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Posts Tagged ‘Education’

College and the Widening Wealth Gap

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a few Economic Policy Institute snapshots might be the Great Novel of our time. A few weeks ago, Heidi Shierholz at EPI brought us yet another harrowing tale from the front lines of the recession generation. In an “Economic Snapshot,” she writes:

As college students head back to the classroom this semester, a harsh reality confronts them — the rewards for the time, energy, and money that young people put into college are less than they were a decade ago. Since 2000, America’s young college graduates have seen wages, adjusted for inflation, deteriorate. This lack of wage growth may be particularly surprising to those used to reading about the vast unfilled need for college graduates, which if true would lead to increases in their earnings.

But how is this happening? Maybe it has something to do with a more recent snapshot from Lawrence Mishel at EPI on the growing wealth gap in America. He writes:


The Debate over Teacher Merit Pay: A Freakonomics Quorum

The term “merit pay” has gained a prominent place in the debate over education reform. First it was former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee trumpeting it as a key to fixing D.C.’s ailing public schools. Then a handful of other districts gave it a go, including Denver, New York City, and Nashville. Merit pay is a big plank in Education Secretary Arne Duncan‘s platform; and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel has just launched his own version of merit pay that focuses incentives toward principals.
There’s just one problem: educators almost universally hate merit pay, and have been adamantly opposed to it from day one. Simply, teachers say merit pay won’t work.
In the last year, there’s been some pretty damning evidence proving them right; research showing that merit pay, in a variety of shapes and sizes, fails to raise student performance. In the worst of cases, such as the scandal in Atlanta, it’s contributed to flat-out cheating on the part of teachers and administrators. So, are we surprised that educators don’t respond to monetary incentives? What makes teachers different?
For answers to these and related questions, we decided to convene a Freakonomics Quorum.


The Vanishing Walk to School

Since the late 1960s, the share of U.S. kids and teens who are overweight has more than tripled. Why? I personally find Ronald McDonald kind of sinister, but it’s possible that Happy Meals might not deserve all the blame. In fact, Noreen McDonald—no relation to Ronald—of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has analyzed a trend that might be contributing to the alarming rise in childhood obesity. Kids today aren’t walking or biking to school like they used to.
In 1969, the National Household Travel Survey found that roughly 41% of school-age children/teens got to school by “active travel” (i.e. walking and biking, though mostly walking, which then and now is more than 10 times more prevalent than biking).
In 2001 the walk/bike share was down to roughly 13%, a pretty spectacular drop. For elementary school children the change was even more stark. Today, even students who live within one mile of school have a less than 50% chance of walking; about 86% of similarly situated students walked in 1969.


Forgive Student Loans? Worst Idea Ever.

There’s an argument going around right now that forgiving the country’s student loan debt would have a stimulative effect on the economy. This online petition by Signon.org, an offshoot of Moveon.org, has nearly 300,000 signatures. Its basic argument is this:

Forgiving the student loan debt of all Americans will have an immediate stimulative effect on our economy. With the stroke of the President’s pen, millions of Americans would suddenly have hundreds, or in some cases, thousands of extra dollars in their pockets each and every month with which to spend on ailing sectors of the economy. As consumer spending increases, businesses will begin to hire, jobs will be created and a new era of innovation, entrepreneurship and prosperity will be ushered in for all.


Buyout Package Bingo: A Reason to Choose More Work for Same Pay?

An example of irrationality? A colleague at another university was offered a buy-out: A full year’s pay if he would resign/retire at the end of the current semester. At the same time his school also offered a phased retirement deal: Two years at half pay, with half a usual teaching load.
This economist chose to take the phased retirement, thus choosing the same pay, but teaching four courses over two years instead of no teaching. I think he’s crazy; but I think you can write down a utility function that is consistent with his behavior and violates none of our assumptions about preferences.


