My beloved Freddie, who unfortunately unlisted me from his RSS reader the other day and will probably never see this, once argued that all of the benefit of "good" schools actually comes from the fact that the kids are high-IQ/SES, none of it from the school itself. Somewhat less extremes of this argument frequently pop up in arguments against vouchers, arguing that private schools won't really do any better because private schools just skim the cream.
I think that this is rather extreme, but there's an element of truth in it. Kids from high income homes are easier to teach. They are less likely to come from broken or truly dysfunctional homes, given that at least one parent is together enough to keep a job. Their parents are more likely to be highly verbal with them, and to read to them. They aren't hungry or cold, haven't been up all night babysitting while Mom works, and a doctor regularly checks on their health. They have higher IQs, some of which is probably genetic--as I recently heard one scientist say, it's hard to see how intelligence could have evolved if it weren't heritable--some of which is environment, and some of which is the excellent care their mother took of herself when she was pregnant. Whatever you saw on that ABC After School Special, they are much less likely to be abused. And their parents, who themselves are almost certainly college educated, place a very high value on things like homework and test scores.
But just as it's unlikely that IQ is either all heritibility or all environment, so with education. Much of the educational benefit comes from the fact that the kids are easy to educate. But to say that the school itself doesn't matter at all is to posit that one could get exactly the same results by parking the kids in a school library for twelve years. There may be diminishing returns, but clearly there is some area within which improving educational techniques improves outcomes. Are US schools really all above the red line?
Doubtful. Anecdotally, I was better educated--at least in English literature--than college peers from very competitive suburban school districts, and not because I was noticeably better raw material or they were distracted by the gang wars in AP English. Nor were my classmates--lawyers kids are lawyers' kids whether they're in Bronxville High or Horace Mann. My school had the resources to higher better teachers, have smaller class sizes, and expect more from its students. Most of the people I know who went to private school say the same.
Now to the data. What about those hard to educate kids? We know that there are methods that work better than others, because in the 1970s the government commissioned a gigantic study of educational methods called Project Follow Through. One method, Direct Instruction, consistently produced better methods, a result that has since been repeatedly replicated. Educational approach does make a difference. Unfortunately, this educational approach is hated by teachers, so even though we know it works better than almost anything else, adoption has been slow.
Of course, kids in the worst off schools often have a train wreck of problems--familial abuse, drug use, language barriers, poor diet--that schools also need to address. Just jamming in direct instruction isn't going to solve those, and the social service infrastructure schools now provide won't and shouldn't go away, though perhaps it should be outsourced or transferred to family services. Some of the problems will not be solved, at least not in the perfect way we fantasize about where no kid has to deal with problems that kids really shouldn't have to deal with. I have no good heuristic, for example, that will ensure that no kid gets abused without removing some kids from their families unnecessarily.
More broadly, this kind of despair over composition effects makes me more likely to support vouchers, not less. If the school really can't make any difference, then why not pay less and get higher levels of parental satisfaction, with at least no worse education for the kids?
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
"My school had the resources to higher better teachers ..."
The other day, you mixed up affect/effect. Now you're highering teachers? In a post about education (with an emphasis on English proficiency)?
And a red stater with a public school education (including a state college) noticed both errors.
I still think you're terrific. It's just nice to know you blue-state elites aren't perfect.
If you're interested, our mutual friend wrote about this at some length here.
"My school had the resources to higher better teachers, have smaller class sizes, and expect more from its students."
Here you openly admit that the better teachers are attracted to the schools with "resources." It is also a tacit admission that there are not enough high quality teachers to go around - hence the effort to attract them with cash, shiny facilities, etc.
My question: How will vouchers change the way in which schools compete for these uber-teachers? Will a tony private school that charges $10000 a year really lose these assets to a charter accepting $5000 vouchers?
My Alabama public school understanding of economics (such as it is) tells me that handing everyone a $5000 voucher will immediately establish $5000 as the floor for private school tuition. Existing private schools will raise their tuition by a commensurate amount because the parents who could afford $10000 before now have $15000 to spend. I would think that the "better teachers" at these institutions would see a portion of this windfall in order to retain them.
(ps I have it on good authority that Freddie doesn't even use an RSS reader.)
Re: They have higher IQs, some of which is probably genetic--as I recently heard one scientist say, it's hard to see how intelligence could have evolved if it weren't heritable
How does he account for all sorts of other things that are decidedly not genetic? I'm kinda in the middle of the road here: I think that we may inherit a potential for intelligence (as we inherit a potential for language, height, etc.) but that environment is the true detrmining factor in whether we reach that potential or not.
