike involuntary and inconsistent therapy for school employees, have a good track record of slightly raising the achievement of low income and minority students. I have to admit I was nervous about doing it, both because the racist teacher theme is popular, and because lots of people don’t like open criticism of the District for wasting resources, because that creates an atmosphere in which voters are les likely to vote for tax raises. But I’m pissed off with the District for wasting resources, both because enough waste creates a perception of waste, and because I think the achievement of low-income and minority students should be the most urgent priority of our education system; and programs like this not only have no benefits, but give ammunition to those who don’t take it seriously as a priority.

In fact the response so far has been unremarkable: a nice note from a School Board member thanking me for writing it, and a series of emails from random people expressing their own feelings. I have, though, heard from a reliable source that the program was opposed internally by the main person responsible for equal opportunities and minority achievement. The Superintendent has not commented.

September 10, 2004

The Wisdom of Crowds

Posted by Daniel

I suspect that the results of Chris Lightfoot’s estimation quiz (trailed by Chris a while ago) will prove to be the Dead Sea Scrolls of the subject for years to come; there is ample evidence for both sides here. I would just like to get my oar in first by saying that it provides definitive support for my views. Well it does.

August 27, 2004

Debating comprehensives

Posted by Chris

Our very own Harry Brighouse — who is away from the internet at the moment — features in the latest Times Educational Supplement . Harry is engaged there in a debate with … his dad. But since Tim Brighouse is commissioner for London schools and Harry has written extensively on justice in education, that’s just as it should be. The subject of the debate: for and against the comprehensive ideal in Britain’s schools. (To read the whole thing, you’ll need to buy the paper version.)

August 16, 2004

School Choice Watch (UK)

Posted by Harry

A couple of interesting position papers are available on school admissions and school choice. This one, from the right-of-centre PolicyExchange, has been up for a while. The authors give a nice quick survey of the varieties of choice scheme operating around the world (though, like many on the right, they emphasize the Swedish example a bit more than they should), and draw conclusions about what works and what doesn’t. What is interesting about this is that they are much better informed and more honest about the proimise and limitations of schemes than other voucher supporters like Chris Woodhead and Stephen Pollard: they understand, for example, that the targetted nature of the Milwaukee scheme is crucial to its political success, and also that the availability of a large, low cost, pool of providers (absent in the UK0 was necessary for it to get off the ground. They are currently working on a specifically UK-oriented proposal to which I’ll link when they’ve completed it. One of the things that is clear from it is that the Tories (presumably under the influence of Willetts) are really trying to think through the practicalities of their voucher-type proposals.

The Social Market Foundation report has been out just a week or two (why did they release it in the summer??). It’s an excellent, and well-informed, proposal about school admissions. The key, and interesting, proposals are a dramatic simplification of the admissions process; and the idea that when schools are oversubscribed they should admit by lottery (an idea I have advocated for a long time). The piece also recognises the need for built-in oversupply of places in order for the ‘market’ in places to work, an idea that the government is pretty set against (since it views ‘surplus’ places as wasteful). The government has also consistently resisted the idea of removing discretion over admissions from schools, on the grounds that it is unfeasible and would not make any difference anyway. I hope that the quirky release date of the report does not mean it will be ignored by ministers.

June 15, 2004

School Uniforms

Posted by Harry

I don’t know enough about this case to feel comfortable commenting on the all-things-considered rights and wrongs of it. But I was taken aback by the comments of the girl’s MP on Radio 4’s PM programme. Margaret Moran, who backs the school and the court, said, in their defence, that the girl had the option of going to a Muslim school, and her family also had the option of withdrawing her from school and home-schooling. She went on to accuse them of having ‘political motivations’ for their suit.

I can imagine good reasons for having uniform regulations, and for upholding them even in the face of religious objections, hence my relctance to comment on the all-things-considered merits. But the fact that the regulations might drive a girl into an educational situation in which her religious beliefs will not be challenged or tested seems to me a reason for bending, or revising the rules, not a consideration in their favour. The parents’ enthusiasm that their child should attend a state comprehensive school is to their credit. Telling them that they should school her religiously or at home doesn’t seem very helpful to me.

June 04, 2004

Plagiarism

Posted by Kieran

Teresa Nielsen Hayden takes a contrarian line on a story about Michael Gunn, an English student who got caught for plagiarism but is now suing because claims he was not informed it was wrong and was shocked — shocked — to be told it was. “I hold my hands up. I did plagiarise. I never dreamt it was a problem” says the guy, “but they have taken all my money for three years and pulled me up the day before I finished. If they had pulled me up with my first essay at the beginning and warned me of the problems and consequences, it would be fair enough. But all my essays were handed back with good marks, and no one spotted it.” Teresa says:

My first reaction was “Nice try, kid.” On second thought, he does have a point. It’s not enough of a point, but he has one.

I don’t think he has a point.

Teresa argues that (1) Students don’t read the rulebooks, (2) Handbooks are crap anyway — “a mixture of hot air, vague benevolence, pious wishes, counsels of perfection, slabs of prose copied from earlier handbooks, stern warnings inserted by the legal department” which produce only FUD, and besides (3) If he’s a serial plagiarist “Kent University is not only entitled to feel embarrassed about it, but is arguably obliged to do so. They should have known.”

Well, it would be nice if ignorance of the rules — especially rules written in dry, boring statute books — was a defence that you could sell to the local Circuit Court Judge. “Your Honor, I never knew it was illegal when I shot him. I should have been told in a snappy and accessible PowerPoint presentation, is all I’m saying.” I’m more sympathetic to the argument that the University should have caught him sooner. It’s not clear from the news stories just how good a plagiarist Gunn was. As I’ve written before there are different kinds of plagiarism and students with different kinds of goals. Certain combinations are difficult to spot. Google plagiarism is usually easy to spot, as Teresa says. Obviously weak students who turn in brilliant essays arouse suspicion. The sadly more common (because more stupid) phenomenon of weak essays suddenly growing brilliant paragraphs is also manageable. But other types are harder. The worst is the student who does not want to get more than a C or a B minus and who plagiarizes from some private stock, such as the papers in a drawer at the Fraternity House or equivalent. You can fight this kind of plagiarism indirectly by setting precise essay questions and not recycling them. But students who cheat intelligently to attain middling results are difficult to catch and more common than you might think. Just because it takes a long time to catch someone doesn’t mean they should be allowed to get away with it.

Teresa asks, “Has there been a revolution in student handbooks since the 1980s?” that makes them interesting to read. Of course not. But there has been a minor revolution in teaching practice. Students are now routinely informed about plagiarism in many different ways, whether via handbooks, the syllabus, talks from the instructor, declarations on cover sheets or warnings from advisors. They used not be. So while further details about the story might make me shift the balance of blame — if it turned out that he really was the very easy-to-catch type and the University were just on autopilot, for instance — my third thought is still “Nice try, kid.” Besides, if we had to tell students everything they aren’t supposed to do — cheat, lie, kick the professor, set their classmates on fire — we’d be here all day.

June 01, 2004

Faith Schools in the UK

Posted by Harry

Americans are often shocked when they learn that not only does ‘public school’ mean ‘private school’ in the UK, but also in the UK the state not only funds, but collaborates with religious organisations in running, religious schools. I used to be strongly opposed to this practice, at least in principle, though I have also long thought that Muslim schools should be candidates for funding given that RC and C.of E. schools were funded. I’m still unenthusiastic about the situation, but also have a suspicion that the practice is part of the reason that religion, though powefully present in the public culture, is a less rich source of social division than it is in the US. Alan Carling has very nicely posted my idiosyncratic take on this subject on his website. The piece is written really for a UK audience, but its nice and short, and comments somewhat on the US situation. Although it is scheduled for publication as is I’m very curious about reactions to it and, as usual, take my own tentative views to be evolving objects of critique rather than anything set in stone.

Faith Schools in the UK

Posted by Harry

Americans are often shocked when they learn that not only does ‘public school’ mean ‘private school’ in the UK, but also in the UK the state not only funds, but collaborates with religious organisations in running, religious schools. I used to be strongly opposed to this practice, at least in principle, though I have also long thought that Muslim schools should be candidates for funding given that RC and C.of E. schools were funded. I’m still unenthusiastic about the situation, but also have a suspicion that the practice is part of the reason that religion, though powefully present in the public culture, is a less rich source of social division than it is in the US. Alan Carling has very nicely posted my idiosyncratic take on this subject on his website. The piece is written really for a UK audience, but its nice and short, and comments somewhat on the US situation. Although it is scheduled for publication as is I’m very curious about reactions to it and, as usual, take my own tentative views to be evolving objects of critique rather than anything set in stone.

May 27, 2004

Improving Schools

Posted by Harry

Excellent post from Laura about improving schools. She makes several school-improvement suggestions, in response to an article in the NYTimes arguing that all you need for good schools is good teachers and small classes. As Laura points out, the research on class size is completely inconclusive. I’d add two points. The first is that even if class size matters we have no reason to believe that there are no threshold effects; it may be pretty much as easy to teach 30 as 25, and much easier to teach 22, for all we know. Incremental across-the-board reductions in size are expensive, and may have miniscule benefits. Second, I have a feeling (based only on anecdotal evidence) that small classes, in making it more feasible for teachers to individualize instruction, may encourage them to engage in trendy, experimental, but ultimately less effective teaching methods.

All Laura’s comments are worth thinking about, and this one hits the nail on the head:

I would also work on job programs for poor areas, on parenting classes, on adult education, and complete overhaul of some neighborhoods.

The idea that you can provide an excellent education for children raised in broken communities, with high levels of unemployment and family separation is, well, silly. Its no accident that the consistent high performers in PISA tests are countries with low levels of inequality and very low levels of child poverty.

The one thing Laura doesn’t point out (so I’ll add) is that it is incredibly naive to think that all you need is good teachers. How good a teacher is depends on 3 variables: i) that person’s qualities; ii) the fit between that person’s qualities and the needs of his/her students and iii) how well the institution as a whole is managed. Incompetent and/or ill-willed adminstrators are entirely capable of preventing much learning from going on. Think of the way that American public school lessons are routinely interrupted, without warning, by administrators who think they have an ‘important’ announcement to make over the PA system. Important announcements about the football results, or the availability of the school T-shirt or…well, you get the idea.

