more college graduates = higher employment for non-college graduates

...a 10% increase in the number of people with a four-year degree in a given metro area was associated with a two-percentage-point rise in the overall employment rate from 1980 to 2000.

The benefit was particularly large for women with a high-school diploma or less. "The results are consistent," the author writes, "with the hypothesis that individuals accumulate greater skills from working in labor markets" alongside highly educated and trained workers.

Week in Ideas: Daniel Akst
December 28, 2012, 8:38 p.m. ET

paper:

"Human Capital Externalities and Employment Differences Across Metropolitan Areas of the USA," John V. Winters, Journal of Economic Geography (Dec. 10)

Something happened

I've been saying for a while now that 'something happened' in 1985. Things changed.

It hadn't occurred to me that Goldin and Katz's timeline in The Race between Education and Technology corresponds directly to mine.

Goldin and Katz find the schools somewhat abruptly ceasing to function as producers of greater equality via educational attainment in the early 1980s.

I find the composition journals abruptly ceasing to function as producers of useful observations re: teaching students how to write, also in the early 1980s.

I don't think that's a coincidence.

"this road is now closed"

A number of us, over the years, have observed that it no longer seems possible for US public schools to be the engines of social mobility they once were, what with the requirement that parents "help with homework" right up through AP Calculus senior year if their children are to succeed.

Actually, scratch that. "Help with homework" continues apace in Grade 13, sad to say. Ed was up 'til 2am Thursday night dealing with an indecipherable writing assignment C. was trying to complete--indecipherable to Ed, not just to C. I hear the same from other parents.

Anyway, back to K-12. Many decades ago, when schools grouped students according to what they knew, and teachers drilled, killed, chalked, and talked, immigrant children whose parents did not speak the language could learn to read, to write, and to do arithmetic at school. Ditto for working class children and children living in poverty.

As Goldin and Katz show in The Race between Education and Technology, the country's public schools directly increased economic equality until the 1980s.

Then things changed.

Goldin and Katz say essentially nothing about what changed or why, and reviews of the book have also tended to dance around the issue of just what exactly went wrong circa 1980.

Now Brad DeLong has written a post about Goldin and Katz's book that expresses the change in the starkest terms I've seen in any account of the book:

...My teachers Claudia Golden and Larry Katz make an impressive and largely convincing argument that the trends in inequality between the top twenty percent and the bottom eighty percent in the United States, at least, have been overwhelmingly driven by the race between technology and education. Technology has kept running at a more or less constant pace. Education has not. From, say, 1920 to 1980, the United States essentially followed the recipe of Berkeley chancellor Clark Kerr: the United States ought to provide as much education for free to its citizens as they wanted.

Devotees of the right approved of this policy....People on the left noted that if you make education free you get an awful lot of educated and well-trained people, so the return to human capital goes down, the education premium that those who have been to college and have been trained in the professions can demand becomes a lot lower. And as your accountants and lawyers and doctors facing competition in the labor market can demand lower salaries, that leaves more money for the assembly line workers and the janitors and the home health aids and the nurses and the waitresses.

Around 1980, this strategy of growth and equality through education in the United States breaks down. Since then the costs of higher education have been rising at an extraordinarily rapid pace in the United States, as government subsidies are withdrawn, and as private colleges react to rising sticker costs of public colleges by raising their own sticker prices. In addition the universal commitment to pre-college high quality education has been in decline. This has stuck. Thus, unless we see a major change in American political economy, this education road that appears to have been very effective at promoting equality between the 1920s and the 1970s is now closed to the United States.

I've never seen that before.

I've never seen someone say, simply, this road is closed.

The Race redux

Two summers ago, I wrote a number of posts on The Race between Education and Technology, a book I found revelatory. Via Greg Mankiw's blog, I've just come across economist Daron Acemoglu's recommendation of The Race as one of the top 5 books to read on inequality:

This is a really wonderful book. It gives a masterful outline of the standard economic model, where earnings are proportional to contribution, or to productivity. It highlights in a very clear manner what determines the productivities of different individuals and different groups. It takes its cue from a phrase that the famous Dutch economist, Jan Tinbergen coined. The key idea is that technological changes often increase the demand for more skilled workers, so in order to keep inequality in check you need to have a steady increase in the supply of skilled workers in the economy. He called this “the race between education and technology”. If the race is won by technology, inequality tends to increase, if the race is won by education, inequality tends to decrease.