Study Shows Minorities Less Likely to Win Grants, Scholarships

A short paper recently released by Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Fastweb.com and FinAid.org, is shaking up the discussion of race and financial aid – specifically, Kantrowitz writes that white students are disproportionately more likely to receive financial aid than their minority counterparts. Kantrowitz’s intro reads as follows:
 

This paper presents data concerning the distribution of grants and scholarships by race. It debunks the race myth, which claims that minority students receive more than their fair share of scholarships. The reality is that minority students are less likely to win private scholarships or receive merit-based institutional grants than Caucasian students. Among undergraduate students enrolled full-time/full-year in Bachelor’s degree programs at four-year colleges and universities, minority students represent about a third of applicants but slightly more than a quarter of private scholarship recipients. Caucasian students receive more than three-quarters (76%) of all institutional merit-based scholarship and grant funding, even though they represent less than two-thirds (62%) of the student population. Caucasian students are 40% more likely to win private scholarships than minority students.


Peg Tyre, Author of The Good School, Answers Your Questions

This week, we solicited your questions for Peg Tyre, education journalist and author of The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids The Education They Deserve. You responded quickly, and so has she, with answers to a handful of your education-related questions, ranging from textbooks, to No Child Left Behind.
This turned into a smart conversation on a topic that affects all of us. Education policy and reform is certainly something we’ll keep coming back to on the blog. Thanks to everyone for participating.


Bring Your Questions for Peg Tyre, Author of The Good School

Peg Tyre is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who specializes in writing about education policy. In her 2008 book, The Trouble with Boys, she delved into the growing academic achievement gap between boys and girls to examine why boys are falling so far behind in the classroom. In her new book, The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids The Education They Deserve, Tyre mines education research data to find out which programs and strategies give kids the highest probabilities of academic success. The result is a concise handbook for parents, one that applies a macro-economic view of education in an effort to create a more rational market around school choice.
As another school year kicks off, Tyre has agreed to answer your questions about The Good School, and anything else education-related. So fire away in the comments section. Before you do, take a look at the table of contents from The Good School printed below, and also read Tyre’s adapted excerpt from the book on the merits (or lack thereof) of teaching to the test.


Are States with Better Educated Legislatures Better Governed?

That depends on how you define “better governed.” If, for simplicity’s sake, you measure the quality of governance by fiscal solvency (or more aptly the lack thereof), then the answer appears to be no. Of course, these are strange times; forty-two states have a combined fiscal deficit of more than $100 billion, so maybe the data’s a bit skewed. Still, comparing a Chronicle of Higher Education report on the collective education level of each state legislature, to Stateline.com’s list of state budget deficits from March seems worthwhile. And the results don’t exactly make the case for education being a good predictor of fiscal competence.


Exam High Schools: Not As Great As We Thought

Exam high schools are generally regarded as a cut above, turning out congressmen, scholars, and all-around high achievers. They account for over half of the top 109 American schools in the U.S. News and World Report best high schools list, and an incredible 20 out of 21 from Newsweek’s list of “public elite.”
But a new study from Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer of Harvard throws cold water on this notion, and calls into question whether the exam schools typically cited for excellence are, well, really all that excellent.
Writing for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Dobbie and Fryer take a fresh look into the measurable achievements of exam school students, specifically focusing on three well-known schools in New York City: Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant. While attending an exam school might be great for your overall education, and resume, this doesn’t come through in terms of increased test scores or college achievement. Here’s the abstract:


Will Rahm Emanuel's Merit-pay System Work Where Others Haven't?

Last week, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that he’s rolling out a merit pay program specifically for school principals, using $5 million in donated funds. The plan is particularly bold considering its announcement comes on the heels of quite a bit of evidence, from research to scandals, showing the faults of merit pay.