April 28, 2004

50 per cent

Posted by John Quiggin

One of the most pleasant aspects of being a Research Fellow is guest lectures. I give guest lectures in a number of different courses, ranging over several faculties and sometimes different universities. This gives me all the things I like about teaching, including (since a change is as good as a holiday) generally attentive audiences, and a chance to present material that’s not the standard textbook, but not new or rigorous enough to justify an academic seminar. On the other hand, all the unpleasant stuff - booking rooms, litigious students complaining about their grades, administrators trying to promote customer-centric shareholder value in a dynamic enterprising university, and so on - is taken care of for me.

I tend to do most of my guest lectures around mid-semester, since this is what fits the standard course structure best, and I’ve got quite a heavy load (by my very relaxed standards) this week. I’m just between lectures, then rushing off to a seminar in town1, but I thought I’d pass on the reaction to my lecture today on the economics of higher education.

I started with the human capital and screening theories. I’m a violent partisan of human capital theory and opponent of screening theory, and didn’t try to hide this, but my success rate in convincing the students was, based on a small sample, only 50 per cent.

One student came up to me at the end and said “Thank you. I learned a lot”. Another came up to the lecturer responsible for the course and asked “Will this be on the exam?”.

1 For any Queensland readers who might be interested, it’s The US-Australia free trade agreement: folly or our future? at a meeting of the Australian Institute for International Relations from 6-7.30pm, April 28 at 46 George Street, Brisbane. For details, contact Colin Kennard (telephone 3371 2454, email c.kennard@uq.edu.au).

April 23, 2004

How government is wrecking British universities

Posted by Chris

A prominent philosopher in the UK emails to tell me that he has had enough and that he’s looking for employment in the US. The proximate cause of his frustration is the ridiculously complicated process that the Arts and Humanities Research Board (soon to be Council) imposes on us as a condition for distributing the pitiful funding that is available for research students. Increasingly, universities have to demonstrate that they are providing all kinds of “training” in order to access this money and this is part of a wider trend where government (or its arms-length agencies like the AHRB, HEFCE etc) seeks to regulate and micromanage activity within higher education by such conditionalization of funding. My correspondent draws attention to the recent review of “Business-University Collaboration” undertaken by former FT-editor Richard Lambert at Gordon Brown’s behest. Suprisingly, given Brown’s predilection for micromanagement and control across the public sector, one section of the report offers a trenchant exposition of the mess that the government has made as it has tried to subject higher education in the UK to its will.

The entire report can be downloaded from HM Treasury’s website here

Some excerpts:

A BREAKDOWN OF TRUST
7.29 A side effect of a modern university’s far-reaching role and breadth of activities is the increased number of stakeholders who hold the institution to account. The result is an uncoordinated and often unnecessarily burdensome system of accountability and regulation. Two independent reports have highlighted the need to reduce the accountability burden on universities. While a number of the recommendations from the Better Regulation Task Force report have been implemented, progress has been slow.

7.30 At the same time, there has been a marked increase in the Government’s use of hypothecated funding to achieve its strategic objectives, creating more regulatory pressures and accusations from the sector of micro-management. HEFCE, for example, is currently running between 40 and 50 separate funding initiatives on behalf of government departments.

7.31 Universities in the UK are operating on the margin — of 131 institutions in England, for example, 47 ran operating deficits in 2002, with the remaining 84 averaging only a 2.2 per cent surplus on revenue. This puts pressure on universities to chase every available pound of funding. With each new funding stream comes new regulatory burdens. In 2003, HEFCE is budgeting to channel 14 per cent of its funds through hypothecated schemes. About half of these funding initiatives were “top-sliced”: that is, the cash to fund them originally came from a reduction in core funding, rather than from additional government funds. In such cases, universities are often required to apply and account for money that had previously been delivered to them through the core grant. The unintended consequence of central government initiatives is that the sector is in a defensive mood and feels micro-managed.

7.32 In Scotland, the Scottish Executive, through the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council, makes less use of hypothecated funding, and this is one factor contributing to a much closer, more respectful relationship between the funders and Scotland’s universities. The other perhaps more important factor is that with only a relatively small number of institutions, it is easier to build close and trusting relationships. Similar considerations apply in Wales and Northern Ireland.

7.33 Public funding needs to be carefully supervised and institutions held to account. But the level of burden is often disproportionate to the money involved, and policies can be untargeted. In many cases, initiatives are designed around the lowest common denominator and all universities, however well-managed, are treated in the same way. The constant layering of new initiatives on top of old, often uncoordinated across government departments and agencies, creates an overly complicated regime.

7.34 The overarching problem, however, comes down to a matter of trust. The Government does not seem to have enough confidence in the way that universities run themselves to give them extra funding without strings attached. Some of this is justified – the sector has in the past suffered from poor management and a lack of strategic thinking. Yet if universities are to become more creative and play their full part in regional and national economies, then ways must be found to give them more room to develop a strategic vision and take entrepreneurial risks.

Recommendation 7.4
The Review recommends that the Government and all funders should minimise the use of hypothecated funding streams.
• Funders should continue to consolidate individual funding into larger streams, more proportionate to the necessary level of bureaucracy and regulation.
• Smaller hypothecated funding streams should, where possible, be allocated on a metrics or formulaic basis, rather than by bidding.
• Funders should minimise audit requirements on hypothecated funding streams.
• “Top-sliced” funding streams should have a limited life of no more than three years, after which they should be rolled back into core funding, unless policy is explicitly renewed.

April 21, 2004

Vouchers in Milwaukee

Posted by Harry

Caroline Minter Hoxby has just published a paper (available, like all her papers, free at her website) in the Swedish Economic Policy Review claiming that the performance of Milwaukee’s public schools (measured in terms of test scores per dollar of spending) improved quite dramatically during the heat of the battle over vouchers (in the late 90’s), and that the gains of that time do not seem to have fallen back (though they have plateaued).

She attributes the gains to the voucher program, though she doesn’t distinguish between the effects of the internal market between schools that the voucher program introduced and the effects of the political fall out on making the school district administration more accountable. She’s entitled to attribute the gain to vouchers because she compares Milwaukee Public Schools with comparable Wisconsin school districts which were similarly effected by the changes in funding wrought by the State equalization formula. There are interesting methodological questions here. For example, if you remove the 1997-8 school year data from the analysis it would look quite different, and less well disposed to choice. And the aforementioned distinction between political and market competition is significant: if the gains were entirely the result of administrators getting their acts together then there might be other, less disruptive, ways of getting the gains. So the paper is not perfect.

But I point it out for two reasons. First, it’s a wonderful paper for non-economists to read – a model of someone who can write simply and clearly, but is sensitive to numerous complexities. Second, because vouchers and choice are increasingly hard for the left in the US to dismiss. The second best objection to well-designed and targeted voucher programs is that they leave the children remaining in the public schools worse off. If that objection can be met, progressives are left only with the best objection – that they will set in train a dynamic that will undermine the principle of public schooling. But in America, where public schooling is savagely unjust in its internal workings, that objection rings a bit hollow unless coupled with a substantial and politically feasible plan for improving the public schools which the least advantaged Americans attend.

April 18, 2004

Yom Hashoah

Posted by Eszter

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day so I wanted to take a few moments to remember. Although numerous members of my family were killed during World War II, my father survived and a few years ago decided to write his story. He did this in a fairly unconventional way. Each chapter in his book begins with a snippet from a Nobel Laureate’s life (with whom he had conducted conversations). Later in the chapter he then relates this biographical story to something in his own life. Reading the book takes us on a journey through the lesser-known moments of many famous scientists’ lives and the details of one Hungarian Jew’s life affected by the events of over 60 years ago.

Here I share with you some snippets from my father’s book. I start with a section told by my uncle about his experiences when he was 11 in a concentration camp. Then I quote the section about my father’s visit in 2002 to the camp he had been in and how poor the remembrance is there.

Excerpts from “Our Lives: Encounters of a Scientist” by István Hargittai, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 2004
[this quote in the book is from my uncle who was 11 at the time — EH] The first day after our arrival [in the camp] the people got their work assignments. Mother was directed to be helper to a roofing master who turned out to be a humane Viennese man. He often shared his sandwich with Mother who pretended to eat it and brought it back for us. Children younger than 10 years old stayed behind in the camp during the day. Children above the age of 15 were considered adults and went to work with the rest. Children between 10 and 15 years old formed a special labor unit. I was in this unit, which had about 20 children. We were taken to bombed-out buildings, immediately following the bombing. We had to reach places that adults could not have reached. We had to bring out cadavers and wounded people and all the valuables. If we found just limbs or other body parts we had to bring them out as well. It was a cruel and frightening job and dangerous too.
Falling down killed some of us. They were replaced then by younger children. The German guards were not brutal just for the sake of tormenting us, but they required unconditional discipline. When they ordered us to climb to a place, however dangerous it was or to walk on a beam however unstable it was, they expected blind obedience. When any of us appeared hesitant, they let out a round next to us from their machine guns to frighten us. I have sharp memories of various events. I remember when we were carrying a heavy container and when the guard sensed that I wanted to pause, he gave a round and I did not dare to stop. From the heavy weight and the fright I wetted my pants. It was so cold that the urine froze along my legs. I remember my shoes, which were in a terrible state and we did not have stockings and used newspaper pieces to wrap our feet. In one of the bombed-out homes I found a pair of shoes that would have fit me and I changed into them. Upon my return downstairs, the guard noticed this, he became very angry and ordered me to return and change back the shoes. This episode stayed with me more sharply than many more horrible events. I could not figure out why he did not let me have a better pair of shoes. At about that time, I started having dreams about Father. He came for us in my dream and engineered our escape. In other dreams, we went for long walks in the woods just as we used to when we lived back home and he was still alive. Such dreams I still have occasionally, and I am now 61 years old. [My grandfather was killed in a labor camp in 1942. — EH]

István [my father — EH], who was 3 years old, was a good child throughout the deportation. He was quiet and withdrawn. When soldiers entered the room he always hid behind Mother.

The sick in the camp were moved to the attic. So was grandmother when she became sick. It was a final move because seldom did anybody return from the attic. Nobody tended the sick. Their meals were placed at the entrance to the attic and those in better condition among the sick distributed the food and reported in the morning about the recent dead. One morning then grandmother was among the dead.

