Everyday Math: Coming to a School Near You!

It appears that the marketing people for Everyday Math are earning their salaries. There's a new promo on the web for EM (I've reproduced it below) The main site is located here. There are also YouTube videos containing testimonials, etc. Of interest is the one here. It features people from Woodbridge NJ (other districts are there also). It's all sound bites. "Allows higher level dialogue in solving problems" etc.


In the EM promo (which I've included below) it looks like they've picked up on the criticisms of EM and are now using it in their advertising. To wit: "There's nothing fuzzy about it".

Excuse me? Nothing fuzzy aboout it? Well, maybe not as fuzzy as TERC, but still... Yes, a casual reading might reveal what look like good problems, but you wouldn't know from looking at the workbook that they don't teach the standard algorithms, that a particular page of problems may represent the last time such types of problems are seen that year, that there are far less computational problems in EM than in the highly disdained "traditional" textbooks, and the computational problems that are there do not cover a lot of 2-digit or 3-digit multiplication. Not to mention that calculators are allowed fairly often.

The sentence that really got to me was "Everyday Mathematics is better than traditional, textbook-centered programs that produced generations of students who hated math." While some of the traditional text books of the 50's and 60's had their bad points, I think this statement is over-generalized and extremely misleading. The textbook-centered programs of yore also produced generations of students who liked math, were good at it, and understood the underlying concepts. And ironically, many if not all of the students who hated math as a result of those "traditional textbook-centered programs" are probably more proficient in the basic skills than those who have received the EM treatment without benefit of Kumon, or outside help.

Of course, EM's solutioon to the "textbook-centered" approach is to do away with a textbook. Students only have workbooks. (Oh, and a reference manual. Which does have a good section on how to use a calculator). The EM promoters' disdain for such "scripted" approaches is pure hypocrisy, since EM does have a particular script. Students and parents can't see it, but it's contained in the teacher's manual and provides the outline of daily lessons. Not very good, mind you, but still, there is a plan there which parents and students do not get the benefit of seeing--except in the "family letters" (some in very poor Spanish as has been discussed here) that students bring home with them and which explain what they will be learning in a particular unit. Every unit is a hodge podge of topics, nested inside some main topic. There is no concentrated focus on any one topic that allows any kind of mastery learning. But the EM promoters have an answer for that one as well: I

"Content is taught in a repeated fashion, beginning with concrete experiences to which students can relate. Research shows that students learn best when new topics are presented at a brisk pace, with multiple exposures over time, and with frequent opportunities for review and practice. The sequence of instruction in the Everyday Mathematics curriculum has been carefully mapped out to optimize these conditions for learning and retaining knowledge."

They didn't bother to talk about what research it was that showed this, but there is another module on their "research base". Much of their research was conducted by William Carroll, who has been on the EM/U of Chicago payroll for some time. Seems to me the National Math Panel's final report seemed to address EM's approach head on when they said:

“A focused, coherent progression of mathematics learning, with an emphasis on proficiency with key topics, should become the norm in elementary and middle school mathematics curricula. Any approach that continually revisits topics year after year without closure is to be avoided.”

Anyway, here's the promo. Read and weep.

How Everyday Mathematics Offers a Better Approach to Mathematics Mastery

There’s nothing fuzzy about it. Everyday Mathematics brings more clarity and rigor to math instruction, so students understand and appreciate the role of mathematics in daily life. Everyday Mathematics, a comprehensive Pre-K-6 mathematics curriculum, not only embraces traditional goals of math education, but also sets out to accomplish two ambitious goals for the 21st century:

• To substantially raise expectations regarding the amount and range of math that students
learn.

• To support teachers and students with the materials necessary to enable students to meet
these higher expectations.

To provide more rigorous, balanced instruction, Everyday Mathematics:

• Emphasizes conceptual understanding while building mastery of basic skills.

• Explores a broad mathematics spectrum, not just basic arithmetic.

• Is based on how students learn and what they’re interested in while preparing them for their
future mathematical needs.

Changing the Way We Teach Math

The accelerating demand for competence and problem-solving agility in mathematics requires
improved methods for teaching math in the classroom. Teachers are no longer preparing students for a lifetime of pencil-and-paper calculations, but for future careers that demand a true understanding of how mathematics works at much higher levels.

Everyday Mathematics is better than traditional, textbook-centered programs that produced generations of students who hated math. It is consistent with the ways students actually learn math – building understanding over time – first through informal exposure, then through more formal and directed instruction.

Content is taught in a repeated fashion, beginning with concrete experiences to which students can relate. Research shows that students learn best when new topics are presented at a brisk ace, with multiple exposures over time, and with frequent opportunities for review and practice. The sequence of instruction in the Everyday Mathematics curriculum has been carefully mapped out to optimize these conditions for learning and retaining knowledge.

for all you content freaks out there

A couple of years ago Carolyn decided that's what ktm-types are: content freaks.

Well, good news! I have discovered the ultimate content freak product: SuperMemo.

Actually, I rediscovered it. A couple of years ago I came across SuperMemo in my wanderings and didn't know what to make of it. It sounded good -- it sounded great -- but who were these people? Offhand, I couldn't tell whether SuperMemo was the brainchild of some crackpot internet nut or some crackpot genius internet nut. So I filed the URL and planned to get back to it when I had more time.

Then I forgot about it until it popped back up a few weeks ago in a Wired article, which I printed out and also forgot. (Once I have my very own copy of SuperMemo and have figured out how to operate the incremental reading feature, this kind of thing won't happen to me any more.)

A couple of days ago the print-out surfaced, and there you have the Living History of my journey to SuperMemo and extreme memory:

Piotr Wozniak's quest for anonymity has been successful. Nobody along this string of little beach resorts recognizes him as the inventor of a technique to turn people into geniuses. A portion of this technique, embodied in a software program called SuperMemo, has enthusiastic users around the world. They apply it mainly to learning languages, and it's popular among people for whom fluency is a necessity — students from Poland or other poor countries aiming to score well enough on English-language exams to study abroad. A substantial number of them do not pay for it, and pirated copies are ubiquitous on software bulletin boards in China, where it competes with knockoffs like SugarMemo.

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It's too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.

Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person's memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains.

Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm
By Gary Wolf
Wired Magazine
4/21/08

memory is good

The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn — words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details — don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for. When it comes to learning, what really matters is how things fit together. We master the stories, the schemas, the frameworks, the paradigms; we rehearse the lingo; we swim in the episteme.

The disadvantage of this comforting notion is that it's false. "The people who criticize memorization — how happy would they be to spell out every letter of every word they read?" asks Robert Bjork, chair of UCLA's psychology department and one of the most eminent memory researchers. After all, Bjork notes, children learn to read whole words through intense practice, and every time we enter a new field we become children again. "You can't escape memorization," he says. "There is an initial process of learning the names of things. That's a stage we all go through. It's all the more important to go through it rapidly." The human brain is a marvel of associative processing, but in order to make associations, data must be loaded into memory.

Yup.

I speak as a person who writes nonfiction for a living. You cannot write a book about a subject in which you aren't expert without committing the vocabulary of the field to memory.

Google isn't memory.

The internet isn't memory.

The World Book Encyclopedia isn't memory.

spaced reptition: To write a book, you have to learn the vocabulary of the subject you are writing about. Also the schema, (pdf file - NOTE: I've read only the first page of this article) to the degree that you can.

And learning means committing to memory.

End of story.

clickers for college

Ohio State University students who used the devices to answer multiple-choice questions during physics lectures earned final examination scores that were around 10 percent higher – the equivalent of a full-letter grade -- than students who didn't.

The clickers also appear to level the playing field between male and female students. In clicker classes, male and female students performed equally well. In the traditional, non-clicker classes, male students outperformed female students.