The authors, Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz, show that this is actually a pretty good model in terms of explaining the last 100 years or so of US history. They give an excellent historical account of how the US education system was formed and why it was very progressive, leading to a very large increase in the supply of educated workers, in the first half of the century. This created greater equality in the US than in many other parts of the world.

They also point to three things that have changed that picture over the last 30 to 40 years. One is that technology has become even more biased towards more skilled, higher earning workers than before. So, all else being equal, that will tend to increase inequality. Secondly, we’ve been going through a phase of globalisation. Things such as trading with China – where low-skill labour is much cheaper – are putting pressure on low wages. Third, and possibly most important, is that the US education system has been failing terribly at some level. We haven’t been able to increase the share of our youth that completes college or high school. It’s really remarkable, and most people wouldn’t actually guess this, but in the US, the cohorts that had the highest high-school graduation rates were the ones that were graduating in the middle of the 1960s. Our high-school graduation rate has actually been declining since then. If you look at college, it’s the same thing. This is hugely important, and it’s really quite shocking. It has a major effect on inequality, because it is making skills much more scarce then they should be.

Do Goldin and Katz go into the reasons why education is failing in the US?

They do discuss it, but nobody knows....It’s not that we’re spending less. In fact, we are spending more. It’s certainly not that college is not valued, it’s valued a lot. The college premium – what college graduates earn relative to high-school graduates – has been increasing rapidly. It’s not that the US is not investing enough in low-income schools. There has been a lot of investment in low-income schools.

[snip]

Goldin and Katz’s book shows that the college premium was higher in the early 1900s than it was in the 1940s and 1950s. Then it remains stable for several decades, and then it starts increasing again in the 1980s.
Daron Acemoglu on inequality

in a nutshell:

• the US education system has been failing terribly at some level

• the cohorts that had the highest high-school graduation rates were the ones that were graduating in the middle of the 1960s

He goes on to say that "What’s missing from the Goldin and Katz book is that they really don’t look at all at what’s going on in the top 10%," a point I think I recall Allison making (although Allison may have been talking about the the top 1 or 0.5%).

highly selective colleges and lifetime earnings

following up on Who gains from attending a highly selective college? :

...[T]he average SAT score of schools that rejected a student is more than twice as strong a predictor of the student’s subsequent earnings as the average SAT score of the school the student attended...

Estimating the Return to College Selectivity over the Career Using Administrative Earnings Data
Stacy Dale, Alan B. Krueger
NBER Working Paper No. 17159
Issued in June 2011

Assuming I'm following the argument, Dale and Krueger are saying that when you account for unmeasured factors such as a student's level of ambition, the selectivity of a school has no effect on the earnings of white children raised by educated parents. In other words, more ambitious students file more ambitious applications; they apply to more highly selective schools than do students who are less ambitious. Same SAT scores, different set of college applications.

I think.

I can email a copy of the article to anyone who'd like to read.

also from the paper:

The high selectivity of the colleges within the C&B [College and Beyond Survey] database make it particularly well-suited for this analysis, because the majority of students that attend selective colleges submit multiple applications, which is necessary for our identification strategy. In contrast, many students who attend less selective colleges submit only one application, because many less selective colleges accept all students who apply. For example, according to data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972, only 46 percent of students who attended college applied to more than one school.

and:

Nearly two-thirds of the 1976 cohort and 71 percent of the 1989 cohort submitted at least one additional application (in addition to the school they attended). For both cohorts, of those students submitting at least one additional application, over half applied to a school with a higher average SAT score than that of the college they attended, and nearly 90 percent of students were accepted to at least one additional school. Of those accepted to more than one school, about 35 percent were accepted to a more selective school than the one they ended up attending. The data for black and Hispanic students (shown in columns 2 and 4) are similar, though blacks and Hispanics were somewhat more likely than students in the full sample to be accepted to at least one additional school, and to be accepted to a more selective school than the one they attended.

math in factory work

In the Wall Streey Journal today:

U.S. manufacturing companies, long known for layoffs and shipping jobs overseas, now find themselves in a very different position: scrambling for scarce talent at home.

Large and small manufacturers of everything from machine tools to chemicals are scouring for potential hires in high schools, community colleges and the military. They are poaching from one another, retraining people who used to have white-collar jobs, and in some cases even hiring former prisoners who learned machinist skills behind bars.