[the chapter continues with my father’s return to the camp site in 2002, this is now my father’s voice — EH]

Vienna 2002

In June 2002, I visited our former camp, Lager 12 at 10 Bischoffgasse in Vienna. It was my first visit to the former camp site and I am the only member of our family who has ever visited the place since World War II. There was no trace of the former camp there, outside or inside the school, as if the camp might have not existed. I almost felt embarrassed, but the director had vaguely heard about some camp. She showed me the school and took me to the attic, where they keep the old year books. In the one for the year 1944/45, there were only short notes, and not a word about the camp that operated on the premises of the school. I found that part of the attic to which a stair-case leads and which I recognized from Brother’s narrative. I was there, alone for a few moments in empty, dusty space, held up by heavy wooden beams, and I felt very close to my grandmother.

On that visit, I contacted the Research Center of the History of Jews in Austria and they sent me photocopied material of the trial of the Lagerführer of Lager 12. There were about 130 pages, mostly testimonies of former inmates, that is, surviving Jews from Hungary, also, testimonies by Viennese people, who lived nearby, and could see some of what was going on in the camp. There were enclosures in the material, and I found my name in the listings as Stefan Wilhelm (Stefan is the German equivalent of István). [my father later changed his name to Hargittai, this is explained in another part of the book — EH]

The testimonies described how Franz Knoll, the Lagerführer, beat not only the young but also 80-year-old people, how he locked people up in the cold cellar in wintertime without food, how he stole the rations and had them delivered to his home by the prisoners, and how he tried to hide his loot, from the prisoners, in three big boxes after the camp had been liberated by the Russians. He was characterized by former prisoners and neighbors as brutal, inhuman, ruthless, and sadistic. A former inmate described how she had to witness the slow dying of hunger of her infant son, her pleading in vain for help to the Lagerführer, who then did not let her be there when her child was buried. Witnesses described how others, including children, perished in the camp. There were close to 600 grownups and about 60 children incarcerated there, and the Lagerführer referred to them as if they were things rather than human beings in his testimony. He repeatedly referred to children as children only for the age group between 0 and 10 years old.

Franz Knoll was born in 1894 in Vienna. He did not have much schooling, did not have any profession, and before the Nazis elevated him to positions of importance, he used to work mostly as a waiter. He joined the Nazi party in 1932, that is, long before the Anschluss. He was accused not only of the crimes he committed as the Lagerführer of Lager 12 but also of other crimes committed during the preceding years in other positions.

I have no expertise in legal matters, so it is only my impression that the trial was meticulous, preceded by a meticulous investigation during Knoll’s long detention of about 22 months. Knoll pleaded not guilty, but the Court found him guilty and on August 20, 1948, it sentenced him to 18 months of imprisonment. The Court considered several mitigating conditions, among them his partial confession, the difficulty of his service, his reduced sense of responsibility, and his duties of supporting his wife and underage child. The Court also ordered to deduct Knoll’s detention from his prison term. Thus, when the sentencing was over, Knoll walked free.

The book is due out in English in about a month, see here for more information including a copy of the Foreword, the Preface and the Table of Contents.

April 15, 2004

Substitution Effects

Posted by Harry

I wonder if anyone can help me. I’m doing some research on Channel One. For those who don’t know Channel One it is a daily newscast for schoolchildren, which is watched in schools. The content is provided to the schools for nothing, and the contracting schools also get a significant amount of televisual equipment for their own use while the contract is in effect. The catch: it broadcasts a 12 minute show, 2 inutes of which are advertisments. Delightful. (Max Sawicky at MaxSpeak
has a nice cost-benefit analysis here). I am interested in it as an example of schools collaborating with corporations in a way that affects the ethos of the school, infusing it with the ethos of the commercial public culture outside the school. But a very minor point that I want to make in the paper is a conjecture that when corporations provide goodies to schools there will be a corresponding drop in the willingness of taxpayers to provide funds. I’m guessing that this happens, eg, when local taxpayers know that a local lottery will provide income to the city or state, and that a substitution effect occurs. My suspicions are increased whenever I describe Channel One to someone and ask them to guess the value of the equipment provided: they MASSIVELY overestimate the value, presumably because they think that any sane person would need to get a hell of a lot of money before they would be willing to force kids to watch commercials. (I’ll put the figure Sawicky and Molnar give below the fold, but even they are pretty certainly overestimating considerably (as they admit)). Rather than conjecture, though, it would be nice to have some empirical evidence of the effect, eg, with respect to a lottery. Does anyone know the literature (or whether there is any) on this?

Its worth about $4 per student per year, on Sawicky and Molnar’s implausibly generous estimate.

March 23, 2004

The Murder (dream) Machine

Posted by Maria

I wish I could have normal recurring dreams like everyone else seems to; falling off buildings, discovering you’re naked in a crowd of people, or even flying. But no. Two or three times a year, unprompted by anything particular in my waking life, I have to re-sit the Leaving Cert. And not just re-sit it. I am sent to a new school half way through the school year, and have to figure out how, this time, I will manage to pass Honours Maths.

For those fortunate enough not to know from experience, the Leaving Cert is the terminal examination for second level students in Ireland. Or, as I thought of it at the time, the eye of the needle through which we all had to pass in order to continue through life. It was the ultimate in obstacles. If you didn’t pass it, you couldn’t become an adult.

I used to look at people aged 19 and up and think, wonderingly, ‘he/she did it. Amazing.’. Kind of like the way that as 14 year olds, my classmates and I would stare at a pregnant teacher, count the months and exclaim to eachother ‘she DID IT approximately 19 weeks ago!’.

The Leaving Cert is a memory test; a gargantuan, two year long struggle to memorise as many quotations and 4th hand/rate analyses of Shakespearian tragedy, be able to ‘treat of the land reform struggle from 1870 to 1914’, and do as many pointless french cloze tests as possible, regurgitating it all in about a dozen intense 2 1/2 hour periods over the most important a week and a half of your life. And then there was Honour Maths.

Honours Maths was the Holy Grail of academic achievement at second level. I never got it. It may have been lack of will, or just wilful stupidity. But I sat in that class for three years (did 5th Year twice and failed maths both times) on my parents’ and teachers’ insistence, and never got much further than the first third of the curriculum. But if you were at all clever you had to be in Honours Maths. No question about it.

It was estimated that just to keep up you needed to do 2 hours homework a night and 7 or 8 on the weekends, just in maths. Forget about your 6 other subjects, each with a teacher claiming an hour a night for her subject. But it wasn’t just the maths itself I hated (actually, I quite enjoyed parts of it, but just as I was figuring out calculus, we’d move on to trig, and so on). Or even the way it was taught - since most of the girls in class were able to follow without too much trouble.

But because of Honour Maths (my English teacher always pronounced the first ‘H’ in contempt), I was plucked from my comfortable undemanding secondary school, and enrolled as one of the Magdalen Sisters.

Two weeks before the autumn term of my last year of school began, I was summoned from the tennis court and informed that I needed to get measured for a new uniform. Why a new uniform with only 10 months of school to go? Because I had failed Honours Maths (again) and I would not be saying goodbye to my school friends before I began as a weekly boarder at the local crammer. Years later, my parents wondered that I had been unhappy in the convent; ‘but you always seemed so happy bounding out of the place on a Friday afternoon…’.

The school of course will remain nameless, staffed as it was by women who in their heart of hearts believed they were doing right. The women who taught me that shame is a weapon.

We were allowed a bath or shower once a week. Mine was on a Tuesday at half past seven. The optimum day was Wednesday - two days out from the shower you took at home on Sunday night just before going to school, and two days ahead of going home. Otherwise you were supposed to wash in the sink in your cubicle, with the door open and no displays of nudity allowed. It took the First Years a while to decipher all the mixed signals, and in the meantime they would be hauled in front of the other girls and told how they stank until they wept in shame.

At the beginning, if I got called into The Parlour to be harangued for offences like being friendly with the wrong girls I would grit my teeth and refuse to cry, no matter how many appeals were made to my parents’ disappointment or my family’s sacrifices. Soon, though, I learnt that the fastest way to get out of there was to count to about 50, let the nun get into her stride, and let the waterworks begin.

Bed clothes were pulled back every day during breakfast. Innocently, I thought it was to give the bed an airing. Until the morning I woke up, saw I’d had my period over night and left a 50p coin sized stain on the sheet. I begged the sister who did morning inspection not to say anything. ‘Oh, of course I won’t. You’re such a nice girl and from a nice family. It could happen to anyone.’. After breakfast, the nun in charge of the boarding school marched into my cubicle, told me how filthy I was, and slapped me in the face in front of the dormitory. It would be nice to think there was camraderie between the girls to get you through episodes like that. But anyone who was seen to consort with a girl in disgrace would fall into disfavour herself. And it just wasn’t worth it.

And, this is almost too good for the story, but it’s true. The head of the boarding school that ran on fear and distrust was, herself, the teacher of Honours Maths. I learnt a lot from her, but not much mathematics.

In late spring, thanks to the intervention of a former teacher in a sister convent, I finally got out of Honours Maths. Out of spite, I think, I was put in the remedial class. Which was actually fine as they let me get on with my own exam preparations. In the end, I took the Matric and got a C in maths, or, as it’s also called, an honour.

But anyway, compared to pretty much anything, it was rather mild. And in my case only lasted a year. A year, mind you, when the best thing that happened to me was pneumonia which got me out of school from November to January. I remember being outraged when they confiscated my copy of Anna Karenina on the grounds that it wasn’t ‘a proper book’. But have I picked up a copy and finished it in my 15 years of freedom since? Not at all.

The Leaving Cert loomed large over my whole life back then. People said it was the hardest exam I’d ever do, and they were right. (then again, I’ve never done comps.) It was the door to the good life thereafter. Thankfully, in my case, it swung open.

But night after night I’m back there again, plunged into a new school and furiously trying to find classes, textbooks, and work out how, this time, I’ll get through Honours Maths. The up side is that the school is always different, the course offerings are quite varied, and these days they let boys in too.

