Futurism

Something that Mark and I have been talking about is how much less audacious we have been (as a country) since the 1950's.  Back then there was a real sense of inevitable progress and an idea that there were great accomplishments lurking around the corner.  Noah Smith weighs in with an example of this:

If we had found better ways to unlock the vast stores of energy that we know are lurking inside the nuclei of atoms, we'd have those flying cars and Mars colonies and everything people thought we'd have back in the 50s (OK, the Economist doesn't say that, but it's true).

When did we lose this ambition and can we get it back?  

A randomized test of welfare

In the Economist, no less. Consider:

When the results were in, the team found that the unpaid women had suffered more than twice the HIV infection rate experienced by the paid women over the course of the 18 months of the experiment, and four times the infection rate of genital herpes. Intriguingly, there was no difference between the infection rate suffered by those required to go to school and those who received the money unconditionally. Whether the actual amount of money mattered was not clear. For that to emerge a larger sample would be needed. What is abundantly clear, however, was that the money did make women behave differently. They had younger boyfriends than those in the control group, and had sex less frequently.

What should be noted is that this was a randomized experiment so you can actually infer causality.  I am positive Mark will have a lot more to say about this experiment.

But let me note, for the record, that this is the opposite result of what conventional thinking would yield about giving young people cash subsidies.  It's also notable that requiring school did not change the good results so unconditional transfers are not inferior to conditional transfers.  Are we sure that a social safety net would result in worse outcomes?  What about giving grants to college students?  

Landsberg's latest

Noah Smith points out a Steve Landsburg column that doesn't make a lot of sense.  I am going to try (although it is hard) to ingnore the moral dimension here (although I am very much on Sandra's Fluke's side) and focus on the inherent logic of the positions being staked out.  Consider Landsberg's comments:

To his credit, Rush stepped in to provide the requisite mockery. To his far greater credit, he did so with a spot-on analogy: If I can reasonably be required to pay for someone else’s sex life (absent any argument about externalities or other market failures), then I can reasonably demand to share in the benefits. His dense and humorless critics notwithstanding, I am 99% sure that Rush doesn’t actually advocate mandatory on-line sex videos. What he advocates is logical consistency and an appreciation for ethical symmetry. So do I. Color me jealous for not having thought of this analogy myself.

There’s one place where I part company with Rush, though: He wants to brand Ms. Fluke a “slut” because, he says, she’s demanding to be paid for sex. There are two things wrong here. First, the word “slut” connotes (to me at least) precisely the sort of joyous enthusiasm that would render payment superfluous. A far better word might have been “prostitute” (or a five-letter synonym therefor), but that’s still wrong because Ms. Fluke is not in fact demanding to be paid for sex. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) She will, as I understand it, be having sex whether she gets paid or not. Her demand is to be paid. The right word for that is something much closer to “extortionist”. Or better yet, “extortionist with an overweening sense of entitlement”. Is there a single word for that?

But whether or not he chose the right word, what I just don’t get is why the pro-respect crowd is aiming all its fire at Rush. Which is more disrespectful — his harsh language or Sandra Fluke’s attempt to pick your pocket? That seems like a pretty clear call to me.

 Noah Smith comments that:

First, from an economic efficiency standpoint, in-kind benefits are inferior to direct cash payments, as Ed Glaeser will tell you. Instead of giving Rush a sex tape, it would be more efficient to simply hand Rush some cash and let him buy whatever he wants with it. 

But I think that this critique also misses the point of the most relevant exmaple given.  In this case (a lesbian student who wanted to be prescribed these medications to prevent cyst growth on her ovaries -- which led to surgery to remove an ovary) -- the rationale for taking the drug had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with preventing unnecessary surgery.  From a strict cost perspective, Landsburg should be praising Fluke for trying to save the state money by improving medical efficiency.  From a utiliatarian perspective, it's probably worth a few thousand dollars to preserve a person's otherwise healthy organ.  So this policy (in this case, at least) is costing extra money for all parties involved. 

So I am mystified by Landsberg's clear call.  He wants to spend more money on unecessary medical procedures that could be avoided with inexpensive and commonly available drug therapies?  Is this because Landsberg thinks his personal tax rate is too low? 