[snip]

Around the country, clickers are regularly used to maintain student attention in large lecture halls. At large universities such as Ohio State, even relatively advanced science classes may contain hundreds of students. Reay said that clickers are a good way to help students pay attention and learn in today's classroom.

[snip]

In clicker classes, multiple choice questions appear on a large computer screen at the front of the lecture hall. Students hold the wireless devices, which resemble small calculators. They cast their votes for the correct answer based on their understanding of the part of the lecture that was just given. A bar graph shows the percentage of students voting for each answer.

Physics educators have expanded the use of clickers at Ohio State by developing sequences of questions to determine if students really understand the underlying concepts of a lecture. The technique involves offering a series of questions -- typically three -- each with different wording and structure, but all designed to test the same concept.

One three-question sequence that Reay and his colleagues developed is used to test students' understanding of Faraday's Law. The class is shown a diagram of two wire loops of different sizes moving into a magnetic field, and asked which loop will experience larger induced voltage at the moment it enters the field.

For an introductory electromagnetics class of engineering majors, this is an easy question and Reay would expect more than 80 percent to answer it correctly.

"But not all students choose the correct answer for the right reason," he said. "A common misconception is that larger loops always have a larger induced voltage, which is not the case. That's why we then ask two more questions that involve loops of different sizes and shapes. The question-sequence method eliminates common student misconceptions, and helps students grasp the underlying concept in a short time."

The idea with clickers, Reay explained, is that both lecturers and students can gauge whether students understand the material in real time. If students don't understand something, the lecturer might try to get them to think about the topic in a different way, perhaps by discussing it amongst themselves to encourage understanding before moving on to a new topic.

Professors typically devote approximately 20 percent of a class to clicker questions, and the rest to traditional lecture and discussion.

[snip]

Students aren't required to use the clickers, but Reay said that participation over the years has held relatively constant at 90 percent. Small incentives, such as grading clicker questions or offering extra credit, can raise participation to 98 percent.

Students seem to like the clickers.

“When we conduct our quarterly surveys, we find that the percentage of students enthusiastically favoring use of clickers is higher than 90 percent,” Reay said.

"In addition to this popularity, our research indicates that our sequence method of using clickers offers students a significant advantage on learning, and we are working to sharpen our methodology for measuring these learning gains. We're finding that the timing of pretests and post tests during the quarter matters, along with different applications of incentives,” he added.

"In addition to this popularity, our research indicates that our sequence method of using clickers offers students a significant advantage on learning, and we are working to sharpen our methodology for measuring these learning gains. We're finding that the timing of pretests and post tests during the quarter matters, along with different applications of incentives,” he added.

[snip]

Both sexes had nearly equal gains in the clicker classes: females had a score gain of 6.2, and males a score gain of 6.7. In the non-clicker classes, the female score gain was 4.3, and the male score gain was 6.6.

As to why clickers seem to help female students more than male students, the anonymity of the devices may offer an advantage. In surveys, nearly all the students -- male and female -- said they liked having the ability to keep their answers private. Students can easily hold the clicker in one hand and block their neighbor’s view. “We suspect that anonymity is a benefit, but right now that is really just speculation," Reay said.

Students Who Use 'Clickers' Score Better On Physics Tests

Am I reading this right?

There was a tremendous gain for female students and essentially no gain for male students? (Of course, I don't know what 1/10th of a point amounts to.)

This seems strange.

Is this a common outcome in college physics courses?:

During the 2006-2007 academic year, the clicker classes outperformed the non-clicker classes by an average of 10 percent -- a full letter grade -- on the multiple choice part of their final exams. The non-clicker class averaged a score of 61 percent on this section; the clicker class averaged 72 percent.

Teacher's Union Opposes Salary Increases

In Washington D.C. a strange thing is happening. A proposal to improve the educational cesspool that is the public school system in the Nation's Capital is being torpedoed by the national teachers unions (despite support from the local union leaders and teachers).

I haven't seen the story reported in any US newspapers, and I wonder why not, since I read education columns quite regularly. If I were any more cynical than I already am, I might think there is a plot by the national unions to keep this particular proposal quiet. Or perhaps I just missed the US press stories due to summer vacations and what not. Anyway, the British news weekly, The Economist, had a short story two weeks ago.

The story begins with a typical indictment of the District's schools -- hugely inefficient, extremely high cost, abysmal test scores, and outrageous student behavior. And then the teachers:

Teachers are virtually unsackable and paid by seniority. Such incentives attract the lazy and mediocre and repel the talented or diligent.

But here's where it gets interesting, the solution is somewhat novel in education reform:

Ms Rhee [Michelle Rhee, School Chancellor] is thrashing out a deal with union leaders that would raise teachers’ wages dramatically. Starting salaries would leap from about $40,000 to $78,000, and wages for the best performers would double to about $130,000 a year. In return, teachers would lose tenure and be paid according to merit, measured in part by their students’ results. Current teachers would have a choice: they could join the new system or stay in the old one. New hires would have to join the new system. Over time, the quality and morale of teachers in Washington should soar. “Imagine the kind of talent the hard-pressed system could attract,” drools the Washington Post.

But wouldn’t all this require a huge expansion of the school budget? Perhaps not. The current system is staggeringly inefficient. The city employs an army of educational bureaucrats and has twice as many schools as it needs. It pays to heat and air-condition some schools that are only a quarter full. Insiders reckon that, within a few years, the new pay deal could be wholly financed by cutting waste. And in the short term private donors are willing to shoulder much of the cost.

The plan’s boosters call it revolutionary, in that it applies to public schools a principle—reward good work and you get more of it—that every other employer has known for centuries. But it will be still-born if the Washington teachers’ union does not agree to it. Local union leaders rather like the idea of higher pay, but the big national unions are appalled at the notion that any teachers might give up tenure. Fearing an unwelcome precedent, they are leaning on the local union to kill the deal.

I can imagine the union drooling all over the pay hikes, but like most behemoth bureaucracies, they'd like the cake too, please. Big pay hikes, no accountability, lifetime tenure. Still, it is disheartening to see the difficulty the District is having getting this approved. If merit pay is a nonstarter in a district performing as badly as Washington D.C., what hope have we in a nominally high performing suburb?

Summarizing, Paraphrasing, Retelling

Emily Kissner's book, unfortunately, is part of my great unread. One of these days...

Still, I've read enough of it to recommend it.

The introduction & second chapters are online:

I started teaching language arts at the height of the whole language movement. The supervisor in my district had removed the old scope and sequence, drill and kill–based curriculum in favor of a far more open curriculum that allowed teachers to plan their own lessons and make their own judgments. “But I have no judgment!” I remember wailing to my mother, also a teacher. [note: this is exactly the way I felt when I first had kids and read advice books telling me to "trust my instincts": I didn't have any instincts] “How do you think I learned what to do?” she asked, and showed me her bookshelf, which was covered with stacks and stacks of professional books. I got the message. I couldn’t expect to make it through a career of teaching with only the knowledge I had picked up in a handful of undergraduate courses. If I was going to be successful, I needed to read. And read. And read.

During the next few years, I amassed my own collection of books. When I came to a thorny patch in my instruction—for example, how to get students to apply grammar skills to their writing—I would look through the books for ideas and solutions. If I didn’t find the answer in my own books, I would borrow from my mother’s bookshelf or the reading specialist’s....

This helped me to cope with the changes that swept through my classroom during the course of the next seven years. I started teaching seventh grade writing, then added sixth grade writing to the mix. When Integrated Language Arts came to our school a few years later, I was thrilled to be able to teach a ninety-minute block of reading and writing. Our state outcomes became content standards, our state testing program was transformed from performance-based assessment to “selected response,” or multiple choice, and the district middle school reading and writing department was headed by three different supervisors who dispersed three different curriculum manuals. As if these changes were not enough, I uprooted myself after seven years and went to teach a self-contained sixth grade class in a tiny rural district. Moving from a district with 28,000 students to a district with 1,800 was quite a culture shock.....