March 19, 2004

Men from Mars, Women from Venus, Ph.Ds from Uranus

Posted by Kieran

Via Kevin ‘the Animal’ Drum we learn that John Gray, author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus is pretty touchy. He’s threatening to sue a blogger who pointed out last November that Gray’s Ph.D was of dubious provenance. I thought this was pretty well known — I mean, I knew it, and it’s not like I keep up with the news. He got it from Columbia Pacific University, an unaccredited diploma mill somewhere in California. There was a TV story about it a while ago. But though CPU may be defunct (by the by, what computer scientist would not want a degree from CPU?) there are plenty of others. Enroll at Strassford University, for example (discussed further in this CBS news report), or Glencullen University, notionally located in the heart of Dublin1, or just cut to the chase and design your own degree — literally — at Ineedadiploma.com. This last site helpfully reminds you that, although “All our diplomas are printed on high quality parchment paper [and] all transcripts are printed on tamper proof, security paper,” and that  ”You also have the option of adding a security hologram to any transcript”, nevertheless “none of our items are intended to be used for unlawful misrepresentation or fraudulent purposes.” 

1 Glencullen also operates as the University of Wexford, which I suppose isn’t that far from Dublin, but also as the University of San Moritz, which makes you hope the students don’t have to walk across campus to get from one lecture to the next.

March 11, 2004

British university axes staff websites

Posted by Chris

In a disproportionate and heavy-handed response to a specific problem, the University of Birmingham (UK) has banned staff from hosting personal web pages (including blogs) on their systems. The Guardian has the story . And staff at Birmingham have a campaign to defend their right to host personal material.

February 23, 2004

Basic science and tech education

Posted by Eszter

Ed Felten has posted a call for science/tech books we’d like all students to read. Ed is disturbed by the low number of science- and technology-related books that appear on the “must read” lists of an international group of college presidents. (Note that the response rate to the survey was quite low at around 25%.) Another interesting result is that very few contemporary books are on these people’s lists.

This is not the first time I’ve thought about the lack of basic science education and knowledge of such areas. Given that both my parents are chemists who have written several books about prominent scientists in the past few years, this has come up in our conversations often. I am reminded of what my father writes in the preface of his book on Nobel Prize winners :

Arthur Kornberg (M59)1 noted that American children are made to learn the names of their presidents, as British and French children have to learn about their respective kings, queens, and presidents, but much less about the great scientists. The same is true for the rest of the world. Our students, our children, the general public, all of us would benefit from knowing a little more about science and how it comes about because so much in our modern life depends on it.

I wonder if it would be more helpful to allocate some of the time that is spent on science education in the traditional sense - e.g. learning about the physical/chemical properties of our world - to learning about the history of science. Of course, one could argue that such material should be included in the history or social science curriculum not in the science curriculum. An interesting and important related approach would be to focus on the social aspects of creativity and innovation. [pdf]

1 Kornberg, A., interview in Hargittai, I. Candid Science II: Conversations with Famous Biomedical Scientists. Imperical College Press, London, 2002, pp.50-71.; M59 stands for 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

February 20, 2004

The "function" of universities

Posted by Chris

Professor Edward Feser continues his self-immolation on TechCentralStation (see previous episodes here and here and Brian Leiter’s takes here and here ) and, in the course of doing so issues a challenge to his critics:

The real question is whether on balance, in general, students tend to become more liberal as a result of their university experience; and this question can, for clarity’s sake, be broken up into a number of sub-questions [details below].

The answer to the questions is, according to Professor Feser, “yes”, indeed he

… simply den[ies] the intellectual honesty of anyone who claims to believe otherwise — or at least doubt that he’s spent much time among university students. Yet to acknowledge that these questions must be answered in the affirmative is to acknowledge that the modern university does indeed serve the de facto function of undermining the commitment of the young to the traditional institutions of Western civilization.

I find it odd for someone to say of anything that just because it has a certain effect (if it does has that effect) it thereby fulfils a function, even a “de facto” one (whatever that is). Presumably, Feser wants to suggest that there’s some kind of explanation lurking here. That, perhaps, universities are the way they are because they perform some beneficial role for someone or something.

Anyway, on to the specific questions to which any intellectually honest person must allegedly answer “yes”. On examination, it becomes clear that to the extent to which it is true that on some interpretation one must answer in the affirmative, that is simply because exposure to more and better information and better training in reasoning and the assessment of evidence leads to people having better founded beliefs. Woudn’t it be shocking if universities didn’t have such effects?

1. Are students today, on balance and in general, more likely after having attended university to be hostile to capitalism?

I’ve no idea about this one really. I imagine that before attending university many students don’t have an attitude one way or the other to capitalism or much sense of what is meant by the term. Afterwards, I doubt that most university graduates are hostile to extensive private property and the use of the market mechanism - but perhaps Professor Feser has evidence to the contrary?

2. Are they, on balance and in general, more likely after having attended university to think that modern industrial society is inhuman, devastates the environment, impoverishes the Third World, etc.?

Again, many of them probably thought little about the issues before being exposed to higher education. After some exposure, I rather hope that they believe these claims to the extent to which they are true. Specifying the extent to which they are true, and the ways in which they are true (and false) requires some nuance.

3. Are they, on balance and in general, more likely after having attended university to think that differences in wealth, income, and the like between the sexes and between ethnic groups are the result of deep-rooted sexism and racism in American society?

Yes, let’s hope so, at least if those patterns that result from the legacies of slavery and segregation count as the “the result of deep-rooted … racism”. Does Feser disagree?

4. Are they, on balance and in general, more likely after having attended university to believe that the history of Western civilization is largely a shameful history of oppression and exploitation?

I hope that they come to believe the truth. Namely that the history of Western civilization is, in part , one of oppression and exploitation. Since colonialism, feudalism, slavery and genocide are an important part of this history one rather hopes that any educated person (including Professor Feser) would agree.

5. Are they, on balance and in general, more likely after having attended university to believe that there is no rational foundation for traditional religious belief, especially of the Christian sort — indeed that Christianity is a uniquely repressive and irrational creed?

Highly doubtful that they would believe the last — “uniquely” — part of Feser’s final sentence. But they should, after exposure to higher education, come to believe what they do believe on the basis of a more sceptical and dispassionate examination of the evidence. If learning those habits of thought leads to them abandoning religious belief, then too bad for religion. If not, not.

6. Are they, on balance and in general, more likely after having attended university to believe that traditional moral scruples, especially concerning sex, lack any rational justification and ought to be abandoned as mere expressions of superstition and bigotry?

This question is slightly hard to parse as Feser has written it. But are educated people likely to be more tolerant of, say, homosexuality than non-educated people? Are they less likely to believe that masturbation makes you go blind? Let’s hope so.

Professor Feser speculated about the “function” served by universities. A much better answer concerning the function they actually serve (as opposed, I hasten to add, to the one I’d like them to serve) was provided by the late Marxist jazz critic Frank Kofsky in his book John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s. As Kofsky puts it:

….the university is in some ways a microcosm of the Establishment as a whole. As we now know from studies that appeared as the by-product of protest movements at campuses all over the country during the second half of the 1960s, universities are governed by boards of regents, trustees, et cetera, on which sit representatives of the dominant business groups in the community.26 In a general way, the curriculum of the university is shaped to the demands of this corporate elite for an institution that will mass-produce mid-level technicians with all the approved social attitudes….

That was the reality then, and that is the reality today. Most student go on to fill exactly the roles Kofsky mentions and universities continue to be governed by the same kinds of people. The limited exposure students get to some moderately counter-cultural influences shouldn’t blind us to the function they actually do perform.

February 17, 2004

High School Diplomas

Posted by Harry

This story about the inflation of high school diplomas simply states what anyone working in a US high school knows — graduation simply requires attendance plus a modicum of obedience. Failing that, it helps to have parents who are willing to make life sufficiently difficult for administrators and teachers that they will give you a passing grade anyway. There are multiple culprits. One is the ludicrous system of having classroom teachers be the sole assigners of grades. I spent Sunday watching two teachers spend 90 minutes preparing for a meeting one of them was having on Monday with a parent of a student. The sole purpose of the meeting was to negotiate over the grade. The teacher had assigned a B and the parent was not satisfied. In the end, the parent refused to be satisfied (having recalculated the grade herself) and is insisting on a meeting with the Principal. My prediction — the parent will win, because the Principal will think — ‘this is a complete waste of my time, caving on this won’t make things any worse between me and the teacher, and it’ll get this p-i-t-a off my back’. Total waste — about 5 hours of school teachers and principal’s time. (I don’t care about the student’s or parent’s time — lets assume that harassing teachers is their hobby).

Of course, the parent has some right on her side. There’s an element of subjective judgment in how we grade assignments, in what weight we give them relative to each other, and finally in what thresholds we set for As, Bs, Cs, etc. What is ludicrous is giving the classroom teacher the power to make ALL those judgments. It simply sets up incentives for students and parents to pressure the teacher to raise the grades, wasting everyone’s time in the process. And, almost certainly, leading to grade inflation. If the judgment were made outside the classroom, by external graders, the classroom teacher’s grade would be predictive; and the incentive for the student and parent would be to cooperate with the teacher to ensure that the learning necessary for achieving the A actually occurs.

Update: so that you can see the urgency of this from the parent’s point of view, and how strong an incentive she has to do this I’ll quote mark’s eloquent comment which you’ll find again below:

1. The diploma itself is irrelevant, a basically worthless document.
2. The GPA is everything.
3. GPA is accumulated (for those not aware) from day 1 of high school, based on continual assessment as well as end of semester exam.
4. Initial college inquiries will be made based on a GPA derived from the first 5 semetesters of High school.
5. Homework is not marked equivalently - some assignments might gain 20 points, some 100 - A single major failure on the 100 point assessment could easily drag a GPA down .1 or .2 - A difficult number to make up over a short period of time. This could easily be the difference between acceptance and rejection by a college

February 05, 2004

Hell is Other Pupils

Posted by Kieran

I love America. Across its vast, extraordinarily diverse area, weird or stupid stuff happens all the time. And the media are usually there to make it into a national story:

A second-grade girl from Pittsburgh was suspended this week from her public elementary school for saying the word “hell” to a boy in her class. But 7-year-old Brandy McKenith says she was only warning the boy about the eternal comeuppance he could face for saying: “I swear to God.”

“I said, ‘You’re going to go to hell for swearing to God,’” Brandy was quoted as saying in an article that appeared on the Web site of the Pittsburgh Tribune Review on Wednesday. School officials were unavailable for comment. A Pittsburgh Public Schools spokeswoman told the newspaper that the student code prohibits profanity but does not provide a clear definition of what profanity is.