[snip]

Third, the U.S. education system isn't turning out enough people with the math and science skills needed to operate and repair sophisticated computer-controlled factory equipment, jobs that often pay $50,000 to $80,000 a year, plus benefits. Manufacturers say parents and guidance counselors discourage bright kids from even considering careers in manufacturing.

"We get people coming in here all the time who say, 'I can weld,'" says Denis Gimbel, human-resources manager at Lehigh Heavy Forge Corp., of Bethlehem, Pa., whose products include parts for ships. "Well, my grandmother could weld." He needs people who understand the intricacies of $1 million lathes and other metal-shaping equipment.

Manufacturers have anticipated for years that baby-boomer retirements would create difficulties. Among those who have tried to get ahead of the demographic curve—with mixed success—is Jeff Kelly, chief executive of Hamill Manufacturing Co., a family-owned company near Pittsburgh that cuts metal into parts for ships and machinery.

Hamill doesn't have any button-pushing work. The 127-employee company is constantly resetting its mills and lathes to produce small numbers of parts to meet precise and ever-changing specifications. There are no long, routine production runs.

One morning in late April, Trent Thompson, a 20-year-old Hamill apprentice wearing shredded jeans and a black baseball cap, was assigned to drill three holes in a piece of carbon steel about the size and shape of a hockey puck. To make sure he was spacing the holes exactly right, he scrawled a triangle and some trigonometric calculations on a notepad. Even a tiny error would mean wasting about $400 of metal.

[snip]

In another corner of the factory, Bill Schaltenbrand, 59, was cutting bigger, more complicated parts. A computer had worked out where he should drill and cut, but Mr. Schaltenbrand, a 40-year veteran at Hamill, does his own math to double-check the plans. Computers, he says, sometimes "punch out stupid stuff." Part of Mr. Schaltenbrand's skill is reading blueprints with myriad numbers and symbols that would baffle most people.

[snip]

Bayer has had particular trouble filling positions in such areas as chemical-process technology at its plastics plant in Baytown, Texas, near Houston. A decade ago, Mr. Babe says, a job opening typically would attract 100 applications. "These days I get about 10," he says. After screening, Bayer often finds that only a couple are qualified. Some jobs have been open six to nine months.

"This place is five acres, and it's three stories tall," says Donny Simon, 55, who has worked in the plant since 1988. It takes time to understand how all the pipes, valves, pumps and feedstock tanks work together and how to avoid explosions or other accidents. Technicians need basic math and science for such tasks as calculating the rate at which dyes and stabilizing agents need to be added for specially ordered batches of plastics.

[snip]

Manufacturers say the U.S. education system doesn't produce enough students strong in math, science and engineering. About 5% of bachelor's degrees awarded in the U.S. are in engineering, compared with an average of about 20% in Asia, according to the U.S. National Science Foundation. In the most recent comparison of math and science test scores of 15-year-old students by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, American students trailed far behind those from China, Japan, South Korea, Canada and Germany.


Help Wanted on Factory Floor

By JAMES R. HAGERTY
May 6, 2011
Wall Street Journal

and see:

blue collar
The Race between Education and Technology

Internet Savvy ? Not.

Kids Aren't As Internet Savvy As They Think

If you read it to the end -- I promise a website worth the click.

blue collar

from The Race between Education and Technology:

We found that wide differences existed among blue-collar manufacturing workers in their educational attainment and that these differences were directly related to industry characteristics and thus to the technologies employed and the skills demanded of workers.

[snip]

...[T]o understand the role of education in the pre-1940 period, we generally use the completion of high school as the definition of more-educated, whereas for more recent times we use graduation from college (either four-year or a combination of two- and four-year). The reason for the different standard concerns changes in the average level of education across the century. In 1940, 34 percent of the U.S. male labor force 25 to 34 years old had 12 or more years of schooling whereas in 2000 about the same fraction had a post-secondary degree.

[snip]

The industries clearly divide into two groups. At the low end of the education spectrum are the products of the first industrial revolution (cotton, woolen, and sil textiles; boots and shoes) and many that have been the mainstay of construction for centuries (lumber, stone, clay, and cement). At the high end are various products of the second industrial revolution (e.g., chemicals, petroleum), many in the machine-producing group, and some crafted in settings similar to that found in a traditional artisanal shop (i.e., clocks, watches, jewelry, and even aircraft.) Finally, there is a perennial among high-education industries: printing and publishing.