The more things changed, the more I could see how some things remained the same. Whether I was teaching to outcomes or standards, whether my curriculum was organized according to theme or genre, whether I had a classroom with windows, I faced young adolescents every day. All the books in the world cannot prepare a teacher for what happens once the students walk into the room.

I certainly wasn’t prepared to teach summarizing. Included as a content standard and an assessment anchor, I knew that summarizing was important, and I dutifully tried to help my sixth and seventh graders write summaries of both fiction and nonfiction texts. I envisioned smoothly written short pieces, like those in TV Guide, that would elegantly capture the essence of a text with a minimum of words.

What I got were stacks of bizarre constructions that claimed to be summaries—or “sumeries,” as my students often wrote—that either copied whole sentences of text, focused on just one section, or missed the main points altogether. Sometimes I wondered if the students had read the same text that I had. The more able students could occasionally pull together a coherent comment or two, but often they would try to jam a summary into the traditional paragraph template—topic sentence, supporting details, concluding sentence.

I learned many things from the article. How tomb robbers took things from tombs, what they stole from tombs, and what they were like. It was a great article.

I wasn’t sure of how to help them. My usual comments—“Elaborate. Add more. Give more detail”—are not helpful for summarizing. The students thought I had become temporarily insane when I told them, “That’s too long. Make it short. Are those details necessary?”

Standing in front of the classroom with a student summary on the overhead projector, I struggled to explain to the students why it was not effective.

“But the article is about trees, right?” Patrick asked from the front row. “So why can’t I say, ‘This article is about trees?’”

I floundered. As the teacher, I was supposed to know these things!

“It’s not good writing,” I said, finally.

“It sounds good to me,” Patrick said, to a chorus of agreement from elsewhere in the room. “I think it’s fine.”

Chapter 2 is droll:

The scene was grim. Eight of us were packed into a cramped, unair-conditioned room, spending the first week of our summer in a kind of curricular sweatshop. Our task was daunting: to unite the previously divided middle school reading and writing programs into one cohesive class. And write 100 days of curriculum in one week, using enough detail so that reading teachers could confidently teach the writing components and writing teachers could teach the reading. The sixth grade table had rapidly devolved into a bizarre reading–writing turf war.

“I don’t think retelling is something we want to assess in middle school,” a reading specialist said. “I mean, just being able to spit back^* the characters and plot of a story doesn’t show any higher level thinking.” To those of us who had taught writing, she said, patronizingly, “One of the goals of teaching reading is to get kids to think critically.”

Really.

“Are you talking about retelling or summarizing?” asked a veteran teacher.

“Aren’t they both the same thing?” someone else asked. [shoot me]

“If we include retelling—or summarizing—would it be a reading activity or a writing activity?”

“How would we assess it?”

“Well,” said one teacher, who came from the more affluent part of the district, “I don’t think summarizing is a skill that we should have to teach in middle school. It’s time that we stop babying students and expect them to use what they learned in elementary school.”^**

“Or should have learned,” someone else chimed in. Reading teachers and writing teachers united momentarily to agree that students should have already learned basically everything before arriving in middle school.

I’ve found that there’s no way to win one of these arguments. [ditto!] In this case, nothing I could have said would have convinced any of these teachers that they were wrong. (Despite the fact that I was the only one who had actually taught reading and writing together, I was still considered a “writing” teacher, and therefore unable to comprehend reading issues!) This group perpetuated four pervasive myths about the related skills of summarizing, paraphrasing, and retelling.

what is a summary, anyway?

If paraphrasing is just restating ideas, and a retelling is completely oral, what is a summary? This question has plagued researchers—and students— for years. Definitions for a summary abound. It may be most useful to study some of the important characteristics of a summary. Although there are some issues still up for debate, most people agree on the following points.

A summary should be shorter than the original text. How much shorter? It depends. A fifteen-page article could be summarized in one page, two pages, or even a single paragraph, depending on the purpose of the summary and the needs of the audience. A summary should include the main ideas of the text. Although this sounds easy enough, it’s where most students, and most adults, have trouble. Stating the main ideas of a text is easy when the author comes out and states them. The task becomes much more difficult when the main ideas are implicit, or unstated, as is usually the case in fiction.

A summary should reflect the structure and order of the original text. This can become another stumbling block. Fiction text written in chronological order is easiest for students to summarize. When it comes to nonfiction, however, authors use a variety of structures. Most students are used to the form of text that states a main point and then supports that point with details. (That’s the structure I’ve used in most of this book.) However, if a text is written in compareand- contrast order, the summary should follow suit.

A summary should include important details. “But how do I know which details are important?” students ask, and research shows that adolescents don’t always agree with adults on the importance of specific ideas (Garner et al. 1989). But summaries do need to include the details that support an author’s main points. A summary, therefore, is a shortened version of an original text, stating the main ideas and important details of the text with the same text structure and order of the original. It had taken me time, but I could finally lay the myths of summarizing to rest. I knew what summarizing was, how paraphrasing was completely different, and why a retelling and a summary could never be confused. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn these things in time for curriculum writing.

The argument at the sixth grade table evaporated as our supervisor came over. “Everything going well?” he asked, and all at the table smiled and nodded.

“You know,” said the reading specialist, after he left, “we only have to write 100 days worth of lessons. We could always leave it up to the individual teachers whether or not to teach summarizing.”

Another teacher nodded. “That way, those of us with—uh, more advanced kids—can move on to lessons that will really benefit them.” She looked pointedly at me.

“Besides,” someone else said, “if we were going to have summarizing tasks, we’d need to have anchor papers, rubrics, assessments—it’s just too much work.”

And there you have it: a window onto the world of our public schools, where educators decide not to teach the stuff they agree kids have to know because somebody else already should have taught it.

Not my problem.

I had never thought about summaries reflecting the structure of the original text.

I find that interesting, helpful, and intriguing.


^* Which is better? spit or regurgitate?

^** Note: this teacher comes from "the more affluent part of the district."

SAT/ACT Math and Beyond

Vicky S sent me notice of a workbook Stephen Wilson has posted on his web site: SAT/ACT Math and Beyond: Problems Book by Qishen Huang.

The book is listed here. I've just ordered the solution manual, which Dr. Huang says is highly detailed (460 pages for the manual, 131 for the workbook). That's critical for those of us teaching ourselves, and not easy to find.

Dr. Huang estimates that 20% of Chinese high school graduates can work 90% of these problems, which he says are not as difficult as those on China's SAT equivalent.

And...on the subject of workbooks, I've emailed Myrtle, who is using the NEM Workbooks (New Elementary Mathematics Syllabus D 1 and New Elementary Mathematics Syllabus D 2).

Meanwhile, I have done no math at all this summer, because I am busy reading C's massive Summer Assignment list, all 2549 pages of it. As to that, please know that you are in the presence of a woman who has read every last word of Guns, Germs, & Steel. There are few amongst us who can say the same.

human capital & Two Million Minutes

We watched Two Million Minutes last night. It was a lot of fun, although I don't think it works well as piece of political or persuasive filmmaking.

After we saw it, I discovered that one of the economists interviewed -- Richard Freeman -- published a book called The Overeducated American in 1976, the point at which income inequality was lowest in the country's history, which meant that the return to a college education was also the lowest in the country's history.

Gary Becker mentions the book in his essay on human capital:

To most people capital means a bank account, a hundred shares of IBM stock, assembly lines, or steel plants in the Chicago area. These are all forms of capital in the sense that they are assets that yield income and other useful outputs over long periods of time.

