Roland Fryer continues to work with incentives in education — for students, parents, and teachers. His newest working paper (gated) describes an experiment in New York City that was unsuccessful in moving the needle.
A worthwhile Bloomberg profile of John List, the University of Chicago economist, frequent Levitt collaborator, and SuperFreakonomics hero who has championed the use of field experiments. List recently received $10 million from hedge funder Kenneth Griffin to track the performance of 600 students, including 150 at the Griffin Early Childhood Center.
The Texas legislature seems likely to pass a law allowing people to carry concealed weapons on campus. Having observed enough shootings of professors by students in the U.S. over the past 45 years, I think this is a dreadful idea.
Given the sort of topics that elementary schools emphasize these days (e.g., a few weeks back, it was national anti-bullying day; my 10-year-old has painstakingly spelled out “Save the Earth” on her bedroom door), shouldn’t Helen Keller be front and center in the curriculum?
How important is school accountability to school performance? According to a new study, the answer is: very.
My Department chairman is mystified: You would think that with the crisis in public budgets, the demand for new economics faculty members would have shifted leftward. Similarly, with graduate students having delayed entry into the market, the supply of new Ph.D.s this year would have shifted rightward. Together, these changes should have lowered the price (wage) that the market pays new Ph.D.s.
The Salina Journal, a daily newspaper in Salina, Kansas, has published a final exam that was given to local eighth-graders in 1895 (via this friendly website). (“It was taken from the original document on file at the Smoky Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, KS.”)
How far will a degree from an elite college get you? Only in the door, says a new study of Israeli grads.
I awoke last week to another foot of snow adding a third blanket of winter to our city of Elms. I am reminded of the joy I felt as a child waiting to learn if school was canceled. Something has been lost in our age of instant information — who can forget huddling around the radio, holding your breath while the radio announcer lists the seemingly endless roster of closings? Today, we received the decidedly less romantic robo-calls at 5:33 in the morning.
Teach for America (TFA) recently announced it is receiving $100 million from four philanthropists to start its first endowment. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, one of the “Big Three” Education philanthropists, pledged the first $25 million, which encouraged matching donations from three others. “A few years ago we embraced the priority of making Teach For America an enduring American institution that can thrive as long as the problem we’re working to address persists,” said Wendy Kopp, the founder of TFA. “I think it’s only appropriate in our country – which aspires to be a place of equal opportunity – that we have an institution which is about our future leaders making good on that promise.”
Joanne Barkan, writing in Dissent, argues that three big nonprofit foundations (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation), working together, exert a “decisive influence” on public-school education.
As you may have read on this blog, the economist Roland Fryer has done quite a bit of research on bribing kids — i.e., offering financial rewards for good grades. A new working paper from Josh Angrist, Philip Oreopoulos and Tyler Williams examines the effect of financial rewards on performance among an older cohort: college students.
If you’re looking for ways to expose your kids to economics at an early age, Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, director of the Rutgers University Project on Economics and Children, has some suggestions. They are mostly picture books, geared toward children ages five to ten.
It’s final exam time, and my office is packed with a few of the 520 students in my bigger class. Although I’m pleased by their interest, I ask why they’re spending so much time on my course. The answer is that it’s the only final exam they have.
Have you ever wondered just who writes those papers handed in by cheating students? An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, written by a writer for a “custom-essay company,” has some answers for you.
Previous research indicates that the more years of education a person has, the more he thinks like an economist. A new paper (summarized by the BPS Research Digest) by Bryan Caplan and Stephen C. Miller, however, attempts to separate the role of intelligence and education in “thinking like an economist.”
A recent Buffalo News article discusses how the airlines are lobbying to rescind a new provision requiring commercial pilots to obtain 1,500 hours of flight training before they are certified (a Congressional response to last year’s fatal crash in Buffalo). The companies believe that this will cause pilots’ wages to rise (to pay for the increased training costs the pilots must incur), causing average total costs to increase, increasing industry prices and reducing output and profits.
The Texas A&M University system has embarked on a new accountability program. For every department – indeed, for every professor – revenue generated and cost incurred are calculated; and profit – the difference – is reported. Each professor is presumably supposed to have a marginal revenue product above his/her compensation.
Katherine Mangu-Ward at Reason writes that interested parties can now find out how their school stacks up against other schools using the Education Nation Scorecard.
Fran Blau is one of my favorite labor economists in the world: She’s smart, savvy, tackles important problems, and also incredibly generous in helping younger scholars and colleagues with their own research. She is now also the winner of this year’s IZA Prize in Labor Economics.
Closing the black-white – and the rich-poor – achievement gap is a frequent topic of conversation on this blog. Economist Christopher Avery takes a look (ungated version here) at one intervention aimed at closing the gap: providing college counselors for high-achieving, low-income students.
Anya Kamenetz of Fast Company writes about the TED phenomenon: “By combining the principles of ‘radical openness’ and of ‘leveraging the power of ideas to change the world,’ TED is in the process of creating something brand new. I would go so far as to argue that it’s creating a new Harvard — the first new top-prestige education brand in more than 100 years.”
To some people, the following conclusion should be filed under “Duh.” But even they might appreciate the empirical rigor undertaken by Scott E. Carrell, Mark Hoekstra, and James E. West in a new working paper called “Does Drinking Impair College Performance? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Approach.”
Levitt’s skepticism notwithstanding, it seems there may be a good reason for some people to get tattoos. David B. Wiseman, a psychologist, showed 128 undergraduate students photographs of tattooed and non-tattooed female models, described as “college instructors.” He found that college students prefer tattoos.
How much does school choice matter? Probably less than you think, as Levitt has previously argued. Now, in an analysis of seven years of test-score data from 6,000 Los Angeles teachers, the L.A. Times and the Rand Corp. have found teacher effectiveness to be three times more influential than school attendance on student performance.
Three weeks until classes start, including my 500-student section of micro principles. Unlike in past semesters, I won’t be assigned any smart undergrads to lead review sessions. Budgets are limited, but all other “large” sections–some less than half the size of mine–have undergrad assistants assigned. “Why not?” I ask. I’m told it’s because I do a good job and don’t need the sessions.
A reader named Karisa Cloward, a school teacher, needs your help. Her dilemma calls to mind earlier blegs about roommates/rent and dividing up a loved one’s earthly goods.
Timothy Knowles calls for an end to tenure in primary and secondary schools.