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Category: education

Published on Leave a comment on What Should Colleges Do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published on Leave a comment on Someone Has To Make War

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

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

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

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

Published on Leave a comment on Udacity — A Preview of Education to Come

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published on Leave a comment on The Need for Efficient Public Institutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published on Leave a comment on Gaps and Redundancies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the whole thing.

Published on Leave a comment on Don’t Blame this on Math

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published on Leave a comment on Good Jobs at Good Wages

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

Would six-figure salaries attract better teachers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Age of Friedman is not dead yet.

Published on Leave a comment on The Play’s the Thing

Why am I not surprised by this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published on Leave a comment on Narrowing, Widening, and Polarizing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published on Leave a comment on Public Education Reform in the Presence of Monopolies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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