But these tangible forms of capital are not the only ones. Schooling, a computer training course, expenditures of medical care, and lectures on the virtues of punctuality and honesty also are capital. That is because they raise earnings, improve health, or add to a person's good habits over much of his lifetime. Therefore, economists regard expenditures on education, training, medical care, and so on as investments in human capital. They are called human capital because people cannot be separated from their knowledge, skills, health, or values in the way they can be separated from their financial and physical assets.

Education and training are the most important investments in human capital. Many studies have shown that high school and college education in the United States greatly raise a person's income, even after netting out direct and indirect costs of schooling, and even after adjusting for the fact that people with more education tend to have higher IQs and better-educated and richer parents. Similar evidence is now available for many years from over a hundred countries with different cultures and economic systems. The earnings of more educated people are almost always well above average, although the gains are generally larger in less developed countries.

Consider the differences in average earnings between college and high school graduates in the United States during the past fifty years. Until the early sixties college graduates earned about 45 percent more than high school graduates. In the sixties this premium from college education shot up to almost 60 percent, but it fell back in the seventies to under 50 percent. The fall during the seventies led some economists and the media to worry about "overeducated Americans." Indeed, in 1976 Harvard economist Richard Freeman wrote a book titled The Overeducated American. This sharp fall in the return to investments in human capital put the concept of human capital itself into some disrepute. Among other things it caused doubt about whether education and training really do raise productivity or simply provide signals ("credentials") about talents and abilities.

But the monetary gains from a college education rose sharply again during the eighties, to the highest level in the past fifty years. Economists Kevin M. Murphy and Finis Welch have shown that the premium on getting a college education in the eighties was over 65 percent. Lawyers, accountants, engineers, and many other professionals experienced especially rapid advances in earnings. The earnings advantage of high school graduates over high school dropouts has also greatly increased. Talk about overeducated Americans has vanished, and it has been replaced by concern once more about whether the United States provides adequate quality and quantity of education and other training.

This concern is justified. Real wage rates of young high school dropouts have fallen by more than 25 percent since the early seventies, a truly remarkable decline. Whether because of school problems, family instability, or other factors, young people without a college or a full high school education are not being adequately prepared for work in modern economies.

[snip]

The enormous influence of the family would seem to imply a very close relation between the earnings, education, and occupations of parents and children. Therefore, it is rather surprising that the positive relation between the earnings of parents and children is not strong...

The old adage of "from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations" is no myth; the earnings of grandsons and grandparents are hardly related. Apparently, the opportunities provided by a modern economy, along with extensive public support of education, enable the majority of those who come from lower-income backgrounds to do reasonably well in the labor market. The same opportunities that foster upward mobility for the poor create an equal amount of downward mobility for those higher up on the income ladder.

[snip]

New technological advances clearly are of little value to countries that have very few skilled workers who know how to use them. Economic growth closely depends on the synergies between new knowledge and human capital, which is why large increases in education and training have accompanied major advances in technological knowledge in all countries that have achieved significant economic growth.

The outstanding economic records of Japan, Taiwan, and other Asian economies in recent decades dramatically illustrate the importance of human capital to growth. Lacking natural resources—they import almost all their energy, for example—and facing discrimination against their exports by the West, these so-called Asian tigers grew rapidly by relying on a well-trained, educated, hardworking, and conscientious labor force that makes excellent use of modern technologies.

I hate to even think about people who listened to pundits back in the 70s saying a college education was a waste of time because college graduates didn't make any money. That viewpoint was everywhere.

You have to take advice about how it doesn't pay to go to Harvard with a grain of salt when it comes from people who went to Harvard.

"gift of time" in the NY Sun

The Sun had a front page article on the "lengthening childhood" study this morning:

The "lengthening of childhood" is having grim effects on American academic achievement.

That's the message of a new paper by Harvard researchers, who warn that there is a downside to the increasingly common practice of waiting until children are 6 to enroll them in kindergarten.

Known as "redshirting," after the practice of letting college football stars take a year off so that they can start playing for the varsity a year older, bigger, and stronger, the practice is widespread: A parent decides to hold a child back a year before beginning kindergarten, and suddenly kindergartners are taller and faster and first-graders are more literate. Manhattan private schools call the extra year "the gift of time."

The practice has grown substantially: In 1968, 96% of 6-year-olds were enrolled in first grade or above. In 2005, the number had fallen to 84%, according to the paper by the Harvard researchers, part of a series issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Not only are children being held back on an individual basis by ambitious parents hoping to give them a leg up; public schools from Maryland to Arkansas are following suit by legislating that children be older when they enter kindergarten.

[snip]

Even private school children suffer from "redshirting," the paper argues. Though they are at a very low risk of dropping out of high school, entering school a year late means losing one year of work experience and salary.

It also means one fewer year that the children, once they are adults in the workforce, will pay into America's Social Security system.

[snip]

In New York City, children must be enrolled in public school kindergarten if they turn 5 years old by December 31. For the city's private schools, the deadline is September 1. Yet private school administrators and admissions advisers said that Manhattan schools often will not accept a child younger than six. They said the schools are hoping to give students a boost in maturity before starting their formal education.

According to the paper, titled "The Lengthening of Childhood," states have followed parents in pushing up the average age of kindergartners.

In the last 30 years, nearly half of all states have increased the age at which a child can legally enter kindergarten. Maryland and Arkansas have both moved their cutoff dates to September 1 and there is currently a bill in the New York State Assembly to do the same.

Ms. Dynarski said there are several reasons why public schools might be starting children in school at an older age.

One is that high-stakes testing and No Child Left Behind have put pressure on states to drive exam scores higher. When policy makers notice that redshirted children get higher test scores, they propose that their states move the cutoff dates to earlier in the year — usually to September 1.

"The older kids do better," Ms. Dynarski said. "That doesn't mean that the kids doing better are doing so because they entered later. That might be misleading to policy makers."

[snip]

"If you have a summer birthday, private schools will frequently say you're too young, you need to wait a year," the president of the private school admissions firm Abacus Educational Consulting, Emily Glickman, said.

The headmaster at Grace Church School in Greenwich Village, George Davison, estimated that more than a third of his first-graders are 7 years old. He said the older ages are a deliberate choice, made to ensure that the children are "happier and healthier."

[snip]

"Sometimes, developmentally, it makes sense for them to wait a year, particularly for boys," she said. "You're never doing a bad thing by waiting a year."

'Lengthening Childhood' Has A Downside, Study Says
by ANNA PHILLIPS, Special to the Sun | July 21, 2008

The problem here is that we fit the kids to the schools, instead of fitting the schools to the kids.

Somehow, Siegfried Engelmann was able to teach academic content to pre-schoolers without a lot of hoopla about maturity and scores and whatnot.

We need a science of teaching & we need it fast.

education & mortality (& being the parent of an autistic child)

Prior research has uncovered a large and positive correlation between education and health. This paper examines whether education has a causal impact on health.

[snip]

This paper has shown that there is a large causal effect of education on mortality. While GLS estimates suggest that an additional year of education lowers the probability of dying in the next 10 years by approximately 1.3 percentage points, my results ... show that the effect is perhaps much larger: at least 3.6 percentage points. Moreover there is a direct effect of compulsory schooling laws on mortality during adulthood: one more year of compulsory schooling decreased mortality after age 35 by about 3%.

[snip]

To better understand the impact of education, I calculate how this effect translates into life expectancy gains. I find that in 1960, one more year of education increased life expectancy at age 35 by as much as 1.7 years (using the OLS estimate). This is a very large increase.

[snip]

This evidence that education increases life expectancy implies that the returns to education, measured only in terms of earnings increases, substantially underestimate the true returns to education.

The Relationship Between Education and Adult Mortality in the United States
Adriana Lleras-Muney
January 2004

Reading The Race Between Education and Technology has led me to think about the relationship between education and being the parent of autistic kids.