[snip]

Drivers for jewelry stores and drug stores were more educated than were drivers who worked in other industries. Blue-collar workers in radio stores, and even gas station attendants, were far more educated than the average blue-collar worker. Our point is that in manufacturing, as well as in many other sectors, blue-collar workers using more advanced technologies and being entrusted with more expensive capital and goods were more educated than were others with similar occupational titles.

[snip]

[D]ifferences in educational attainment of blue-collar workers across industries are substantial even after adjusting for differences in urbanization, regional location of production, and age structure.

[snip]

...[T]he fraction employed in the metal trades rose with education, whereas the fraction employed in wood, leather, clothing, and textiles declined with education. The metal trades rose with education, whereas the fraction employed in the metal trades rose with education, whereas the fraction employed in wood, leather, clothing, and textiles declined with education. The metal trades were considered among the more technologically advanced in manufacturing, whereas trades in the other indutriess mentioned were older and less dynamic. Of the young men with 12 years of schooling who were employed in blue-collar jobs, 54.4 percent were in the metal trades. But among those who left school after nine years, 44.4 percent were in the metal trades, and among those who left after six years just 30.3 percent were in the metal trades.

[snip]

The complementarity between technology and skill existed even earlier in the twentieth century and was associated with the introduction of electricity and the more extensive use of capital per worker.

[snip]

Rarely is the education of production workers mentioned in the labor history literature. Yet there is ample qualitative evidence, complementing our empirical findings, that certain cognitive skills were highly valued in various trades.

we're number 12

The United States used to lead the world in the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. Now it ranks 12th among 36 developed nations.

[snip]

“We spend a fortune recruiting freshmen but forget to recruit sophomores,” Michael McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation, said at the meeting.

[snip]

“We led the world in the 1980s, but we didn’t build from there,” he said. “If you look at people 60 and over, about 39-40 percent have college degrees, and if you look at young people, too, about 39-40 percent have college degrees. Meanwhile, other countries have passed us by.”

Canada now leads the world in educational attainment, with about 56 percent of its young adults having earned at least associate’s degrees in 2007, compared with only 40 percent of those in the United States. (The United States’ rate has since risen slightly.)

While almost 70 percent of high school graduates in the United States enroll in college within two years of graduating, only about 57 percent of students who enroll in a bachelor’s degree program graduate within six years, and fewer than 25 percent of students who begin at a community college graduate with an associate’s degree within three years.

[snip]

The problem begins long before college, according to the report released Thursday.

“You can’t address college completion if you don’t do something about K-12 education,” Mr. Kirwan said.

Once a Leader, U.S. Lags in College Degrees
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: July 23, 2010

out in paper

The Race between Education and Technology

freakonomics summary of The Race
ktm posts about The Race

Goldin & Katz!

The White House cites Goldin & Katz!

The same folks I've been citing for lo these many months!


Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Bloomington High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been
the golden age: a NYC teacher remembers
the White House cites Goldin & Katz

stimulus jobs

Sorry I've been missing in action -- lots of goings-on here in town. Good news on that front.

And tonight is Jimmy's birthday party, so I may not be back in the swing of things 'til sometime tomorrow.

In the meantime, I've just this moment stumbled across a New Yorker post about President Obama's "stimulus jobs":

It is common to say that we are in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The structure of the economy in which that crisis is occurring is very different than during the nineteen-thirties, of course. Just how different is highlighted in this chart (pdf file) from research by Anthony Carnevale, Jeffrey Strohl, and Nicole Smith, of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University. They estimate that the Obama Administration’s stimulus bill will create about 3.7 million jobs—and that just over half of those jobs will require some college education. A remarkable fourteen thousand eight hundred jobs, they estimate, will require post-doctoral work.

[snip]

Jamie P. Merisotis, of the Lumina Foundation for Education, dropped by our offices the other day and mentioned this Georgetown research. Lumina seeks to drive the rate of college completion in the United States from its current level of just under forty per cent to sixty per cent. The U.S. once led the world in this area; now, among rich industrialized countries, we are tenth. The current leaders (over-achieving Finland among them) put about fifty-five or so per cent of their populations through college.

[snip]

In general, much of the education spending in the bill is delivered as direct transfers to states to help them retain teachers and administrators at a time when local and state tax revenues (from which our school K-12 public-school systems are funded) are collapsing. Even this block transfer money is being used to coerce prospective reform—in particular, by forcing states to develop new plans to collect information on school, teacher, and pupil performance. This information in turn will presumably be used to strengthen the “No Child Left Behind” law if and when it is renewed over the next couple of years.

