Schooling ain't learning!

Today is the official launch day for Lant Pritchett's new book: The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain't Learning.

You can buy the book here.

You can read about it here.

While governments in the developing world have indeed managed to increase school enrollment rates substantially (as they were advised to do by rich country aid agencies and the MDGs), the payoff has been muted at best because of the often low to non-existant level of actual education available in the schools.

Development advice and aid often focuses inappropriately on the inputs at the expense of the outputs (though the RCT nation is changing this), perhaps nowhere more strongly though than in education.

To me it's another example of "cargo cult" development (Lant is much more polite, well, ok a little more polite, and calls it "isomorphic mimicry"). Build a straw airplane and balsawood control tower and wait for the cargo to fall from the sky.

Of course in education policy it can be even worse as the balsawood control tower is frequently staffed by un-accountable, un-dismissable, personnel.

Lant doesn't write in development-speak (the isomorphic mimicry phrase not withstanding). You'll have no trouble figuring out what's on his mind.

Both Mrs. Angus and I plan to use this book in our teaching and we highly recommend it to anyone interested in education policy and development.

(This post also appears at Cherokee Gothic).

This week's sign of the Apocalypse

Loyal KPC reader HC sends this actual photo from the actual Wisconsin State Fair:

Now maybe children are selling political influence and there is just a grammar issue in the first line (kids not kid's)?

Or maybe it's something worse?

Here's how HC describes the scene:


Me: what's that sign about?

Guy at booth: It's for a contest but it was this morning.

Me: for what, the kids were selling things?

Guy: no, pedaling, like a bicycle.

Me: that's not how you spell pedal.

Guy: I didn't make up the sign. You’ll have to talk to Pick ‘n Save about that.

First I have to say, WAY TO GO HC!

But then I have to say, if crap like this can happen, why do we even have a government at all?

Further adventures in Summer School

My summer class is winding down, and I'm still enjoying it (except for the ungodly starting time). We had another class today where the Learning Catalytics software really came through. Students were clearly having issues on public goods and common resource problems, but were not very forthcoming, so we went into the questions I'd prepared on the topic.

These questions go to their phones, tablets, or computers, where they answer and then  I see on my laptop either the individual answers if I've asked for a graph or a short answer, or the distribution of answers if the question was multiple choice.

On the first three questions, the splits were almost even between correct and incorrect, so without revealing the correct answer, I had the students discuss their answers with someone who had a different answer. In each case this "peer-instruction" (I never call it that in class), got us to around 75-80% correct, at which point I showed the distributions to the class and we talked through the incorrect answers.

On the last couple questions, we were getting 85-90% correct on the first round, and the mood in the room had brightened visibly.

It doesn't happen like this every class, but several times this process has really gotten the class to a place we might not have reached without this tool.

A target rich environment

People you know I'm talking about the Sunday NY Times!

Let's start with yet another defense of the stimulus by Christina Romer.

The piece starts with a remarkable display of selective amnesia. Romer says,

After listening to Representative Paul Ryan in the vice-presidential debate, you might think that careful evaluation isn’t needed. In his view, we spent $800 billion on the stimulus, yet unemployment still rose to 10 percent — so obviously it wasn’t helpful.

She then goes on to (correctly) point out that to evaluate a policy, we actually need the counter-factual, what would have happened without the policy in question.

But she ignores the counterfactual elephant in the room:

Which of course arrived to us in a document authored by... Christina Romer (and Jared Bernstein)!


Even more amazingly, she says the stimulus would have worked better if people would have believed in it more! In most circles, this is known as blaming the victim, not economic analysis.

And yet, who could fault people for not believing in the stimulus when by the second quarter of 2009 it was obvious that it would not accomplish anything nearly close to what the government had claimed it would accomplish?

Case #2 is after the jump!

"Tyler is trying to sphincter us"

People, I teach development economics (among other things) for a living. I only let paying customers into my class, & I don't let them tape the classes.

It's a sweet deal for me and people of my ilk.

But now Tyler and Alex are giving away the cow for free!

Yes, MR. University is up. Online, live and from a quick tour I took, mighty snazzy.

The first course, development economics, is ready for matriculation.

Check it our for your own selves: Learn, Teach & Share!

Part of me really wants this venture to succeed, but part of me doesn't want to spend the last few years of my working life saying "welcome to Walmart" 200 times a day.

Thus the title of my post.

PS: I am also going to spill the beans and inform you that Mrs. Angus will be doing a major MRU module on Mexico. Look for it in early 2013. et tu, Mrs. A?

Always look for the union label

So, the great Chicago teacher strike is apparently a big deal?  I'm not sure I get it. The strike is legal, right? I can't see it lasting too long if the teachers are not getting paid. Do they have a big strike fund?

Sure, we can debate whether public employees should be unionized at all. Whether taxpayers get left out of the negotiations when "management" feels more kinship to the teachers than to those paying the bill. And it's true that unfunded pension liabilities are a real problem in many states.

But the Chicago teachers are playing by the rules as far as I can tell, so what exactly is the problem?

This piece by Freddie DeBoer got me thinking about the strike (thanks to @modeledbehavior). I highly recommend reading it, not because I agree with him, but because it is extremely entertaining.

Among many other things, Freddie rails about people who want the best and brightest to go into teaching but then think teachers get paid too much.

But here's the thing. It doesn't make sense for society to have the best and brightest go into teaching. We don't need geniuses teaching in elementary school! The opportunity cost is just too high (and yes I know the studies showing a good kindergarten teacher affects lifetime earnings).

Nor does it make sense to (as Freddie does) compare Ezra Klein's salary with the average Chicago teacher salary. Ezra is a blogger. A very good blogger. He has risen up to his current position based on his skill at entertaining and informing people. Certainly the average (or at least the median) salary of a blogger is quite a bit below the average (or at least the median) salary for a Chicago school teacher.

But Ezra is a super-star and is compensated accordingly. Would Freddie and the teachers unions accept this kind of pay-scheme? Big money for superstar teachers, peanuts for the crappy ones.

In higher education, salaries generally differ according to field and accomplishments. Assistant professors of economics generally make more than assistant professors in philosophy even inside the same institution. Holding field constant, better published and better cited professors generally make more than lesser published and cited professors.

Would the teachers unions allow science teachers to be paid more than english teachers?

Higher pay for all teachers is an answer in search of a relevant public policy question. In other words, it's great for (some of) the teachers, and they are certainly playing by the rules to seek it, but it doesn't really solve any of the issues we may have with education in this country.

Sometimes a picture isn't worth spit

Take this one in today's WSJ for example. A scatterplot of countries average growth rate over the 41 years from 1960-2000 against their average math test scores in the same period.

And, yes, of course the authors take the graph as causal explaining how that if we could just get our math performance up to the level of Canda's, we would all become way richer (yes I know the graph shows us growing faster than Canada already. The authors certainly could have picked a better example to tout their "theory").

I agree with the authors that K-12 education in America is failing an unacceptably large number of students and I favor reforms and experiments to search for better solutions. But let's not kid ourselves that the graph presented provides us a "menu" where we pick the growth rate we want by achieving the requisite test scores.

I'd hate to see the unhappy one!

Development links

World Bank says they are doing an excellent job.

More Lant Pritchett on schooling vs. education in developing countries.

Michael Clemens tries to reconcile the conflict between development goals and impact evaluation.