Lovely. Possible followups to this story: (1) Little boy also suspended for taking the Lord’s name in vain. (2) School issues statement saying, “It’s all been cleared up: We’ve explained to Brandy and the little boy that we were wrong to suspend them because, of course, Hell doesn’t exist and neither does God.” (3) President Bush issues statement that his No Child Left Behind Act will remedy “the unimaginative nature of profanity found in our public schools today.” (4) Brandy handed additional suspension for violating her school’s strict no-alcohol policy.

Normally I leave stories like this to the Volokhs, who have a sweet tooth for them. But they are busy at the moment trying to convince their readers that, whatever Paul Craig Roberts thinks, U.S. taxpayers are not less free than slaves. Eugene Volokh has devoted about 10,000 words of his fine legal mind to this question, so far. He even wrote up a helpful table outlining the relevant differences between 19th century U.S. slaves and 21st century U.S. taxpayers. I find myself wondering just what you’d have to say to get Eugene to write “Oh piss off, you ignorant little troll.”

January 27, 2004

Top up fees (yet more dissent)

Posted by John Quiggin

I’m not clear enough on the workings of the British Parliament to know whether Blair’s 5-vote win on the second reading of his education bill means that the political fight is over, but I thought I’d have my say anyway.

First, I’ll respond to other CT bloggers who’ve discussed this issue. Chris primarily makes the argument that, given that money isn’t going to come from anywhere else, or on any other terms, it’s better to take what’s on offer than to refuse on the basis that the terms are bad ones. I suppose I agree with this, but it’s not a helpful basis on which to discuss policy. Assuming you don’t want the Tories back, the same argument could be used for acquiescence in whatever policy Blair chooses to propose. Chris also dismisses concerns about variable fees, and I’ll return to this.

Daniel argues on risk grounds against the repayment mechanism (borrowed from the Australian HECS scheme) and, in my view, gets the risk analysis wrong. For precisely the reasons he outlines for not using NPV rules in assessing the effects of fees, the insurance implicit in the provision that no repayment is required until/unless earnings exceed some percentage of average earnings is considerably more valuable than he suggests. Assuming the proportion is set to give a level higher than the average earnings of non-graduates, it makes education a one-way bet. If you win, by earning more than you would have expected otherwise, you pay back some of your winnings. If you lose, you pay nothing. I don’t know what the actual proportion is, so I should stress that my support for the repayment scheme depends critically on this variable - in the absence of a high threshold substantial insurance, Daniel’s analysis is correct.

The critical sticking point, though, is not the level of fees but the principle of variable fees. If this provision had been dropped, it seems clear that the rest of the package would have passed fairly easily. The claim that these are not the same variable fees that were specifically excluded in the manifesto is nonsense, and the determination with which Blair and Clarke have stuck to them shows this.

The variable fees proposal raises two main issues. The first, which I assume is dominant for Blair and Clarke, is the desirability of a market-based and profit-driven higher education system, in which prices determine the allocation of resources. I could go to great length on why this is a bad idea, but most of the arguments will be familiar to readers so I’ll raise one that I borrow from archetypal Chicago economist, George Stigler who formulated the ‘survivor principle’. Stigler argued that if you want to determine the optimal firm size and structure for a given industry, you shouldn’t rely on abstract theoretical arguments or engineering estimates of cost functions. Instead, you should look to see which firms have actually survived. In the case of education, for-profit providers have (almost) always and (almost) everywhere failed in competition with non-profit and state providers, even when competing on apparently level playing fields. The big exception is that of providing vocational training to adults (commercial trade schools and the University of Phoenix are examples) . But this is the exception that proves (tests) the rule, since most of the standard arguments against for-profit education don’t apply in this case.

Chris raises the framing issue of whether there would be similar objections to discounts from a set fee as to top-ups. In principle, my answer is “Yes”, but in practice there are two offsetting observations. On the one hand, discounting is very difficult to stop. On the other hand, unless the basic fee is set too high, relative to the cost of provision, discounting will be a marginal issue.

The other major issue is that of equity, and raises afresh a whole lot of issues which have been debated at length in relation to school education, notably with respect to selective education and the 11-plus examination. Supporters of the proposal take it for granted that some university students (for example, those going to Oxford and Cambridge) should receive a substantially better education than others, even when both are undertaking essentially the same course of study. If so, it seems only fair that those receiving the better education should pay more. And since the extra payments go to the university, the difference in quality can be maintained indefinitely.

The same case can be made for a user-pays system in almost any public service, once the principle of unequal provision is accepted. Long after the NHS was introduced, health services were better in rich areas than poor ones, and the same arguments could have been applied for user charges, which would then have perpetuated the inequalities.

The only way in which variable fees could be regarded as egalitarian would be if the grants to top universities were reduced in line with their capacity to charge higher fees. That is, in effect, Oxford and Cambridge would be taxed on the capital accumulated during centuries of state and church support.

An important difference that used to apply to higher education was that only a small proportion of the population, selected on the basis of competitive examination, went to university. In these circumstances, there was no obvious reason for trying to equalise provision within this group. But this difference has ceased to be relevant. In most developed countries, a majority of people can be expected to undertake some form of post-secondary education.

This means that the issues applying to the funding and organisation of post-secondary education are, in essence, the same as for school education (particularly for the post-compulsory age group). The primary objective of public policy ought to be the provision of a high standard of universal education, encouraging diversity in the type of education provided (traditional university, technical and so on) but not in quality. If there’s some extra money for a few flagships like Oxford and Cambridge, well and good, but they should not be allowed to set the pattern.

To the extent that there’s a case for “elite” universities, it relates primarily to research. But even here, the case for elite institutions is weak. There’s no particular reason why the best economics department and the best physics department should be located at the same place, and this is recognised in the Research Assessment procedure which focuses on disciplines rather than institutions. The link between top-quality research and undergraduate education is made much of, but is quite tenuous these days, The distance between research frontiers and undergraduate work now is as great as the distance between research and upper secondary school was thirty or forty years ago in many disciplines - certainly this is true in economics.

Moving on to the blue-sky department, I’d suggest that since post-secondary education is unlikely to become properly universal for a long time, we could think about providing every 18-year old with a capital loan which could either be traded for a post-secondary education or used for some purpose such as establishing a business, with the whole being repaid by a tax surcharge when (if) incomes exceed average earnings.


[Posted with ecto]

January 26, 2004

And where were you educated?

Posted by Eszter

Last week in class I asked my students where we had all learned that it is illegal to kill people. [UPDATE 1/27/04 10:30am CST: Since the comments have gotten long and some may miss this clarification: this is not the exact wording of what I had said in class. I said something along the lines of “not supposed to kill people”. My question was not about legalities it was more general.] (Let’s set aside for the moment why this question would come up in a grad seminar on the Social Implications of Info and Communication Technologies.. the question seemed to make sense at the time.:) When I posed the question I wasn’t sure about my own answer to it so I was especially surprised when I saw that most students (of the eight in this class) had an immediate response: church.

Having grown up in Hungary where religious education in the 70s and 80s was not part of most people’s upbringing, I’ve always been fascinated by how prevalent it seems in so many Americans’ lives. I am curious whether my question would have led to similar responses by people who grew up elsewhere (or even others in the US). For me this has always been a bit of a paradigm shift. It’s also an example of why I think it’s helpful for social scientists (or anyone else for that matter) to live in a different country at some point. It really helps in understanding how much social and cultural context can matter in how people view and understand the world.

By the way, my own candidates for a response to my question would have been school, family or the media not that I recall any specific instances of learning about this particular matter. Figuring out where people learn things that seem so intrinsically obvious later is a fascinating subject. It is to me anyway which might explain why I became a sociologist.:)

Kelly Bets and Education Policy

Posted by Daniel

Non-UK readers might not be aware of this, but there is the most almightly kerfuffle going on in the UK at the moment on a subject which I strongly suspect Americans would regard it as bizarre to be having a debate about. We’re all throwing beer bottles and calling each other fascists over the question of … whether different universities should charge different fees. Why? Well, for one thing, Blair and his government promised us in their last manifesto that they weren’t going to do this, and apparently some of us still care about the government’s habit of allowing us to go into the ballot chamber believing things that aren’t true (by the way, where the hell are our oversized pint glasses and longer opening hours?). But there is another, more fundamental reason; a lot of people believe that this is a fundamentally inegalitarian measure. And on my analysis (though not that of most other economists) they are right. Read on …

The argument that differential tuition fees are inegalitarian is quite an easy one to grasp intuititively. It’s simply that poor kids will be more impacted than rich kids by the need to stump up the cash, so poor kids will tend to be drawn to the cheap ‘n’ cheerful universities while the rich kids go to Oxford or Cambridge in even greater numbers. Obviously, this is bad news for Durham, Bristol and St. Andrews universities, which have traditionally subsisted on a market made up of posh kids too thick to get into Oxbridge when they had to compete against the oiks. But it’s also regarded (most particularly, by people from modest backgrounds who were given a leg up by going to Oxbridge, a segment of the population in which Labour MPs are quite thick on the ground) as somewhat inegalitarian; it closes down one of the exit routes from the slums for those of us who can’t box and for whom Pop Idol is not a realistic option.

The counterargument which the neoliberal tendency among the Blairites have latched onto is that this is wrongheaded, and that differential tuition fees are a profoundly egalitarian measure. After all, the universities which would be charging a premium are the ones which provide the entree into the upper echelons of society. So the graduates of those universities are veritably the creme de la menthe of the UK class system; why should they have their education subsidised by dockworkers, painters, waiters etc?

When you put the argument like that, it’s really quite obvious that it’s based on a brutal insistence on ignoring the distinction between ex ante and ex post. The people whose education is being subsidised aren’t investment bankers, management consultants, and so on; they’re scruffy kids, with for the most part no income of their own. This is an argument for a graduate tax, (and quite a progressive one at that), not for an upfront user fee. But the problem is that the money from a graduate tax would take time to arrive unless it was imposed retrospectively, and Blair et al want the cash now, to spend on universities before the next election, rather than in ten years time when it might be contributing to some other bugger’s feelgood factor, so they are demanding the money up front. Seems pretty clear to me that this is a pathological outcome of the political process from which we should be protected, and that the setting of large general principles of taxation like a move toward user fees ought not to be driven by the exigencies of one year’s budget process (if my spies are to be belived, btw, the matter is complicated by the fact that Brown favours a graduate tax while Blair is keen on user fees for ideological reasons).