Schooling the Stimulus
Steve Coll

"Does School Quality Matter" Julian Betts

in a nutshell:

This paper has found that earnings of white male workers depend significantly on which high school they have attended. However, standard benchmarks of school quality explain very little of these differences between schools.

Does School Quality Matter? Evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth by Julian R. Betts
The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 77, No. 2 (May, 1995), pp. 231-250

Abstract

The paper searches for links between school quality and subsequent earnings of students. Using data for white males from the NLSY, the paper rejects the hypothesis that workers' earnings are independent of which high school they attended. However, traditional measures of school "quality" such as class size, teachers' salaries and teachers' level of education fail to capture these differences. This result is robust to changes in specification and subsample. The paper contrasts the results with those of Card and Krueger (1992a), and speculates that structural changes may have weakened the link between traditional measures of school quality and student outcomes.


I. Introduction

A lengthy literature has attempted to de- termine which "inputs" to the schooling process affect student outcomes. In detailed surveys, Hanushek (1986, 1989) concludes that there is little evidence that standard measures of school quality have any effect on student performance.

The vast majority of work in this area, dating back to the widely read Coleman Report (Coleman et al., 1966), has used test scores to gauge students' achievements. However, the validity of test scores as a performance measure is questionable, given the low correlation typically found between test results and subsequent labor- market outcomes.

[snip]

Indeed, if earnings are the metric by which economists measure success in the labor market, it makes more sense to use wages or earnings to gauge the effectiveness of schooling.

[snip]

A second trait, shared by two-thirds of this literature, is the use of spending per pupil as the single measure of school quality. Murnane et al. (1991, p. 7) criticize this approach as "sterile," since it gives no indication of which of the many components of education spending should be increased to improve student performance

In summary, no published paper in this literature on school quality and earnings has yet measured school quality at the level of the school actually attended. In addition, most studies have measured "quality" in terms of spending.

[snip]

My findings indicate that while there are significant differences between the labor-market performance of students who attended different schools, these differences are not significantly related to standard measures of school quality. These results accord with the literature on school quality and test scores, as surveyed by Hanushek.


III. Results

It would be premature to search for the characteristics of schools which influence earnings without first determining whether earnings differ between workers who attended different high schools, ceteris paribus.

[snip]

[A]ll four regressions were repeated with the addition of father's and mother's years of education, a dummy variable indicating whether any family member possessed a library card when the person was 14 years old (as a measure of the intellectual environment of the family) and the imputed hourly wage of the father.'0 But in each of these regressions, even when these personal and family characteristics were added, the null hypothesis that schools have no effect on earnings was rejected...

[snip]

In summary, despite repeating the regression under many different specifications, and using various subsamples designed to eliminate poten- tial data problems, the same conclusion holds throughout: three commonly used measures of school quality--the teacher-pupil ratio, the relative salary of starting teachers and the percentage of teachers with Master's degrees or higher--in general bear no significant positive relation to the subsequent earnings of students.

[snip]

Overall, these results do not lend much strength to the notion that better high schools contribute to earnings by leading workers to acquire more education and/or training than they otherwise would have.

[snip]

However, as shown in table 5, subsequent earnings of students do appear to be positively and significantly related to the number of students enrolled at the school, although the elasticity at the means is only 0.044. This suggests that mildly increasing returns to scale may be at work. Table 5 also presents evidence that a school with a higher percentage of disadvantaged students is likely to produce graduates with lower earnings, at least for those students who achieve less than 12 years of education. (The interaction term between this variable and education is actually positive, so that students with more than 11.98 years of education are predicted to have higher wages as the percentage of disadvantaged students rises.) Similarly, the percentage of grade 10 students who drop out without completing grade 12 has a negative and significant effect on earnings, at least for those workers who obtain less than 13.4 years of education.2

[snip]

[T]he size of the school, as measured by enrollment, is related to earnings, and is a variable which policymakers can control. This is the sole measure of school "quality" which this study has found to be significantly related to students' subsequent earnings. [ed.: don't know how this relates to the "small school" movement...]


bureaucratization of the schools & school quality:

[I]ncreasing bureaucratization of public schools might have weakened the link between standard measures of school quality and educational outcomes. In a cross-sectional study using state-level data from 1984, Anderson, Shugart and Tollison (1991) find that states with larger educational bureaucracies tend to produce stu- dents with lower standardized test scores. In a 1987 survey of secondary school principals, fully 69% complained of administrative roadblocks caused by new State guidelines and requirements (National Center for Education Statistics, 1991, p. 92). The idea that increasing bureaucratization of the public schools reduces their effectiveness is gaining widespread acceptance.