Jimmy is 21. When he was diagnosed, no one knew anything about using meds in autism, and everyone was against it. Parents were horrified by the idea, and psychiatrists in Los Angeles routinely told us there were no medications that could treat the "core symptoms" of autism. I remember going to all the parent meetings & hearing that: can't treat the core symptoms of autism.

One shrink in particular ticked me off. I heard him speak in someone's living room. There was nothing medicine could do, he said confidently; the core symptoms were untreatable. News flash.

I didn't like him. I didn't like the cowboy boots he was wearing, I didn't like his twitchy manner, and I didn't like the way he slouched in his chair. I especially didn't like his air of certainty, and I was appalled by the fact that he appeared to consider himself cool. If you're going to tell me there's no hope, don't be cool while you're doing it.

How did this "core symptoms" business make sense, anyway, I wanted to know. Granting that severe mood swings and 4-hour tantrums aren't core symptoms of autism, wouldn't it be a good thing for a child not to have 4-hour tantrums?

Ditto for being unable to sleep more than 4 to 8 hours a night at an age where other kids sleep 12. Yes, sure, raging insomnia isn't a core symptom of autism, but so what? Is raging insomnia good for a 4-year old with autism?

Amazingly, I once had a doctor tell me that raging insomnia was perfectly fine for autistic kids. "These children don't need a lot of sleep," he said.

I thought that was a crock.

I was right. I was so right that in 4 years' time the twitchy psychiatrist in the cowboy boots, who had become Jimmy's doctor when our insurance stopped covering the Encino psychiatrist we'd been seeing, did a fantastic job treating Jimmy with meds.

His one truly brilliant move, when we came to his office panicked because a year of Risperdal-created peace was unraveling, was to say to us, "I'm all out of tricks, my black bag is empty. But sometimes just getting more sleep can help."

He prescribed trazodone and Jimmy had a breakthrough: in mood, in behavior, in functioning. And in sleep. Sometimes a twitchy guy wearing cowboy boots is your kid's future best friend.

That was our second medical breakthrough.

Our first had come the year before, when I was pregnant with the twins and Ivar Lovaas had told Ed we needed to place Jimmy outside the home. Jimmy was 7 years old. "You're going to have two other children to think of," Ivar said. "You have to consider your whole family." He wasn't alone in this view. Jimmy's school principal dropped broad hints that the time had come, and our SPED attorney asked if we wanted to request a residential school.

My therapist asked me, point blank, "How would you feel if Jimmy killed one of the babies?"

"Jimmy isn't going to kill one of the babies," I said. When I left her office, I called my best friend from the pay phone in the hall. "Are my friends saying Jimmy will hurt the babies?" I asked. "Are you all afraid to tell me?"

Her voice was so gentle and kind when she answered. I get tears in my eyes writing this now.

"No," she said. "No one is saying that. Everyone is incredibly worried how you're going to manage Jimmy and two babies. But no one is saying Jimmy will hurt the babies."

I never spoke to my therapist again.

Things got worse before they got better. The Northridge earthquake happened in February just after we'd begun construction on an extra bedroom; the house was a shambles and we had construction workers everywhere -- construction workers who were feuding with each other on site, to boot. The pregnancy had been high risk to start and within a few months most of the bad things that can happen to a high-risk pregnancy did happen. By the end of the 29th week I was in labor and in the hospital mainlining magnesium sulfate. We were facing the possibility of having three disabled children to care for instead of just Jimmy.

We had one person left to turn to. Our doctor, the one in Encino.

That doctor had told us there was a new drug for schizophrenia coming on the market that he wanted to try with Jimmy. Risperdal. It was different from the old antipsychotics, he said. By the time Ed saw him again, with me in the hospital and Jimmy out of control at home, Risperdal was available and the sales reps had made their rounds. Our doctor ransacked his office, pulling out every sample packet he could find and handing them to Ed, who stuffed his pockets full and carried the rest out in his hands. He drove straight to Osco's to fill the prescription before going home to Jimmy and my mother.

The Risperdal worked. With his first dose, Jimmy calmed, the tantrums dropped to nothing, and for the first time in his life he had a bedtime. Ed could read him a story and tuck him in bed and he stayed there and he slept.

Later on I told this story to one of the founders of the National Alliance for Autism Research, who was himself a psychiatrist and the father of an autistic child. He frowned and looked puzzled for a moment, then said, "Jimmy had to have been one of the first children in the country to take Risperdal."

He was.

Risperdal is a tough drug to take; it's nothing to fool around with. It is also a miracle drug, or was for us. On October 6, 2006 it became the first drug to be approved for the treatment of "irritability associated with autism." I believe that Risperdal, along with the other atypical antipsychotics, has produced a new generation of young men and women Jimmy's age who are living in the community instead of in back wards, in restraints, which is where Jimmy was headed.

Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz's observation that educated workers are early adopters has stayed with me. With autism, Ed and I have been early adopters.

Being an early adopter in the realm of psychotropic medications administered to your 4-year old is different from being an early adopter of an iPhone. We knew no one who was using meds, and we knew many who thought we were crazy or worse.

To be an early adopter with the big things, you have to be unshakably confident in your ability to listen, read, and think. You probably have to be as confident as the shrink in the cowboy boots, who turned out to be confident for a reason: he was good at his job. He didn't know what he was talking about with the core symptoms business; that was malarkey. But he could look at a child, talk to the parents, prescribe a medication off-label, and make it work. He was an early adopter, too.

Risperdal saved Jimmy's life. When Jimmy was 4, the social worker at the Regional Center told me, "I can see that you and Jimmy have a very close relationship. But in a few years, you will come to me for a placement."

I didn't, but she wasn't wrong. Three years later, the experts in our lives agreed that it was time.

That Jimmy's life turned out so differently is a tribute to education: to the education of the psychiatrists we've worked with for nearly 20 years, to the education of the teachers and behavior analysts who taught Jimmy and us, to the education of the research scientists in their labs, and, not least, to the many years of education Ed and I had when we were young.

Being educated ourselves, we were able, often enough, to know a good idea when we heard it.

We could spot malarkey, too.

The best of hands-on, real-world, interdisciplinary, multi-media learning

From In Memoriam: William R. Bennett Jr., Laser Inventor and Collector of Data, in this past week's Yale Bulletin:

Over his 38 years at Yale, Bennett carried out research in diverse fields ranging from atomic physics to computer science and acoustics...

Many of the approaches Bennett used to collect data for his projects provided much amusement to his students and colleagues. For one project, he rented a truck and filled it with equipment and a mattress and, together with his wife and dog, set out to measure the "Fifth Force" at a site where a large body of water changed height rapidly. The site he chose was the locks on the Snake River in Washington, which gave him special dispensation to camp there with his truck for the summer.

He was also frequently seen at various sites around the Yale campus collecting data for his popular course on "The Computer as a Research Tool." For this course he was named one of the 10 best professors at Yale for many years in a row. His lectures in that course were multi-media events and included demonstrations of firestorms, removal of warts by laser, calculations of how long it would take monkeys sitting at the typewriter to produce phrases recognized from great works of literature, and comparisons of the sound waveforms of the French horn and the garden hose.

One time the professor was spotted dressed in scuba gear and pushing scales and other gadgets at the bottom of the Yale swimming pool, measuring drag coefficients.

...He used his expertise in physics and sound to make calculations on how to decrease the noise levels in the Yale dining halls and used those successfully to improve the ability to converse and to enjoy chamber music concerts there. He also measured magnetic fields around campus and around New Haven. With the magnetic field data, he showed that it was improbable that those fields could cause cancer.

(Cross-posted at Out in Left Field).

relative age effects - references

from The Lengthening of Childhood
David Deming
Susan Dynarski
Working Paper 14124
June 2008

Angrist, Joshua D., and Alan B. Krueger. 1991. “Does Compulsory School Attendance Affect Schooling and Earnings?" (pdf file) Quarterly Journal of Economics, 106(4): 979–1014.