SIDEBAR: As a concession to the backbench Labour MPs who have been up in arms about this one, the current proposal gives what have been sold as very generous repayment terms to students. Specifically, they wouldn’t pay it back unless they were earning a certain percentage of the national average wage, and the debt would be wiped out after 25 years. I don’t buy this, for a number of reasons, chiefly because I happen to know a bit about how much both of these measures cost. The “percentage of average wage” criterion is the equivalent of payment protection insurance, which is available on normal commerically contracted debt for a fee of about 0.8% of the amount borrowed, while the present value in 25 years time of almost anything at any decent discount rate is fuck-all to a bag of chips. But more fundamentally, you ask yourself the question “Will the £30,000 of debt that we’re proposing to saddle new graduates with, make it more difficult for them to get a mortgage?” and the answer is “Yes, indubitably, there is no way in which it couldn’t”. The CML have suggested that the repayment schedule means that students would still get a mortgage, but the debt service involved probably reduces the student’s borrowing capacity by … well, about £30K. So there.

But in any case, that’s the argument against having upfront tuition fees at all; what I want to consider now is the argument against differential tuitition fees. In order to do so, we’re going to have to descend into the murk, and consider the most plausible form of the argument outlined above; one which I believe is still based on the same ugly confusion about ex ante and ex post, but less transparently so.

This would be a version of the “graduate salary premium” argument based on net present values. The idea here is that you take the salary premium earned by a graduate over a non-graduate, capitalise it at some risk-adjsuted discount rate, and treat the go to uni/don’t go to uni decision as the decision to exchange a sum of cash now for a stream of future benefits. If you put it like this, then the decision to go to university (or to go to Oxford rather than Thames Valley Uni) can be seen as an investment like any other. And on the basis of plausible numbers about graduate salary premia, it can be made to look like an investment with a very high return indeed. Hence, why do we need to subsidise this investment; it’s obviously rational for people to go to university so all this stuff and what-have-you about poor kids being scared off by debt levels is just scaremongering.

Taken in its own terms, it’s not a bad argument. What’s wrong with it?

Well, basically, that it’s a misapplication of the net present value rule. The use of a risk-adjusted discount rate on expected cashflows is a very,very wrong a way to take account of risk in this particular case. Net present value is a way of discounting mathematical expectations of future values. It’s a sensible way to operate if you’re looking at a large portfolio of investments; at base, it’s an actuarial approach. As a result, it relies upon the large-sample properties of the underlying returns generating process to a very great extent indeed.

Unfortunately, this portfolio approach is not at all available to a teenager making the university decision. Because they only have one life to live, they can’t invest their human capital in a portfolio of educational experiences; it’s all or nothing. And average statistics for the graduate salary premium aren’t as helpful as one might think; on average, British women say “yes” to a marriage proposal 78% of the time [1], but that’s not much use to you as you woo the fair Roxanne, is it?

So to recap, the decision to go to university is one which is a one-time decision, where one is making an all-or-nothing decision on the basis of subjective assessments of the probability and magnitude of a favourable outcome. The net-present value version of the “graduates reap the benefits” argument is based on a decision rule which is appropriate for making a portfolio allocation decision on the basis of actuarially expected probabilities.

For the time being, I’m going to set aside my fundamental objection to this whole approach (that this kind of way of thinking about investment decisions ignores the effect of animal spirits and is a fundamentally wrong way of thinking about decisions made under time and uncertainty, also that it massively overuses asymptotic properties to generate rules over discrete decisions) in order to suggest a different mathematical decision rule which I think captures a few important aspects of the decision in question.

Deciding to spend a chunk of money on going to university to me feels less like making an investment and more like betting on a horse. You’re not in a situation trading off risk and return from a well-defined menu; you’re trying to suit horses to courses (or indeed, yourself to courses) on a one-shot success-or-failure bet. You think you’ve got a bit of special information about yourself which makes it worth gambling at all, but the overall atmosphere is one of uncertainty. What do you do in these conditions?

It’s a surprisingly poorly developed body of economic theory, but one decision rule which I’d regard as at least defensible is the Kelly Criterion. It’s a piece of information theory (an article on a possible interpretation of the “information rate” in Shannon & Weiner’s theory) retooled by Ed Thorp for the black jack crowd. It’s a science of what you do when making a bet in which you have an edge. To start your intuition running, imagine that you happen to know that a particular roulette wheel is biased and comes up red 60% of the time. How much money would you bet on this wheel? If you bet all your cash on the first spin, you’ve got a 60% chance of winning big, but if you lose, you won’t be able to bet any more. If, on the other hand, you bet the table minimum you won’t go bust, but you’re not really making the most of your opportunity. What’s the happy medium?

Basically, the Kelly criterion says that, facing a bet where you have a probability of winning p and an expected return r, you bet the following fraction of your bankroll:

Fraction = {[p(1+r)]-1}/r

Note that for an even money bet, r=100%, and the fraction simplifies to 2p-1; this is the simple form of the rule that blackjack players will quote that you “bet your edge”. In the case of the roulette wheel, we assume an even money payout, so you should bet 20% of your bankroll per spin.

Betting in this manner has a number of attractive long-run characteristics; your wealth grows at a faster rate than any other system of betting, the time to reach any given wealth level is shorter, and you have zero chance of going bankrupt. It’s this last propert of the Kelly criterion (that it doesn’t go “all-in”) that makes the real difference with the NPV rule; the NPV rule will always tell you to go all-in on a positive NPV investment.

The Kelly criterion was largely disposed of by Paul Samuelson in an important paper called “Why We Should Not Make Log of Wealth Big Though Years to Act Are Long” (the paper is entirely written in words of one syllable!). It’s a towering achievement of Samuelson’s, and like so many of his other towering achievements, I do wish he hadn’t bothered. Basically, the point is that log-wealth criteria (of which species the Kelly criterion is one; it’s the solution to an equation which maximises the log of wealth over time) tend to give excessive weight to small probabilities of very bad outcomes (cf Tyler Cowen’s discussion of the Paradox of Immortal Drivers), and this is inconsistent with any plausible utility function.

On the other hand, this very property (loss-aversion) makes the Kelly criterion more attractive to the modern behavioral finance crowd, who are attempting to resurrect various versions of it because loss-aversion seems to describe human behaviour a bit better than expected utility theory (refs refs refs). Since doing something similar won John Nash a Nobel Prize, I’m going to assume for the meantime that it’s OK for me to elevate this highly arguable mathematical criterion with a few favourable characteristics into the very definition of rationality. I hope that Prof. Q will forgive me for this dreadful mangling.

Anyway, for my purposes, the important thing about the Kelly criterion is that it captures an important intuition which appears relevant to the question at hand; that no matter how favourable the tradeoff, how much you are willing to stake on something depends on how much you own now. The NPV rule misses this because at heart it’s a two-period model being made to do the job of a dynamic one, so it doesn’t really have much of a concept of “keeping in reserve”. So, using some random numbers skimmed off the web, I’ll try and calculate how much a Kelly-betting student would be prepared to spend on education.

The consensus figure is that graduates earn £400, 000 more than non-graduates “over a lifetime”. I can’t tell whether that is a net present value and strongly suspect it isn’t, in which case the government is doing its little bit to further the cause of financial illiteracy. I’m therefore going to scale it down to £300,000 because then the oddsd are a nice 10 to 1 when compared to £30,000 of debt (I’m treating the debt as the initial investment). Based on this site’s numbers, I’m going to assume that the chance of landing in a “non-graduate” occupation is 10%, so your probability of winning is 90%. Great betting odds, looks like. Plugging the figures into the formula reveals that it would be rational (by this criterion) to bet 89% of your wealth on a university education.

The trouble is that, for anyone with less than £34k of net worth, spending £30,000 on a university education is an “overbet”. Overbetting is particularly bad in the Kelly system, because you’re not only taking on too much risk, you’re actually reducing your expected return. And my guess is that surprisingly few teenagers have £30,000 in assets, even if you include that proportion of their parents’ assets they could call their own in the form of an expected inheritance. How does this affect the desirability of a university education?

I’m going to assume a teenager with wealth of £10k, assuming that there’s a family with three children and housing equity of £30k; the average house equity in the UK is £60k, but that’s skewed toward old people. This youth would be betting 300% of his wealth on a university education rather than the Kelly bet of 89%. What’s the effect on his returns?

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll realise that you don’t need to do the math on this one; an overbet devastates returns. If you bet a fraction equal to or greater than 100% of your wealth, then you will go bankrupt with certainty in finite time (the gambler’s ruin theorem). So it looks like Samuelson had a point; a Kelly-bettor would not go to university unless he had wealth of more than £34k, which seems far too conservative.

The actual numbers here aren’t that significant. The important thing to bear in mind is that the question of inveting in a university education is qualitatively different for the poor than for the rich. If you’ve got a bankroll of £34k per child (equates to housing plus financial wealth of about £65k for your typical kid), then your decision to go to university is clear cut; it’s strictly rational in the sense that if you were faced with a succession of such choices over time, you would maximise the log of your wealth by accepting them all. If you’ve got less than £30k, then it’s much more of a leap in the dark. There is potentially a genuine rationing effect here which arises as the result of requiring the up-front payment rather than structuring the loan as a graduate tax.

I’ve not addressed except in passing a number of other issues that I regard as important; the precedent of introducing user fees, the fact that removing a middle-class “perk” is just the sort of thing that undermines the solidarity that’s the bedrock of a welfare state, and the fact that overhanging debt is a fine tool of political control (a theme that will probably be addressed this week by a number of CT posters). I also haven’t touched on the wider question of UK university funding, other than to say that I have no confidence at all that this proposal will really make more funds available to them rather than being offset. But I’d recap my point here as follows:

1. There is a very real difference between a graduate tax (a tax on graduates making lots of money) and a user fee (a tax on teenagers with no money who might in future become graduates), particularly in terms of the incentive effects. Note that a graduate tax is a tax that you incur by virtue of something that happened in the past, and thus doesn’t have further incentive effects.

2. This problem is tied up with fundamental questions of time and uncertainty which economic theory does a very bad job indeed at modelling.