[snip]

An implication of these hypotheses of "structural change" in the public school system is that standard school quality measures should still be significantly and positively related to wages of those who attended private and parochial schools. When the basic regression from table 1 was run on the subsample of white males who had attended such schools, the teacher-pupil ratio and the percentage of teachers with post- graduate degrees were indeed significantly and positively related to earnings. However, this intriguing result should be regarded with caution as it is based on 507 wage observations involving only 58 individuals.


growing the administration

Coming across this study today is a case of serendipity.

In the past five years, my tiny little school district (1848 student enrollment in K-12 projected for 2009-2010) has been massively bureaucratized. I've always been told that when you grow the administration school quality declines, but I'd never seen a study saying so.

Now I've got two.



Anderson, Gary M., William F. Shugart III and Robert D. Tollison, "Educational Achievement and the Cost of Bureaucracy," (pdf file) Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 15 (1) (1991), 29-45.

Weintraub, Daniel M., "Wilson Calls for Schools to Set Own Rules," Los Angeles Times (Jan. 29 1993), Al and A26.

Lefty in the TIMES - & the return of instructivist!

"Lefty" has a terrific letter in the New York Times:

Re “Education Is All in Your Mind,” by Richard E. Nisbett (Op-Ed, Feb. 8):

I don’t doubt that removing “stereotype threat,” discussing the benefits of hard work and asking children to consider their futures and personal values improve student performance.

But if changing the curriculum and training teachers “typically produce little in the way of educational gain,” I must conclude that only certain curriculum changes and training protocols have been examined.

How about replacing today’s popular “reform math” programs, which some mathematicians estimate ultimately delay students by up to two grade levels, with a more challenging, pedagogically principled one like Singapore Math? How about specifically training teachers who understand upper-level arithmetic?

Education is, of course, ultimately all in your mind, but neither work ethic nor future focus will help you multiply large numbers efficiently or convert arbitrary fractions into decimals — unless either your teacher or textbook takes time to address these topics.

Katharine Beals
Philadelphia, Feb. 10, 2009

The good news:

• Nicholas Kristof has taken Goldin & Katz's thesis to heart and may be in the process of retooling himself to become an education columnist [news flash: have just this moment noticed that instructivist - he's back! - has already covered this ground]
  

• While the first 2 columns Kristof devoted to The Race Between Education and Technology repeated Fareed Zakaria's assertion that "White suburban schools still offer an excellent education, comparable to those in Singapore, which may have the best education system in the world," his third column does not. Since Zakaria appears to have drawn this claim from a trade publication article that got the TIMSS research wrong, I'm hoping Kristof won't adopt the white-schools-good/black-schools-bad approach that so badly mischaracterizes what has gone wrong in U.S. public schools.
  

Although he has dropped the comparisons to Singapore, Kristof does claim, without citing evidence, that the best teachers are teaching the most privileged students. And he thinks spending $100 billion to save all public school teaching jobs no questions asked is self-evidently a good thing.

Still and all, the contradictions inherent in Kristof's second column are bound to occur to him sooner rather than later:

a) teachers matter more than class size
b) many disadvantaged children are being taught by not-so-great teachers (according to Kristof)

and

c) no teacher in any public school anywhere in the country should lose a job

As an elected official here in Westchester County once said of the evacuation plan for Indian Point, "All three things cannot be true at once."

As to the $100 billion for education, now that my own child has been rescued by a Catholic school^* I'd like to see a good portion of that money go to private and parochial schools that have been successfully educating children for years:

Through a laserlike focus on a no-frills, core academic curriculum, and by resisting progressive-education fads, Rice takes most of the students who enter in ninth grade—many of them two years behind in reading and math—and gradually gets them up to grade level. The kids pass most of the necessary state Regents exams. There are no Jaime Escalante miracles here, no AP calculus whiz kids. But Rice’s graduation rate is a legitimate 90 percent, compared with the public schools’ rate of 50 to 60 percent—despite per-pupil spending in the city’s public high schools triple that of Rice’s. Most Rice graduates go on to some form of higher education.