Angrist, Joshua D., and Alan B. Krueger. 1992. “The Effect of Age at School Entry on Educational Attainment: An Application of Instrumental Variables with Moments from Two Samples.” Journal of the American Statistical Association, 87(418): 328–36. (pdf file)

Ariès, Philippe. 1962. Centuries of Childhood. New York: Random House.

Barnsley, R. H., and A. H. Thompson. 1988. Birthdate and Success in Minor Hockey: The Key to the NHL. Canadian Journal of Behavioral Science, 20(2): 167–76.

Barnsley, R. H., A. H. Thompson, and P. E. Barnsley. 1985. Hockey Success and Birthdate: The Relative Age Effect. Journal of the Canadian Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, November–December, pp. 23–28.

Bedard, Kelly, and Elizabeth Dhuey. 2006. “The Persistence of Early Childhood Maturity: International Evidence of Long-Run Age Effects.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(4):
1437–72.

Bedard, Kelly, and Elizabeth Dhuey. 2007. “Is September Better than January? The Effect of Minimum School Entry Age Laws on Skill Accumulation.” (pdf file)

Black, Sandra, Paul Devereaux, and Kjell Salvanes. 2008. “Too Young to Leave the Nest? The Effects of School Starting Age.” NBER Working Paper 13969.

Bracey, Gerald. 1989. “Age and Achievement.” Phi Delta Kappan, 70(9): 732.

Card, David, and Thomas Lemieux. 2001. “Dropout and Enrollment Trends in the Postwar Period: What Went Wrong in the 1970s?” In Risky Behavior among Youths: An Economic Analysis, ed. Jonathan Gruber, chap. 9. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cascio, Elizabeth. 2005. “School Progression and the Grade Distribution of Students: Evidence from the Current Population Survey.” IZA Discussion Paper 1747.

Cascio, Elizabeth, and Diane Schanzenbach. 2007. “First in the Class? Age and the Education Production Function.” NBER Working Paper 13663.

College Board. 2005. “Advanced Placement Report to the Nation.”

Crosser, Sandra. 1998. “He Has a Summer Birthday: The Kindergarten Entrance Age
Dilemma.” ERIC Digest ED423079 1998-09-00. (pdf file)

Danziger, Sheldon, and Cecilia Rouse, eds. 2007. The Price of Independence: The Economics of Early Adulthood. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Datar, Ashlesha. 2006. “Does Delaying Kindergarten Entrance Give Children a Head Start?” Economics of Education Review, 25(1): 43–62.

Dee, Thomas. 2004. “Are There Civic Returns to Education?” Journal of Public Economics, 88(9): 1697–720.

Dhuey, Elizabeth, and Stephen Lipscomb. 2007. “Disabled or Young? Relative Age and
Special Education Diagnoses in Schools.” (pdf file)

Dobkin, Carlos, and Fernando Ferreira. 2007. “Do School Entry Laws Affect Educational
Attainment and Labor Market Outcomes?”

Elder, Todd, and Darren Lubotsky. Forthcoming. “Kindergarten Entrance Age and Children’s Achievement: Impacts of State Policies, Family Background, and Peers.” Journal of Human Resources.

Elson, John. 1989. “The Redshirt Solution.” TIME Magazine, November13.

Frederick, Carl, and Robert Hauser. 2006. “Have We Put an End to Social Promotion?
Changes in Grade Retention Rates among Children Ages 6 to 17 from 1972 to 2003.”
(pdf file)

Fredriksson, Peter, and Bjorn Ockert. 2005. “Is Early Learning Really More Productive? The Effect of School Starting Age on School and Labor Market Performance.” IZA Discussion Paper 1659, Institute for the Study of Labor.

Freeman, Richard. 1976. The Overeducated American. New York, NY: Academic Press.

Glamser, Francis D., and John Vincent. 2004. “The Relative Age Effect among Elite
American Youth Soccer Players.” Journal of Sport Behavior, March 1.

Graue, Elizabeth. 2006. “Engineering the Perfect Kindergarten.” Teachers College Record,
September 13.

Graue, Elizabeth, and James DiPerna. 2000. “Redshirting and Early Retention: Who Gets the ‘Gift of Time’ and What are Its Outcomes?” American Educational Research Journal, 37(2): 509–34.

Grondin, Simon, and Jochen Much. 2001. “Unequal Competition as an Impediment to
Personal Development: A Review of the Relative Age Effect in Sport.” Developmental Review,
21(2): 147–61.

Heckman, James, and Paul LaFontaine. 2007. “The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels.” NBER Working Paper 13670.

Heckman, James, and Dimitriy Masterov. 2007. “The Productivity Argument for Investing in Young Children.” Review of Agricultural Economics, 29(3): 446–93.

Kett, Joseph. 2003. “Reflections on the History of Adolescence in America.” The History of the Family, 8(3): 355–73.

Kirp, David. 2007. The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Lincove, Jane, and Gary Painter. 2006. “Does the Age that Children Start Kindergarten
Matter? Evidence of Long-Term Educational and Social Outcomes.” Educational Evaluation
and Policy Analysis, 28(2):153–79. (pdf file)

Lleras-Muney, Adriana. 2005. “The Relationship between Education and Adult Mortality in the United States.” Review of Economic Studies 72(1): 189–221. (pdf file)

Lochner, Lance, and Enrico Moretti. 2004. “The Effect of Education on Crime: Evidence
from Prison Inmates, Arrests, and Self-Reports.” American Economic Review, 94(1): 155–89.

Mayer, Susan, and David Knutson. 1999. “Does the Timing of School Affect How Much
Children Learn?” In Earning and Learning: How Schools Matter, ed. Susan Mayer and Paul
Peterson, 79–104. Washington, DC: Brookings.

Milligan, Kevin, Enrico Moretti, and Philip Oreopoulos. 2004. “Does Education Improve Citizenship? Evidence from the U.S. and the U.K.” Journal of Public Economics, 88(9–10): 1667–95.

National Commission on Excellence in Education. 1983. A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.

Oreopoulos, Philip. 2007. “Do Dropouts Drop Out Too Soon? Wealth, Health and Happiness from Compulsory Schooling.” Journal of Public Economics, 91(11–12): 2213–29.

Oreopoulos, Philip. Forthcoming. “Should We Raise the Minimum School Leaving Age to Help Disadvantaged Youth? Evidence from Recent Changes to Compulsory Schooling in the United States.” In An Economic Framework for Understanding and Assisting Disadvantaged Youth, ed. Jonathan Gruber.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. 2004. Education at Glance:
OECD Indicators. Paris: OECD.

Puhani, Patrick, and Andrea Weber. 2007. “Does the Early Bird Catch the Worm?
Instrumental Variable Estimates of Early Educational Effects of Age of School Entry in
Germany.” Empirical Economics, 32(2–3): 359–86. (pdf file)

Shepard, Lorrie, and Mary Lee Smith. 1988. “Escalating Academic Demand in Kindergarten: Counterproductive Policies.” The Elementary School Journal, 89(2):134–45.

Shepard, Lorrie, and Mary Lee Smith. 1989. “Introduction and Overview.” In Lorrie Shepard and Mary Lee Smith, eds., Flunking Grades: Research and Policies on Retention. New York: Taylor and Francis.

Stevenson, Betsy, and Justin Wolfers. 2007. “Marriage and Divorce: Changes and Their
Driving Forces.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21(2):27–52.

Stipek, Deborah. 2002. “At What Age Should Children Enter Kindergarten? A Question for
Policy Makers and Parents.” Social Policy Report, 16(2): 3–16.