On vouchers I'm also in between and feel the same way I do abouit singel payor healthcare. If designing a system from the ground up Id go with both, but since it's usually a very bad (and costly) idea to completely tear down existing systems we should accept what we start with and reform it.
Scott F., I think the hope is that introducing more competition to education would change the supply of good teachers as well as the demand. Knowing that there are schools where they can make an excellent living as well as a difference will attract some on the margin from other fields.
This is going to get ugly really fast.
Here's how you answer your question.
Kids have been getting vouchers for years now.
There must be some study that shows their SAT's after 4 years at a private high school. Compare those vouchered kids with their unvouchered counterparts.
That will give you an idea that the private school environment makes a difference to the proto-typical poor kid from the innercity who gets to learn right next to Richie Rich.
I'm sure you can search JStor, or some other academic database for the answer. And if you can't do it, one of your grad student readers can.
Compare those vouchered kids with their unvouchered counterparts.
How do you control for all of the variables?
Some of those studies randomly assigned the kids to receive vouchers. That means you can compare those the received them with those that applied for them but did not. Even if they show that private school is better for those kids than public ones it may not be externally valid to state that the same result would occur if vouchers were granted to kids that did not apply.
My beloved Freddie, who unfortunately unlisted me from his RSS reader the other day and will probably never see this, once argued that all of the benefit of "good" schools actually comes from the fact that the kids are high-IQ/SES, none of it from the school itself.
Like everything else that Freddie says about vouchers, he not only lacks empirical evidence for his comment, but is actually going contrary to what empirical evidence there is. As I said to Freddie on a previous thread (with no response), there are often some perverse selection effects going on with religious private schools. I’ve personally known troublemakers and delinquents who went to a private Christian school; apparently their parents thought that if they signed their kid up for a religious school, that might be the one thing that could straighten him out. And sometimes the religious schools think of accepting a bad kid as a way of reaching a lost soul.
Less anecdotally, James S. Coleman and Thomas Hoffer (in "Public and Private High Schools: The Impact of Communities") found that “students who transfer from public sector elementary schools to the private sector, particularly to the Catholic sector, contain a HIGH NUMBER who were doing poorly, scholastically or behaviorally, in public elementary school.” (p. 112).
Derek Neal and Jeffrey Grogger more recently found [http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/brookings-wharton_papers_on_urban_affairs/v2000/2000.1grogger.pdf] that “there is evidence of NEGATIVE SELECTION into Catholic schools. Relative to their public-school counterparts, urban whites who attend these schools appear to possess unmeasured traits that inhibit attainment.” They add this footnote: “Evidence of negative selection is common in this literature. Coleman and Hoffer (1987), Evans and Schwab (1995), and Neal (1997) all report evidence of negative selection into Catholic schools. A common hypothesis concerning this result is that some parents send their children to Catholic schools seeking a remedy for existing problems with discipline and motivation.”
One of the reason private schools often have 'better' teachers is because they frequently hire people who don't have teaching degrees.
As far as money being the reason? Not that I know of. Most private schools (particularly private boarding schools) do provide housing in exchange for being on call 24/7; they don't pay well at all. Friend calculated his hourly wage once, it was way below minimum wage.
>How do you control for all of the variables?
If you try to tease out all of the variables *before* doing a rough cut/back of a napkin calculation, you'll end up with paralysis analysis.
If there's a marked difference, which is what you should expect if private schools actually make a difference, then you start in on selection bias and the rest of the obvious variables.
I have always wanted to teach middle school. Mainly because my 7th grade teach made such a big impact on my life.
As a mattter of fact, I am now a teacher.
However I teach for large corporations.
I would be willing to make less money but the last time I checked I would have to take a pay cut over $100,000.
I could imagine taking a 10-30,000 paycut, but 100K?
Not going to happen. Instead, my kid goes to private school, where I volunteer.
WestIndianArchie,
I recognize that you can worry too much about what you cannot control. However, as a statistical matter, you can easily construct a data set where there is no difference between two groups without controlling for a factor but there is when you do so.
That's one reason that back of the napkin statistics are dangerous.
"but there are only so many good teachers"... well obviously. Now the better teachers tend to (strong tendency, but only a tendency) end up in better school districts/ schools. This happens more in small districts where there is inter district competition but happens to some extent intra district when there are strong catchment area restrictions on student assignment, depending on the the power of principals and the specifics of the union contract.