3. Anything which means that you have to make an investment up front in your future is likely to have a disproportionate incentive effect on people with less wealth.

4. Once more, a graduate tax is not the equivalent of a debt to be repaid in line with income, because you cannot put the expected value of a stream of future earnings and tax payments on the same footing as a certain debt today, because key assumptions of the NPV rule (diversification and marginality) are not satisified.

That’s it. I’m not wholly satisified with this piece. But the vote is tomorrow, so it has to go up today.

January 25, 2004

Top-up fees

Posted by Chris

I see from comments to another thread that Daniel is preparing to argue against the British government’s case for top-up fees for universities. A good thing that we don’t have a CT party-line! Actually, I’m not sure I would be in favour of them either if the choice were between the current proposals and any alternative that I’d care to formulate for an ideal world. But that isn’t the case. British universities have been starved of resources for over two decades, academic pay is extremely poor (especially at the start) and we’ll face a real difficulty in recruiting people to teach some subjects if things don’t change (Daniel — fancy a job an a junior econ lecturer in a British university?). So since the extra money we need isn’t going to come from increasing taxation and isn’t going to come from a graduate tax (both of which I’d be perfectly happy with), and since the likely outcome of a government defeat is further drift and starvation — I hope Blair wins this one.

Some additional observations:

First, the opposition to the measure is a coalition of the unprincipled: Labour MPs who have lost or never had ministerial office and now know they well never get their hands on a red box in the future; those who want to punish Blair for Iraq; the Tories who see a chance to give Blair a kicking whatever the merits of the issue (and ditto the Lib Dems). There are also organisations like the Association of University Teachers and the National Union of Students who campaign for higher pay for academics and better resources for students and then can’t hold themselves back from opposing the only reform likely to fund the very things they want.

Second, I can’t understand the opposition to variablity in fees. This is couched in terms of outrage at the suggestion that those paying for courses at “elite” universities ought to pay more. I wonder how consistent these opponents are. If flat-rate fees are introduced and some vice-chancellors want to offer a discount on hard-to-fill courses, will they also oppose that ?

Third the claim that the proposal breaches a manifesto commitment is bogus. On this I can quote from an email I wrote to Chris Brooke which now appears on The Virtual Stoa :

It seems to me that there’s a perfectly straightforward line [on this] … which seems to me to be true and defensible (though difficult to defend on, say Newsnight or Question Time - for obvious reasons). Namely, that the what was denoted by “top-up fees” in the manifesto is something other than what is denoted by “top-up fees” in the current proposals and debate. That is to say, that what it was proposed to outlaw in the manifesto was the idea (then floated by some Vice-Chancellors) that universities should be able to charge in addition to the £1000 basic fee, a further fee at their discretion. The current proposals — no money up front, fixed ceiling to the fees, some element of variability, moderately painless and income-dependent repayment scheme — are different: the variable fees aren’t a top-up to other basic fees in the way previously suggested.

Of course it isn’t certain that even these measures will bring universities more money. The flat-rate £1000 fee was supposed to do this and Gordon Brown simply clawed the money back (someone should have called Blair on this in the Newsnight debate). But I don’t think there’s a better option on offer. When it rains heavily in Bristol, water pours into the building where I work; my junior colleagues struggle to find anywhere to live on their depressed salaries. Meanwhile our students, many of whom have been privately educated at costs far exceeding those in the proposal, will go on to earn salaries far exceeding those of their teachers within two or three years of graduating. Time to make them pay.

January 12, 2004

School Vouchers in the UK?

Posted by Harry

The New Statesman (subscription required) just published this article about why school vouchers would not have a beneficial impact in Britain. I wrote it in a fit of irritation after hearing the know-all Melanie Phillips on the radio expressing her support for vouchers, and invoking the Swedish and Dutch experiences. The Swedish voucher scheme has been evaluated positively (and frequently) by Bergstrom and Sandstrom. But it is tiny, and if you read the version of their study put out by the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation you’ll find no evidence of improved scores, and that it is regulated in a way that is unimaginable in the US or UK. The Dutch experience is very different — most children attend private schools on what is effectively a voucher system, but the State subjects all schools to heavy regulation, and the vouchers are highly progressive (schools get paid much more for low-income kids, kids from homes with low levels of parental education, kids from non-Dutch speaking homes). The Netherlands is consistently a pretty high performer in international comparisons of children’s achievement. But there is no particular reason to think this is due to their having private schools. The virtual elimination of child poverty, for example, might be responsible. My response to Phillips on the comparison is this: you give us high marginal tax rates, low levels of inequality and child poverty, etc, and I’ll give you progressive school vouchers.
Anyway, that’s the background — the article ignores the other Northern Europeans, and concentrates on the differences between the US and the UK. Here it is:

Vouchers, it may seem, are an idea whose time has come. The proposal to give
parents a voucher representing the cost of their children’s annual education
which can they can “spend” at the school of their choice (private or state)
is not only Tory policy, it is also finding favour in 10 Downing Street.
Andrew Adonis, one of Tony Blair’s top advisers, has recently visited
Milwaukee, the Mecca for both US and British voucher advocates. John
Norquist, mayor of Milwaukee, has paid a return visit to London.
I too admire the Milwaukee voucher scheme - actually known as “the Milwaukee
public choice program”. But is it really transferable to Britain? It
exclusively serves low-income families; only children from households with
incomes of less than 75 per cent above the poverty line are eligible. The
voucher pays private schools about two-thirds the per pupil amount used in
the local state schools. The private schools cannot ask the parents for
anything extra.
The schools must abide by other regulations. They are not allowed to select
among the voucher applicants. They cannot discriminate on the basis of
religious affiliation, race, or even past achievement or behaviour record.
They can reject children with special needs only if they do not already have
paying children with that particular need on the school roll. If a school
has more voucher applicants than it has places for them, it must choose by
lottery (subject to the ubiquitous rule that siblings have preference).
All this is admirable. But US private schools can abide by these regulations
because they are very different from Britain’s. Many private Catholic
schools, for example, have a social justice mission and positively welcome
the opportunity to teach low income and low-achieving children. They can
also afford to operate at two-thirds the cost of the state schools because
spending per pupil in US private schools averages half the spending in the
US state sector.
In Britain, by contrast, private schools spend something more than twice as
much per pupil. Do British voucher advocates seriously expect Eton,
Winchester and the City of London School to educate all-comers at two-thirds
the cost of state schools? Frankly, British private schools are not good
enough. They want the cheapest and easiest children to educate which is why
they preserve so fiercely “control over the admissions process”.
If a British version of the Milwaukee scheme were to involve more than
handful of quirky private schools, it would have to ditch that city’s
regulations and allow schools to select entrants and charge parents top-up
fees. A handful of poor children might benefit if they were lucky enough to
be among those chosen for special treatment (and if private schools really
are as good as they think they are). But the scheme would more likely end up
subsidising from public funds the wealthy parents who already pay private
school fees.
Do Britain’s voucher advocates know all this? Either they do, in which case
they are dissembling, or they don’t, in which case they are ignorant. Either
way, we should stop listening to them.

December 05, 2003

Don't do like what I say, do what I does

Posted by Daniel

Kevin Drum has a piece of advice for composition students:

“ignore anyone who tells you to write like you talk”

I certainly agree with him that if someone can’t construct a simple English sentence without making two grammatical howlers, you probably shouldn’t listen to them any more. If someone were to instruct you to “write as you speak”, then there might be some point in having a pedagogical debate, but that’s presumably another matter.

Update: Kevin also suggests that “The meaning of a word is never unclear because an apostrophe has been misused”. Its not the daftest claim I’ve seen this week, but I think hell regret making it.

November 13, 2003

Private Schools, Equality, and Liberty

Posted by Harry

In my role as Adam Swift’s unpaid publicist I want to point out this piece in The Telegraph (you have to register, but its free, quick, and easy, and there’s lots of other good stuff). Swift explains — to Telegraph readers, remember — why the standard arguments in defence of private schools don’t work; either because they appeal to false values, or because they appeal to correct values but are beside the point. A great challenge to private schools —- and kudos to John Clare, the Telegraph education editor, for running it. (For Americans who don’t know it the Telegraph is the furthest right of the UK newspapers, so this is a particularly incendiary piece for it).

October 22, 2003

Home schooling

Posted by Chris

I’ve just given a talk on education and social justice over at our Graduate School of Education. It was a fairly low key affair, aimed at some graduate students with no prior knowledge of political philosophy (and one CT-reader, as it turned out). So I concentrated on elaborating Rawls’s principles of justice and explaining how they might or might not feed into debates on educational policy. (I was greatly helped in this by reading Adam Swift’s extraordinarily clear and well-argued How Not to Be a Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent . Even if you disagree with Swift, he’ll help you to sort out your own thinking.) The point of the talk wasn’t to say that Rawlsian principles mandate this or that solution, but rather to explore how they could inform policy arguments. One of the questions I had from the floor concerned the permissibility of home schooling. Here’s, roughly, what I said as an off-the-top of my head Rawlsian response.

Children have an interest in growing up with various moral capacities, including the capacity to form, revise, etc their aims in life, a sense of justice, and so on. Schools function not just as purveyors of information about maths, physics and geography but also as social environments in which individuals learn to rub along with others and get exposed to a wider range of social influences than they would at home (or perhaps than their parents judge desirable). That’s a good thing, and is a reason to be opposed to home schooling.

BUT. It all depends what the options are. In an ideal system no child would be home schooled, but faced with the prospect of unacceptably poor schools it might well be the right thing for a parent to do. The point about a broad social environment also cuts two ways. Although being exposed to those wider influences and to peer groups is valuable, in reality the peer groups that children have available may be (really and not just in the imagination of paranoid overprotective parents) be dangerous and bad.

So I kinda sorta sat on the fence. Harry, who has thought about these issue much more than I have, and who has a book and many papers on justice and education would probably have had a ready answer.

October 09, 2003

Social Mobility

Posted by Harry

I just learned (rather late) that this week’s Times Educational Supplement is carrying this Platform piece by me. Since I don’t have a subscription I can’t read it, but assume it is a nicely edited version of the following.