Spira, Greg. 2008. “The Boys of Late Summer: Why Do So Many Pro Baseball Players Have
August Birthdays?” Slate Magazine, posted April 16.

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. 2007. The
Condition of Education 2007. (NCES 2007–064). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing
Office.

Vinovskis, M. 1995. “School Readiness and Early Childhood Education.” In Learning from the
Past, ed. Diane Ravitch and Maris A. Vinovskis, chap. 10. Baltimore, MA: John Hopkins
University Press.

Weil, Elizabeth. 2007. “When Should a Kid Start Kindergarten?” New York Times Magazine,
Sunday, June 3.

Whittaker, William. 2005. “Child Labor in America: History, Policy, and Legislative Issues.”
CRS Report for Congress, Order code RL31501, Congressional Research Service.


and:

Werner, F. Helsen, Van Winckel, Jan, and Williams, Mark. "The relative age effect in youth soccer across Europe."Journal of Sports Sciences, June 2005; 23(6): 629 – 636.

Daiji Kawaguchi. The Effect of Age at School Entry on Education and Income, June 2006 ESRI Discussion Paper Series No.162, Economic and Social Research Institute Cabinet Office Tokyo, Japan. (pdf file)

redshirting & "tournament settings"

Competition between Parents

Red-shirting parents appear to believe that relative age matters for children’s performance. There is no evidence of a lasting benefit to education or earnings from being older than one’s classmates. [maybe, maybe not] There is, however, evidence of a lasting competitive advantage in sports. In Europe and the United States, children on elite youth soccer, hockey, swimming, and tennis teams are disproportionately born just after the age cutoff for those leagues—that is, they are the oldest of their peers. This early advantage persists, with 60 percent more Major League Baseball players born in August than in July, mirroring the near-universal age cutoff of July 31 in youth baseball....Relative age effects could plausibly persist in other tournament settings. Admission to the most elite colleges is a rank-order tournament, for example. We are exploring whether age effects persist in this competitive arena.

[snip]

Two recent papers appear to contradict this extensive literature on the negative impact of later entry on educational attainment. Bedard and Dhuey (2006) find that those who enter later are more likely to attend a university track in British Columbia and more likely to take exams required for admission to a selective college and to attend a four-year college in the United States. Puhani and Weber (2007) (pdf file) similarly find that those who enter school later are more likely to follow the Gymnasium university-preparatory track in Germany. But these studies show no positive impact of age at school entry on years of completed education. Their results, like the research on competitive athletes, is consistent with the idea that relative age provides an advantage in rank-order tournament competitions, which characterizes admission to elite schooling tracks, selective universities, and competitive sports teams.

The Lengthening of Childhood (pdf file)
David Deming
Susan Dynarski
Working Paper 14124
June 2008
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

This is exactly what we're seeing here.

Exactly.

My district's middle school -- and, from what I hear, the high school, too -- are "tournament settings." The school creates artificial scarcity for highly valued resources (Honors courses at the high school, accelerated courses in the middle school) and the kids are on their own. I've always called it Darwinian gatekeeping, but tournament setting does nicely as well.

I don't know how things work for girls, and I don't know how things are going in other classes. What I've seen in my own kid's class, broadly speaking, is that the older kids win.

They'd almost have to, given the Harry Potter divide.

This is one of the reasons we're changing schools, as a matter of fact. C's new school isn't a tournament setting. At least, it doesn't appear to be.


relative age effect
high school leadership, wages, and relative age
redshirting kids
redshirting & tournament settings

more on redshirting Kindergarten kids

from the WSJ:

A new study draws attention to the social consequences of a decades-old trend in parenting: having kids start school a year later. For years, research showing the benefits of being an older first-grader, as well as the experience of countries like Finland where schooling doesn’t start until age seven, has encouraged parents and teachers to “redshirt” kids. In 1968, 96% of six-year-olds were enrolled in first grade or above. By 2005, that number had fallen to 84%.

[snip]

Harvard’s David Deming and Susan Dynarski, in an NBER working paper published this month, write that “increasing age at school entry intensifies inequality in human capital and social welfare.” Kids who start school a year late have one year less schooling before they reach the age at which they’re allowed to drop out, decreasing their average educational attainment and widening the gap in learning between rich and poor.

[snip]

Deming and Dynarski note that, in the last 40 years, almost every state has raised the age at which children can start school. “This change is remarkable,” they write, “given the strong evidence that, in the United States, starting school later decreases educational attainment.”

The Graying of Kindergarten'

a couple of interesting comments:

I agree that the extra year is especially helpful for boys. My son has the skills but not the social maturity to sit through all day kindergarten. I also feel that there should be some boundaries. My daughter had an eight year old in her first grade class. Bullying and sports are both a problem in that case.
Comment by Andrew - July 18, 2008 at 2:32 pm


I have a January birthday and was a good reader when I entered Kindergarten. My first grade teacher had me tested and based on my social maturity and age, I was moved to second grade after two months or so.

My mother years later said that some neighbors shunned our family because I got special treatment and their kids did not. Mind you, this was in 1959 when parents were less competitive about their offspring.

Later in HS, I felt socially immature compared to my peers and the fact that my puberty was delayed did not help either. That senior year was tough. But in college, it did not matter.

The intangibles of being one year off probably cannot be reliably assessed for 10 years.
Comment by Skipped first grade - July 18, 2008 at 2:49 pm


In my neighborhood there are two reasons parents hold back their children: 1) To give their child an academic advantage over their younger classmates so they have the honor of being in the gifted track; and 2) To give their child an athletic advantage in sheer size and speed over younger classmates.

To me it was very strange seeing several of my child’s classmates with adult teeth when they entered kindergarten.
Comment by John - July 18, 2008 at 2:55 pm


I have three sons, the third of which started a year late. The third is in his second year of high school and has been this highest achiever of the three. Had we entered him into school a year earlier, his relative immaturity and diminutive size would have likely caused socialization and confidence problems that would have resulted in a much different outcome.
Comment by Paul - July 18, 2008 at 2:59 pm


I love this: “increasing age at school entry intensifies inequality in human capital and social welfare.” Isn’t that the whole point of holding your kid back? It’s to give him a leg up and widen the gap between him/her and other students because good jobs are a scarce resource. Maybe on average kids who start later do worse, but not in the WASPY demographic of the WSJ. Face it people, we are trying to widen the gap between our own children and everyone else’s so they aren’t in a position to lose their job to a 3rd world worker. Ideal? No. Reality? Yep - welcome to America.
Comment by So Smart You're Stupid - July 18, 2008 at 3:33 pm
[this commenter must have read The Race Between Education and Technology...]


Have none of you really considered why many parents are starting their kids later…for sports. I know lots of kids who were held back by a year so by the time they reached high school they were a year older and more mature and developed than the competition, thus increasing the chances of being recruited for college. It’s sad but true that so many parents actuall do this.
Comment by Anonymous - July 18, 2008 at 4:04 pm


Parents who redshirt their children believe that outcomes in life are determined by relative achievement. For example, they feel that their children will be better served by becoming Little League All-Stars while competing against younger teammates. This is clearly sub-optimal for society, but it does strike me as rational. The Harvard researchers seem to have missed the fact that many parents would prefer their daughter to graduate from Harvard at age 23 than from State U at age 22.
Comment by John Sterling - July 18, 2008 at 4:16 pm


The problem here is how the data is being interpreted by the Harvard folks. When the dropouts are lumped in, on aggregate the picture looks bleak. The more interesting point, and the one that everyone seems to be alluding to in their comments, is what happens to the educational attainment of those children who do stay in school for the full 12 years; is it better or worse than a control group?
Comment by Professional Researcher - July 18, 2008 at 5:27 pm


After reading/scanning most of your comments I am baffled how parents have abdicated their responsibility in raising their children. Wake-up call: it is not the state’s responsibility to educate your children or set age limits, it is yours. Just because the state has taken over this job doesn’t mean it should be that way. And for those ready to ask me about the “socializing” of my children, here’s my answer: My children are socialized with a diverse group of people: older people, children from other countries, their parents and each other. They are certainly not the peer dependent children that the state/private school gives you back when you send your child there.
Comment by Homeschooling Dad - July 18, 2008 at 6:23 pm


I was an August birthday who started “on time.” I did fine academically, but my social and physical development lagged behind my academic development.
The problem isn’t whether a kid is or is not ready to start by a certain date, the problem is whether a kid is or is not more mature than their peers. The youngest kid in the class will always be developmentally behind the oldest, whether the youngest kid was born in December, August, or May.
Comment by Jim - July 19, 2008 at 8:36 am


just throwing it out there, but I repeated kindergarten then went on to graduate number 1 in my class from high school and magna cum laude from college. From my recent experience, the younger kids in my grade during high school were more imature and did not do as well on average. Most of the AP classes were older kids
Comment by another opinion - July 19, 2008 at 10:04 am

There are numerous comments from people who were the youngest in their class and did great. I've pulled the negative comments because they describe what we've experienced.