In March, we wrote about Harvard economist Roland Fryer‘s study on New York City’s failed merit pay experiment, the Schoolwide Performance Bonus Program, which was shutdown last month. A subsequent RAND report echoes much of Fryer’s findings:

…the theory underlying school-based pay-for-performance programs may be flawed. Motivation alone might not be sufficient. Even if the bonus here had inspired teachers to improve, they might have lacked the capacity or resources — such as school leadership, expertise, instructional materials, or time — to bring about improvement.


Our Daily Bleg: What Economic Concepts Should Kids Know?

This bleg comes from reader Wayne Smith, who asks for suggestions on which economic concepts are the most important for kids to learn:

What topics do the Freakonomics readers feel are most important to teach kids 8-13 years old? Aside, of course, from the fact that the man keeps you down.
I was listening to The History of Sesame Street audio book the other day and thought that it would be nice to come up with a YouTube show with decent production value that outlines basic economic concepts in an entertaining way. Concepts like capital, value, supply/demand, trade, time value of money, interest, saving and borrowing, opportunity cost, taxation,and so on. This would be more narrative than something like Khan Academy. Naturally each concept can have an episode devoted to it and each concept can be addressed in different ways in different episodes, but in scenarios geared toward kids. What do the readers think about this as a concept?


A Teaching Moment on Numeracy

It’s an embarrassing episode. The opening sentence of James B. Stewart’s Tangled Webs: How False Statements Are Undermining America is:
“We know how many murders are committed each year — 1,318,398 in 2009.”
But this is false. As Jeffrey Rosen notes in a savage New York Times review, there were 15,241 murders in 2009. The cited number isn’t just wrong, it’s wrong by two orders of magnitude. Where did the 1,318,398 come from? It’s the number of violent crimes, which includes robbery, rape and assault. And only a small proportion of all violent crimes — a little more than 1 in 100 — are murders.
And so this provides a useful teaching moment for thinking about numeracy. How can you avoid such errors?


A Debate on University Tenure

With only 8 percent of private employees belonging to trade unions, job security outside government employment has become a sometime thing. One group of employees, however, does have nearly total job security: tenured university professors. Faculty tenure is under attack as never before in the past 50 years.
I like tenure, but why should my group of workers get special protections against the vicissitudes of demand for our “product?” Self-interested arguments about job protection are unsatisfactory. I recently “debated” a journalist on this issue, with the resulting short video from the Texas Tribune:


Is High Unemployment Hurting Kids' Grades?

A new study from a group of Duke economists finds that large-scale job losses have a negative impact on student test scores, particularly in math. Previous studies have shown how kids whose parents lose their jobs perform worse on tests. This study shows that job losses have a much broader effect, and impact kids whose parents remain employed. Here’s the abstract:


Another Case of Teacher Cheating, or Is It Just Altruism?

From the results of this year’s high-school “maturity exam” in Poland (courtesy of reader Artur Janc), comes this histogram showing the distribution of scores for the required Polish language test, which is the only subject that all students are required to take, and pass.
Not quite a normal distribution. The dip and spike that occurs at around 21 points just happens to coincide with the cut-off score for passing the exam. Poland employs a fairly elaborate system to avoid bias and grade inflation: removing students’ names from the exams, distributing them to thousands of teachers and graders across the country, employing a well-defined key to determine grades. But by the looks of these results, there’s clearly some sort of bias going on.


Immigrants Are Getting More Education

A Brookings report shows that for the first time, the share of working-age immigrants in the U.S. who have college degrees (29.6%) exceeds the share without a high school education (27.8%). In 1980, there were more than twice as many low-skilled immigrants living in the U.S. as high-skilled ones.
The report focuses on demographic trends in the 100 biggest metropolitan areas of the country over the past 15 years. While the Southwest and Great Plains remain destinations for low-skilled immigrant labor, much of the Northeast and Rust Belt now attract more immigrants with college degrees than those without.