School-reform experts often argue that money is overrated as a factor in school improvement. For the most part, I agree. But in the case of Rice High School and most of the other Catholic schools in the city, money is the issue. With a little extra each year, we could almost guarantee that Rice will go on doing an excellent job of educating at-risk black boys far into the twenty-first century, just as it educated underprivileged white boys throughout the twentieth century. I estimate that if the city’s Catholic schools could get just 1 percent of the budget for the public schools, there would be no more Catholic-school closings. And if the people and political leaders of this wealthy city can’t figure out how to get such a small amount of money into the Catholic schools, Patrick McCloskey’s inspired book can serve as a requiem for one of New York’s most noble institutions.

Kristof says he's still on the steep part of the learning curve, and I'm thinking he's headed in the right direction. In his follow-up blog post to the second column, he writes that "you’re much better off with a great teacher in a big class in a bad school than with a poor teacher in a small class in an excellent school." That's not something you hear every day of the week.

Maybe by the time Column #3 rolls around, Mr. Kristof will have discovered that education is dominated by charlatans and a noxious ideology!


Nicholas Kristof on The Race Between Education and Technology:
Obama and the Schools November 12, 2008
Throwing Schools Out the Window Feb 6, 2009
Our Greatest National Shame Feb 14, 2009
Your Comments on My Education Column Feb 14, 2009

Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Bloomington High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been

^* For passersby: I am a Protestant, and my husband is Jewish; our public school is funded at $25K per pupil spending and rising.

returns to education: twin study

I had never heard of this study --

This paper uses a new survey to contrast the wages of genetically identical twins with different schooling levels. Multiple measurements of schooling levels were also collected to assess the effect of reporting error on the estimated economic returns to schooling. The data indicate that omitted ability variables do not bias the estimated return to schooling upward, but that measurement error does bias it downward. Adjustment for measurement error indicates that an additional year of schooling increases wages by 16%, a higher estimate of the economic returns to schooling than has been previously found.

Estimates of the Economic Returns to Schooling from a New Sample of Twins
Alan Krueger & Orley Ashenfelter

From the Princeton Weekly Bulletin:

One of Ashenfelter’s best-known areas of study is the relationship between education and income. Research into the impact of education had been complicated by the fact that many other factors, such as social class or innate intelligence, could contribute to someone’s earning power. Ashenfelter and Princeton colleague Alan Krueger found a way to bypass those factors through an unusual field study.

Beginning in 1991, the researchers traveled to the Twins Day Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio — which attracts thousands of twins each year, young and old — and interviewed more than 600 attendees over three years to collect data on their schooling and earnings. They were assisted by graduate students and, in one year, a pair of identical Princeton undergraduates.

Ashenfelter and Krueger, who also collaborated with Rouse on the study, found that each year of additional schooling equaled an additional 12 to 16 percent in earnings. Because the study compared genetically identical subjects, excluding other factors that were difficult to measure, it was widely considered the strongest analysis to date of the impact of education on earnings.

“What drove it was the fact that we realized there was a cheap and easy way to collect data,” said Ashenfelter, “and it was hysterically funny to go to a festival like that.”

Krueger said, “The twin study was great fun. What I took away from the experience is that Orley never treats research as finished. He thinks long and hard and deeply about economic problems. He also makes research fun. Our paper made a splash because we collected new data … and used simple as well as sophisticated econometric methods to answer a longstanding question in economics.”

Doing What Comes Naturally
by Eric Quiñones

Education Week:

[T]the twin who put in more school time tended almost always to be the higher-wage earner later in life. That was also true, subsequent studies by Mr. Krueger and others revealed, even when the difference in schooling time amounted to just a few months.

“If you look at the evidence at the individual level, it’s overwhelming,” said Barry P. Bosworth, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “I’m far more inclined to say that it can be aggregated up to gains for society as a whole. But they don’t let economists run controlled laboratory experiments, so it’s hard to know for sure.”

Mr. Krueger agreed. “I think education matters in the long run,” he added. “In the short run, it’s the business cycle that matters.”

Researchers Gain Insight Into Education's Impact on Nations' Productivity
by Debra Viadero
Education Week April 23, 2008

Now that Goldin & Katz's book has been published, I would like to see Education Week simply assume that education has an "impact" on productivity.

my thoughts exactly

Last year, two labor economists, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, published a book called “The Race Between Education and Technology.” It is as much a work of history — the history of education — as it is a work of economics. Goldin and Katz set out to answer the question of how much an education really matters. They are themselves products of public schools, she of New York and he of Los Angeles, and they have been a couple for two decades. They are liberals (Katz served as the chief economist under Robert Reich in Bill Clinton’s Labor Department), but their book has been praised by both the right and the left. “I read the Katz and Goldin book,” Matthew Slaughter, an associate dean of Dartmouth’s business school who was an economic adviser to George W. Bush, recently told me, “and there’s part of me that can’t fathom that half the presidential debates weren’t about a couple of facts in that book.”