I had a funny experience this spring. I've long had the perception that the dominant boys in C's class are the older kids. But I hadn't thought about the ramifications of this apparent fact.

In C's class there are a couple of boys who routinely blow him & most of his friends out of the water on grades, etc. These kids also seem to be very well liked by the teachers.

This was always a bit of a mystery to me. Obviously these kids were very bright, but I didn't see the big difference between them and all of the boys in C's circle, who seem a tad underappreciated by my lights.

Then last May C and I were talking about something or other, and C mentioned in passing that "X & Y are a year older. That's why they're so smart."

He said this matter-of-factly, as if this were simply taken for granted by the kids at school.

I'm sure he's right.

My conclusion is that if your son is going into a highly competitive public school setting, a Richard Elmore-type "high-performing" school^* in which parents are hiring tutors, there's nothing to be gained and plenty to be lost by allowing him to be the youngest in the class.

I suspect things are different in a DI or Catholic school, though I don't know.

Basically, any kind of sink-or-swim educational environment will handicap kids by age. I'm pretty sure.


^* Richard Elmore posts t/k


relative age effect
high school leadership, wages, and relative age
redshirting kids
redshirting & tournament settings

gamesmanship

I've been asking friends about sport psychology lately, mostly on C's behalf. Having missed out on sports as a child, I know nothing about athletics and wish I did. Ed is teaching me tennis, so I've started...)

One thing I didn't know: the importance of the "mental game." Actually, I'm not sure I was fully aware that there was a mental game. All I knew was what Ed's college friend, Ricky, who began life as a sportswriter for USA Today, once told us about the greats. The difference between the great athletes & the near-greats, he said, was that under ferocious pressure the greats got better. That image has stayed with me.

Just found this passage in a WSJ article:

If a masterpiece is both sui generis and gives abiding pleasure, then Stephen Potter's odd books "Gamesmanship" (1947), "Lifemanship" (1950), "One-upmanship" (1952), and "Supermanship" (1958) surely qualify.

I first read "One-upmanship" at age 19, and not long after attended a lecture by the book's author, an Englishman who, had his accent been any plummier, would have been indecipherable....

Of the lecture itself, I remember only that afterward a graduate student rose to ask, in the best wooden academic fashion, how it came about that he, Potter, a recognized Coleridge scholar, a man who had proved his seriousness, as it were and if you will, had veered off to write such ostensibly frivolous books as "Gamesmanship," etc.

Pausing interminably while clearing what seemed like three or four liters of phlegm from his throat, Potter leaned close to his microphone and, in five staccato beats, replied: "Out of work, you know."

A perfect answer, I should say, for the author of books whose reason for being is instruction in how to stir doubt, undermine confidence, spread unease, and encourage hopelessness in one's fellow human beings.

[snip]

Stephen Potter's own description of his career before writing his -manship books runs: "Failed academic lecturer, failed novelist, failed literary biographer, reasonable compiler [of anthologies], reasonable educational pamphleteer, failed editor, failed book critic, failed rowing blue . . ." He also wrote a play, which, he reports, "got as far as a read-through by a Sunday Society and is perhaps the only play which died on the first rehearsal."

All this failure is important, for it never would have occurred to a successful man to devise the four strange books that were the making of Potter's reputation as a comic artist. The idea for these books first arose while Potter was playing tennis with the philosopher C.E.M. Joad as his partner, against two younger and better players. After hitting a ball that was obviously well out of court, Joad called, "Kindly say clearly, please, whether the ball was in or out." By suggesting a slight lapse in etiquette on the part of the younger players, good sportsmen both, it threw them off stride, a stride they never regained, and Potter and Joad went on to win the match. "For me," writes Potter, "it was the birth of gamesmanship."

"Gamesmanship" is devoted to "the art of winning games without actually cheating." Actually is the key word here. In tennis, golf, chess, poker, cricket, bridge, hunting and other games, Potter suggests delicate ways of breaking the flow of concentration in your opponent so that he stumbles and falls off his game. A gamesman does what he can to make sure that the best man does not win.

The Success of Failure
by Joseph Epstein
July 19, 2008 Page W14
Wall Street Journal

In fact, I figured this out in a high school P.E. class one day. We were playing softball, and I was pitching to one of the naturals. As I recall, my opponent was not only naturally athletic, she was popular and she had made the Pom Pom squad, which I had not.

So I was pitching to this paragon of athleticism and teen success, and I found myself saying to her solicitously, after she had uncharacteristically missed a first swing, "Are you OK? Do you feel alright?"

Her normally confident expression changed to a look of uncertainty and then to near bewilderment as her swing fell apart and she struck out.

heh

C's tennis teacher told me to get Brad Gilbert's Winning Ugly, which I did.

It's about beating people who are better than you.

The tone of Potter's books combines the amiability of P.G. Wodehouse with the humorous malice of Evelyn Waugh. Behind them is the Hobbesian presupposition that man lives in a natural state of war. Well, perhaps not all men -- only those of us who are not dazzlingly handsome, impressively athletic, widely learned and deeply cultured, always at ease in the world. Natural advantage is the enemy for Potter, whose books offer guidance in the art of redress -- or how to go from well down to one-up.

That was pretty much my view of high school.

hands-on

I've always thought there was something important about actually working physically with your hands:

LONDON - British children's brain development is being threatened by their failure to work with their hands in school and at home, said a report released on Monday.

With woodwork, metalwork, craft, music or car mechanic classes dropped by many schools and children wanting to play computer games at home, the UK is becoming a "software instead of a screwdriver society," said the report, commissioned by the Ruskin Mill Educational Trust.

"Working with one's own hands in a real-world 3-D environment is imperative for full cognitive and intellectual development," said the report's author Dr. Aric Sigman.

[snip]

The report cited examples of 11-year-olds with deficits in certain areas of their cognitive development and a decline in the ability of young engineers and apprentices to conceptualize straightforward mechanical problems.

"The findings of this report clearly point to strengthening the role of '3-D' learning and crafts in educational policy-making today," said Sigman.

Working with hands helps develop kid's brains

Temple has been talking about this for years. Her students can't draw (scroll down). By "her students can't draw," I mean her students can't use CAD to make a correct architectural drawing. The reason they can't use CAD, Temple believes, is that they never learned to draw by hand. Older architects who learned to draw by hand and then switched to CAD do fine. It's the younger architects who never did hand drawings at all who are lost.

My sister's husband has seen the same thing. And Carolyn always thought there was something important about hands and math.

Maybe one of these days I'll get around to reading The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture.

This could be wrong, of course. But if I had to bet, I wouldn't bet on Project Lead the Way.

Bring back shop.