The meritocratic ideal has a powerful grip on contemporary politicians. It seems deeply unfair that some people have worse chances of getting at the unequally distributed rewards of our society, just because they are born into households that, themselves, have done worse in that distribution. The meritocratic ideal commands that one’s social class of origin should have no impact on one’s chances for success.
But in fact very few societies have come anywhere close to approximating the ideal. In Britain, for example, although the proportion of working class children attending university has steadily increased over the past 50 years, this has only been in line with the increase in the proportion of 18 year olds attending university. Relatively, it is as great an advantage to be born well in 2003 as it was in 1953.
Former secretary of state for education, Estelle Morris, frequently stated her ambition to eliminate the connection between social class origin and educational success (and, by extension, success in later life). But any efforts to achieve this through education policy face two serious problems. First, it is incredibly hard to compensate for disadvantage through education — it is easier and more effective simply to eliminate disadvantage at its source. Second, any such efforts involve targeting resources at the least advantaged. But targeting the least advantaged in the state schools runs the risk that wealthy parents will feel they are getting a bad deal — and defect to the private sector. This would be undesirable because the involvement of more advantaged parents and children in the state system is generally thought to benefit the least advantaged. Three examples: i) if the most stimulating students are creamed off into the private sector, that sector becomes correspondingly more attractive to the best teachers; ii) lower achieving children benefit from being taught (well) alongside higher achieving children; iii) as schools come increasingly to rely on fund raising to top up their own resources, they benefit from having parents who are more capable of raising (and donating) funds.
The trick, then, for the policymaker concerned with social mobility, is to design policies which simultaneously target the least advantaged and lower achieving children, while reassuring the middle class parent. What policies do this will depend on the motives of the middle class parents: obviously those who simply want to maximize their own children’s prospects cannot be reassured by anything that helps out the least advantaged.
But one recent study and two new books suggest it might be easier than some fear to reassure middle class parents. A new study conducted by the IPPR finds that in London, despite increasing prosperity especially among the wealthy, the percentage of children attending private schools has barely changed in the last two decades. This hardly indicates a predisposition to flight by parents in the state system.
Then there is Adam Swift’s How Not to Be A Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent. After providing a brilliant argument for the prohibition of private schools, Swift explains why it might nevertheless be morally permitted – even required – to send one’s child to one if they do exist. The reason is that one might have an obligation to send one’s child to an adequately good school, and the state may not provide that option (in fact, if private schooling is widespread, it is likely not to provide that option for everyone). This is not, he understands, everyone’s motivation for using private schools. But it is an acceptable motivation.
Finally, Stephen Ball’s Class Strategies and the Education Market contains extensive interviews with middle class parents deciding whether or not to ‘go private’. Strikingly, many of his interviewees are, indeed, motivated by the concern to ensure that their own child just gets an adequate school: some go private, and others do not. Even some who do go private bemoan the fact that they are doing so, and express regret that there is not a school with a representative socio-economic mix available to their child. They believe that the available state school is not just not good enough for their child, but not good enough for any child.
Why does this help? Consider the following targetting policies. First, alter the funding formula so that all children eligible for free school meals bring with them three times the normal amount of per pupil funding. This helps to counteract the tendency of schools to prefer middle class to less advantaged children, and ensures that, if low income children do still concentrate into particular schools, they are at least better resourced. Second, alter the structure of ‘new start’ schools so that they have, for the first 3 years, guaranteed class sizes of no more than 15, rising to 22 over the next 4 years, so that lower class sizes benefit the least advantaged, and are enough lower as to have some real impact.
Both these policies target the least advantaged. But what do they do for the middle class parents who are abandoning the schools for private sector, taking with them their political clout, personal resources, and the social capital of their children? Well, for some of those parents, those who are seeking unfair advantages for their children, or who cannot bear to have their precious children mix with the lower orders, it will do nothing. But for the large number of parents who simply want an adequately good school for their child it might do quite a lot. If ‘new start’ schools had those kinds of guarantees they might be quite attractive to parents whose other choices are very expensive private schools or under-resourced state schools. If low-income children brought a lot of resources with them the schools and classrooms they inhabit will be better able to provide a decent learning atmosphere for them and for anyone else who is there with them. More schools and classrooms would meet the required threshold of adequacy, and more middle class parents might choose them, to the benefit of the least advantaged.
So the policymaker’s dilemma might be less demanding than it seemed. Still, its worth remembering that we don’t know that much about how to use schooling to counteract disadvantage, and don’t have many examples of it doing so. Social mobility is easier to achieve through policies which simply eliminate social disadvantage — high employment and steeply progressive taxation. These policies simultaneously make social mobility less important, by equalizing people’s life chances and lowering the stakes in the lottery of whom you are born to.

October 02, 2003

A modern-day pogrom

Posted by Chris

Hysterical use of language alert: Rachel Cooper in the Spectator , reacting to the suggestion that British universities admit student from rough state schools with lower A-level scores than their peers from expensive private schools:

Professor Schwartz is happily preparing the ground for a pogrom of the privileged children whose successful grades are the product not only of their hard work and ability, but also the school they attended.

Those pogroms aren’t what they used to be you know.

September 25, 2003

School selection or parental choice?

Posted by Harry

Stephen Pollard is often worth reading on education, though almost always wrong. Take his latest post (and article from Fabian Review) in which he attacks the British left’s skepticism about specialist schools. I’m on record as being skeptical about the particular version of specialization Pollard attacks, and also as favoring abolition of private and selective schools in the UK (not in the US), another position he attacks. I am also, unlike most people with my politics, a strong supporter of parental choice. But Pollard is not, it seems. He says that we should fund ‘whatever parents, not bureaucrats or politicians, want’. But he also wants schools (run, let me tell you, by government-funded bureaucrats) to be able to select students. So whose choice is decisive in where a kid goes to school? Not the parent’s choice, but the bureaucrat’s.

What makes his rant even stranger is that he is in favor of vouchers funding children attending private schools. If these schools get to select among the voucher applicants what choices does he imagine they will make? If parents can top-up the voucher with their own money, this will simply amount to a public subsidy of wealthy parents maintaining an elite exclusive space for their kids. If the voucher allows no top-up elite schools will select in only those students whose presence enhances their project of elite-formation. Why would they do otherwise?

Pollard assumes that selective and private schools are excellent. I’d like to see the evidence. The best existing study suggests that elite academic schools get academically oriented kids slightly better A-level results than state schools, despite spending more than twice as much per pupil and being able to cream off elite teachers. This might be a good deal for the very wealthy parents whose children attend these schools. But it hardly constitutes excellence. Many of these schools would look pretty bad if they had to labor under the budget constraints of state schools.

A final note. Pollard says that the left outside the UK advocates selection and specialization, and particularly identifies the US left. Not true. Even right-wing advocates of school choice tend to hesitate at the idea that school bureaucrats should get to allocate children to schools, and the few existing state-funded voucher programs target the poor and disallow selection. UK advocates of vouchers are systematically either dishonest or ignorant about the character of US voucher programs, which are far more carefully regulated than either their US opponents or their British advocates like to admit.

September 16, 2003

Writing, thinking, daydreaming

Posted by Chris

Musing further on whether technological development has helped or hindered thinking, and especially philosophical thinking, it occurs to me that the ideas of which I’m (rightly or wrongly) most proud have generally started not when I’ve been trying to do philosophy, but when I’ve been daydreaming about it whilst doing something else: travelling on a train, riding a bicycle, swimming or whatever. Purely mechanical and repetitive activities can been good for this too, though it is for good reason that there are a whole range of philosophical stories in which philosophers let cooking pots boil over, poison people or run them down whilst in the middle of their reveries.

Then there’s the business of writing, of trying to turn ideas into publishable prose. I’ve adopted two strategies for getting this done - both of which work very well, but eventually seem to run their course.

Strategy A is the Anthony Burgess method. I read an obituary of Burgess which revealed that he would write 1000 words every day before retiring to the nearest bar to sip a martini. I’m sorry to say that I skipped the martini part, but, for a long time managed the routine of 1000 words. Many of those words, certainly most of those words were garbage and got thrown away, but gradually, like whisking mayonnaise, publishable material started to emerge. Indeed my best ever paper (IMHO) came from following this writing strategy.

Strategy B I think of as the “football method”. Whilst I can spend whole mornings (and afternoons) getting absolutely nothing done, everyone who watches football (soccer) knows just how much can happen even in a few minutes of extra time. (I spend far too much of my life watching football matches.) I’ve found that 45 minutes of intense writing activity, followed by a 15-minute break (half-time) followed by a further 45 minutes, is also very productive (repeat as required).

The two methods are similar in that they allow you to get a lot done (cumulatively) in a little time, though one is like piecework and the other is like payment by the hour. Given I know their effectiveness, I think the complaint academics make that they don’t have enough time for writing and research is probably misconceived. Time, strictly speaking, isn’t the issue. What is a problem — as I know from the fact that I’m having to manage a department for the second time in my life — is that it is far too easy for other matters to colonise your head. To work effectively you need to be able to do a combination of concentration and daydreaming (self-hypnosis is good here!) but that isn’t possible if your thoughts are full of finances, staffing problems and achieving the next government target.

September 13, 2003

High School Mathematics

Posted by Brian

Over at Calpundit there’s an interesting discussion going on about the stresses that contemporary high school education places on students. In the comments Kevin expresses surprise (at least I think it’s surprise) that there are students who take two years of calculus in high school. I was rather surprised that this is surprising.

Where I went to school (in a fairly good suburban Catholic school in Melbourne) the median student did two maths courses with hefty calculus sections before graduation, and a sizable minority (about 15 to 20%) did four such courses. And I didn’t think this was particularly unusual. It certainly didn’t strike me as an outrageous amount for high school students to complete.

Because there’s next to no philosophy taught in high school in America (or Australia) I’ve never had to pay much attention to how much incoming college students have learned. So I’ve got no idea really how to compare American and Australian students. But my (quite possibly erroneous) impression is that the demands of American high schools are much less onerous than their Australian equivalents.

If you want some more specific info on what Australian high students are expected to know, here’s the final exams from the last three years given to final year high school students in Victoria. At my school 50% or more of graduating students would have taken the course ‘Maths Methods’, and another 15 to 20% the course called ‘Specialist Maths’. (Back in my day they had different names, but the syllabus doesn’t look to have changed dramatically.) Quickly flipping through the VCAA website it seems the numbers across the state for how many took those two courses are more like 40% and 15% respectively, and you can get some detailed reports on how they did here.