More Depressing News on America's Financial Literacy (or Lack Thereof)

I’ve written on the woeful state of Americans’ financial literacy a few times in the past. There is probably no academic researcher more attuned to the problem than Annamaria Lusardi of Dartmouth. This week’s NBER e-mail blast describing the latest crop of economics working papers includes nine papers; of those, four are written or co-written by Lusardi on this topic.
Among the highlights (or, I should say, lowlights); the bolding is mine:

“Americans’ Financial Capability”
This paper examines Americans’ financial capability, using data from a new survey. Financial capability is measured in terms of how well people make ends meet, plan ahead, choose and manage financial products, and possess the skills and knowledge to make financial decisions. The findings reported in this work paint a troubling picture of the state of financial capability in the United States.
The majority of Americans do not plan for predictable events such as retirement or children’s college education. Most importantly, people do not make provisions for unexpected events and emergencies, leaving themselves and the economy exposed to shocks.


Deliberate Practice: How Education Fails to Produce Expertise

Thanks to recent, hugely popular books about the development of expertise, the term deliberate practice is coming into common usage as the kind of practice that produces expertise.
Deliberate practice requires careful reflection on what worked and what didn’t work. A budding concert pianist may practice a particularly troublesome passage listening for places where his fingers do not flow smoothly. A chess student may spend hours analyzing one move of a world-championship chess match trying to see what the grandmasters saw. This kind of practice demands time for reflection and intense concentration, so intense that it is difficult to sustain for longer than 3 hours per day.
As I have learned more about deliberate practice, I often think about its lessons for the educational system. And they are not happy ones.


Women Continue to Make Education, Labor Gains

A new Census report finds that for the first time, more women in the workforce have bachelor’s degrees than men (37 percent vs. 35). Women are gaining on the education front in general: for ages 25 to 29, 36 percent of women had a bachelor’s or advanced degree versus 28 percent for men. Women were also slightly more likely to have a high school diploma than men: for age 25 and above, it’s 87.6 percent versus 86.6 percent.


What Can Movie Stars Tell Us About Marriage And Education?

According to a study published in the Journal of Human Capital, marriages among movie stars may help unravel the mystery behind why people tend to marry partners of similar education levels. It’s a question that’s been puzzling social scientists for years. Some reason that it is mostly due to monetary reasons: a partner with similar education should have similar salary . . .


Does More Education Lead to Less Religion?

According to a new working paper that looks at Canadian compulsory schooling laws, an additional year of education leads to a 4 percent decline in the likelihood that someone identifies with a religious tradition.


Clearing Out the "Rubber Rooms"

New York City Dept. of Education has been savaged over reports that it stows bad teachers in ‘rubber rooms’ rather than simply firing them. A new report says that many of those teachers are being returned to the classroom after having paid a fine.


Trouble in Higher Ed.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is running the second installment of an interesting two-part essay on the declining expectations and level of learning taking place among college undergrads.


Have D.C.'s "Best Schools" Been Cheating?

A handful of Washington D.C. schools are embroiled in a scandal over whether teachers corrected wrong answers to boost students’ test scores, and thereby, increase their bonuses.


Memorizing the Digits of Pi

Pi is an irrational number. Which means that as a decimal, it goes on forever. What’s the best way to memorize this infinite chain of numbers? How about music? Or poetry?


Can Customized Education Be Scaled Up?

School of One, the New York City pilot program that aims to give every student a customized education (and the subject of a Freakonomics Radio episode), is about to grow.


Taking a Course From Gary Becker

Up until now, the only way to take a course taught by Gary Becker was to be a student at the University of Chicago.
Thanks to the heroic efforts of three students –Dana Chandler, Salvador Navarro Lozano, and Jorge Garcia — that has changed.


Does "No Child Left Behind" Contribute to Obesity?

That’s the question posed in a new working paper by Patricia M. Anderson, Kristin F. Butcher, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach. What would the mechanism/s be? “Schools facing increased pressures to produce academic outcomes may reallocate their efforts in ways that have unintended consequences for children’s health. For example, schools may cut back on recess and physical education in favor of increasing time on tested subjects.”