The Big Fix by David Leonhardt
The New York Times February 1, 2009

That's what I said!

And, just in case you were thinking I'd slacked off on my mission to bring Goldin and Katz to the masses (or, failing that, to the long-suffering readers & writers of kitchen table math, who have now been exposed to a couple dozen posts on the topic of Goldin and Katz)....well, I haven't.


Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Bloomington High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been
the golden age: a NYC teacher remembers
the White House cites Goldin & Katz

a high school we know and love

Congratulations Bloomington High School!

Goldin and Katz have this to say of the schools of the Midwest in The Race between Education and Technology:

From 1910 to 1940 secondary schools mushroomed all over the nation and youths began to go to high school in ever-increasing numbers fo learn skills for life, not necessarily just for college. Certain parts of the nation experienced the high school movement earlier than others and were educational leaders. The state in the West North Central portion of the United States were among the leaders and one of them--Iowa--figures prominently in our analysis.
p. 72

and:

[T]here has been remarkable persistence in the leading and lagging states from the end of the high school movement until today...The persistence of educational excellence is demonstrated by graphing the high school graduation rate by state in 1938 against n index of educational performance by state in the 1990s, where the index incorporates high school graduation rates and various achievement test scores. The raw correlation of the two variables by state for 1938 and the 1990s is 0.72.
p. 343

Path dependency. The Midwest started out ahead and they're still ahead today.

Unlike the country's education system as a whole, which started out miles ahead of the rest of the world and has now fallen behind.


update 12.8.2008

from a parent whose kids have attended Bloomington High School (& long-time ktm commenter & member):

I haven't had a chance to review the report at length, but my preliminary read is that it seems to mean that our district has taken to heart the challenge/mandate to leave no child behind. Thirty percent of our district's student population is African American or Hispanic; forty percent qualify as disadvantaged. What I think the bronze medal status means is that our district is making strides in educating "harder to educate" populations. The data comports with what my own sense of what has been happening in our district in recent years.

I have not seen a corresponding decrease in the quality of education for students at the higher end of the spectrum. This is not to suggest that all is perfect (far from it); but good news is always welcome, and this recognition was most definitely good news.

Here is a link to the full report

Our high school hosted a speech tournament yesterday, and we took a turn at concessions (which is our speech team's primary fundraiser). There was a positive buzz about the ranking amongst the parents who were volunteering.

Congratulations, Bloomington High.


Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Bloomington High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been

book party

tomorrow (pdf file)

Is there an award for Best Book Nobody On the Planet Understood and/or Listened To?

Or, alternatively, Best Book Used to Justify Doing Stuff the Book Has Nothing to Do With?

Because if not, we need one.

a person without a party, part 2

excuse me while I bang my head against the wall

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

While we're on the subject of things that cause head-banging, here is Margaret Spellings evoking The Race Between Technology and Education to flog Clayton Christensen's technology will save us argument. Goldin and Katz are Harvard economists who've spent 20 years studying the economics of education; Clayton Christensen is a b-school professor who has applied a Big Idea to education.

My point: these two works are not on a level, and technology will not save us.

Bonus points:

Over the past 18 months, Kevin and I have held a series of conversations on educational technology with educators, executives, and students.

Why is it "executives" rate attention from the Secretary of Education while parents, college professors, and taxpayers do not?


Lawrence Katz: publications
Claudia Goldin: publications
Clayton Christensen: publications

Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

21st century or the real world: pick one

The mean literacy scores of all jobs projected to exist in the year 2005 were only 2 to 3 points above those prevailing in 1992. Unless the demand for professional, managerial, and technical workers increases at a rate faster than that projected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, or unless literacy requirements for existing jobs are substantially upgraded, there does not appear to be any serious literacy mismatch between the projected occupational job structure and the available work force in the early years of the 21st century.

Literacy in the Labor Force
National Adult Literacy Survey
September 1999
p. 266

I say we forget the 21st century skills and teach the liberal arts disciplines.

Of course, I suppose these projections could have changed since 1999. If so, that's all the more reason to forget about 21st century skills and teach the liberal arts disciplines.