Frequently there is parity in salary and benefits within a metro area. When there are strong geographic restrictions on students, teachers aim to teach at the better schools, so the boards or principals face a labor surplus and can choose the best teachers available. They offer a better environment, more discipline, and more engaged students. Schools in a bad areas get the worst teachers and those without seniority. And this is all at the same wage rates.
The goal with vouchers is to create better schools that aren't dependent on geography. Entrepreneurial schools will have more freedom on curriculum, work rules, and discipline, making them more attractive environments to work in. It's the difference between Silicon Valley and the old Bell Labs - you get much more out of the sum of the population by giving them more freedom and giving them a real stake in their work.
If you look at the real attractions for private schools, it's not the pay (which is usually at best the same as public school teachers, if not drastically lower). The true draw is an environment focused on learning, the ability to make a difference, and an ownership of ones work.
What protectors of the status quo have to accept is that what we have now is truly horrible and hurts the most vulnerable in our society the most. You would be hard pressed to dream up a system that had quite such an atrocious output. The public school system is the proverbial road to hell paved with good intentions. The Afrikaners of 1950 would LOVE the results we get, and even better that they would be able to cloak it with such impeccable PR. We need the school equivalent of dynamiting Cabrini-Green. The alternatives might not work, and they for sure won't be perfect, but the current system is incurable and needs to DIE.
Megan,
I will concede that there is a correlation between schools that have money and student performance, but I contend in many ways that funding of a school is a lagging, not a leading indicator of school success. But another way, successful schools attract home buyers how are interested and willing to pony up for education, and pass referendum raising property taxes. Once a school starts to succeed it attracts parents who are interested in their child having a good school.
It is the interest of those parents more than their income that is the best predictor of a childs success. The truth is that the more parents who call to ask why their kid got a 'B' in some class, the better, because the fact that the parents care isn't lost on the children. If you move into a high tax school district, it means you are committing to pay more for your kids education. Sort of like a weird free market where people can choose how much education you want to by, just by choosing where to live.
Just some thoughts on free markets and education.
Doug
I work in engineering for a tech startup. Virtually no one who does engineering learns much of anything from k-12 schooling, whether private or public. It's an area where the people smart enough to go into it are way better at it then their teachers. Everybody teaches themselves programming. In college math and engineering classes, the teaching is universally horrible, and most people learn from their books and from doing the work.
Even when I switched from a public school to a top in the nation private school, I don't think I learned anything more. The best part of it was that all the other students were smart, so I could have more interesting lunch time conversations. Instead of learning by reading silently in the corner, I learned by interacting with other students. My quality of life improved, but I did not learn more.
Meanwhile, if you've ever tutored, you realize that there are a lot of people that just don't pick things up, no matter how slow you go, and how well you explain things. IQ matters, and matters a lot. I'm entirely in Freddie's camp, and believe that formal schooling has very little impact on educational attainment.
90% of the jobs in the economy require little more than reading, writing, and arithmetic and then on the job training. It is possible to learn the other jobs - like engineering - at very low cost ( if you're spending more than $3,000 per student, per year you're spending too much) and be fully employable by the age of 19. The entire American education system is mis-allocation of resources on a mind boggling scale.
Deving Finbarr says:
In college math and engineering classes, the teaching is universally horrible, and most people learn from their books and from doing the work.
Wow. I don't know where you went to college, but you got rooked. I had excellent teachers for my civil engineering classes. Some of my math teachers weren't that great, but they still managed to get the point across.
Devin Finbarr, the question is how do we get more kids to the point where they can learn on their own? A kid needs a certain amount of reading and math instruction/exposure to allow them the base from which to learn for books on their own. They need to get that from somewhere. High SES kids will get some of that at home but often not enough because parents in general don't think they should teach academics to their kids
Read the Direct Instruction results and you will see how much instruction can matter. Read the explanations and engineering process they used to create their materials and contrast it with how other publishers make their materials. The DI folk start with a theory of instruction then submit their ideas to a build test fix cycle, and deploy them with a quality control process to detect and fix problems in the field. In comparison most educational materials are just something someone made to meet a legislative standard, and is not subject to any test process.
"this educational approach is hated by teachers"
I think the main push back on DI has come from the administrative level in school districts and not so much from the teachers. The administrators don't like it because it highlights how accountable they can be, which exposes how un-accountable they are in everything else they are doing.
Certainly if you went into a school and forced it on all the teachers, they will be people that react negatively to it. And most of what Ed-schools teach would make any teacher pre-disposed to reject DI. But to the extent that the teacher is motivated by the results of their students, many of them can be won over
I just helped organize DI for a charter school start up in San Diego. We found some very enthusiastic teachers that had used DI in a previous schools and were very enthused with it worked for their students. These are kids from the barrio areas of San Diego, mostly ESL free lunch students. After two years of DI they were all at or above grade level, many a full year ahead. There was some hesitation on the part of other teachers that hadn't use DI before, but after they got the training they seem to be quite interested. Time will tell how this works out.
I highly recommend the books "War Against Schools: Academic Child Abuse" and "Teaching Needy Kids in Our Backward System" by Siegfried Engelmann to better understand how and why DI works and the forces that keep it at bay.
Rob, I think there is also some confusion. As a method direct instruction (in lower case since I'm refering to the methods not the methods plus curriculum produced as DI) is terrific; I use it all the time.
However those methods have been connected with some curriculums and policies that heavily script teachers and attempt to force everyone to be on the same page at the same time and saying the same things. I'm not an elementary school teacher so I have no direct experience with these curriculums but I can understand why there would be a negative reaction even if a teacher agreed with the underlying principles of direct instruction. The connection between DI and these programs might or might not be real but the perception is present.
Freddie's point might also be, y'know, just wrong. In San Francisco and other places charter schools were deliberately _banned- from pulling the cream off their applicants -- and they _still_ outperformed the public schools.
"However those methods have been connected with some curriculums and policies that heavily script teachers and attempt to force everyone to be on the same page at the same time and saying the same things."
To be specific the DISTAR materials produced by SRA are heavily scripted, and do have exact descriptions for what the teacher is to say. There are definitely reasons why some teachers will react negatively to this and other aspects of DI. To be a bit flip, I expect there are doctors who are put off by checklists as well, but they have been well established for improving care.
The DI materials are meant to be used with small targeted groups, where the children are placed based on their current skill and rate of learning. Placement is evaluated every 10 lessons or about 2 weeks. The curriculum does have expectations for the pace at which different levels of kids will progress through the material. If a class/teacher is not keeping that pace, it is cause for a trainer to come and evaluate what is going wrong.. thats part of the QA process. If its just an individual child they would get some combination of extra attention or moved to a lower or slower group.
But this is I think quite different from the school policies that "force everyone to be on the same page at the same time." I take this to mean across classrooms and across schools even. This is a school admin thing, not a DI thing as far as I know. DI doesn't care if one class does math first then reading or the other way around.
"Anecdotally, I was better educated--at least in English literature--than college peers from very competitive suburban school districts, and not because I was noticeably better raw material or they were distracted by the gang wars in AP English." -- McArdle
And yet you didn't recognize 'The Fountainhead' as kitsch.
Hmmmmmmm. Maybe you didn't get quite the education in English Literature you imagine.
Sorry if that sounds snarky, but I fear you're the equivalent of a creationist bragging about the great science education she received as a teen.
I'll just note Japan gets much better academic results for much less money with much larger class sizes. And pay my school tax bill, which went up 10% for some reason.
I'm sure it's not because the average SAT score improved 10%, or our graduation rate improved 10%, or even that the school population increased 10%.
CatCube-
I went to an Ivy, and yes I got rooked :-) To be fair, I only took engineering/math courses. I mostly blew off classes and self-taught myself programming as part of working on a startup. Perhaps horrible is an exaggeration and I could have sought out better teachers. But in the classes I took, the sense I get from people at other colleges, the actual quality of instruction is pretty poor compared to even the public middle school I went to. If you don't get it on your own, you pretty much end up dropping out of that track.
I'm curious CatCube - do you think you could have self taught yourself civil engineering? Would it have made a difference if you learned just from the textbook and peer study groups? Or did the professors really add value and make a difference?
Rob Sperry-
My sense is that if you can a student to the level where they can read the Hardy Boys, then they are good to go. From then on, it's just a matter of hoping they like to read. As long as they keep reading, they will gradually get better over time.
For math I'm not so sure. I have a theory that with the right software, one could design a way for students to completely self learn math. Maybe some day, I'll find the chance to try and create it.
The Direct Instruction stuff is interesting. Many education interventions and methods have turned out to make no difference upon further study, so I'm pretty jaded. But I would like to look further at DI to see if it is in fact the real deal.
After all, I went to "good" schools.
But I would have learned more if I'd spent half my time reading quality books — my own choices off a suggested reading list, for instance — and a few minutes a day discussing what I was reading.
And that is not an expensive education.