Not only do I find the substance of the argument repugnant, it seems to fail on even on it's own terms.  So I am confused by what Landberg is trying to accomplish wit it.  Is he hoping that we will turn it around and support open access to oral contraceptives?  Is he advocating for higher tax rates to enable a greater degree of social engineering?  Or am I missing something here? 

Odd Criterion

Via Diane Ravitch:

But one sentence in the agreement shows what matters most: “Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall.” What this means is that a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective overall, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining sixty percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher is fired.

So why not be transparent and make the student performance count for 100%? Unless the goal is to allow teachers who are effective at improving standardized test scores be removed for other reasons. I love the idea of trying to ensure that education is of high quality. But high stakes evaluations of complex behavior based on a simple metric seems . . . unwise. I am sure Mark will have a lot more to say about this newest entry in the Education Reform debate.

Cash for Citations

Mark sent me this piece entitled Cash for Citations?. The title was a bit misleading when you click though and read the actual offer:

An astronomer at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was offering him a contract for an adjunct professorship that would pay $72,000 a year. Kirshner, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, would be expected to supervise a research group at KAU and spend a week or two a year on KAU’s campus, but that requirement was flexible, the person making the offer wrote in the e-mail.

I am actually not sure that this rises to the level of a "scam" by modern standards.  The professor would, after all, work with the students at KAU and be residential for at least part of the year.  Sure, the salary is a bit high for two weeks worth of work but access to a top researcher can be worth a lot if he contributed remotely.  To rise to the level of an actual scam, the flexible requirement would have to be negotiable to no duties.

Now, the concern is that the astronomer would have to list the KAU affiliation on all of their papers.  On the other hand, if they are a salaried adjunct professor then that would actually be pretty normal.  Several of my colleagues have positions cobbled together from multiple places and the requisite need to list multiple affiliations.

The real issue is the ability of universities to purchase reputations.  It has long been true that extremely gifted and creative researchers have better employment options at least partially because of the prestige they bring to the hiring institution.  In a world with flexible work locations (consider MITx), these issues are likely to become larger over time.

But the idea of "cash for citations" is really a salary for research productivity.  The real question is how residential does a professor need to be to count as affiliated.

Cross sectional reasoning

I want to follow up on a post by Bad Astronomy that has been discussed by both Mark and Noah Smith. The post comments on the results of the 2010 census on employment rates:

I highlighted one in particular: Astronomy and Astrophysics. Note that it has a 0% unemployment rate; in other words, last year everyone who majored in these fields got a job! Now, I find myself being a tad skeptical about this, but if there’s some weird thing going on with this survey, I can at least make the broad assumption that the relative job numbers are probably OK. Majoring in astronomy is still a good idea, and will strengthen your chances of getting a job after college.

I want to take this in a different direction. What this metric shows is that, if you were lucky enough to have majored in Astronomy in 2005 then you were very likely to be employed in 2010. It says nothing about what will happen to somebody who enters the program in 2011 and whether they will be employed in 2015.

See, I was actually a physics major in the mid 1990's, in a school with a large astrophysics group. I knew a lot of these students and even took classes with them. Do you know what they mostly ended up as: High School Teachers. Plus a few academics. At the time there was a terrible job placement rate in physics and we were all depressed by the poor employment outcomes. Using the tool, I see a 4.5% unemployment rate for physics, which does make me wonder how many astrophysicists are counted in this group.

But, in general, past performance is no guarantee of future employment. A depressed job market could easily have led to full employment years later, long after only the most dedicated students remained. I've seen this phenomenon in a lot of fields -- people go where the markets signal but, in education, the signals are lagging indicators.

So maybe we are seeing the unemployment ghettos of the future?

A tweet from Matt Yglesias

Seriously amazing how much better digital over the air looks than "HD" cable with compression.

Isn't this the same argument Mark has been trying to make about Broadcast Cable?

UPDATE: See more here

More banking thoughts

Reading Mark's last post brought to mind this New York Times article on how sticky bank accounts have become:

What they haven’t mentioned are marketing studies like the one commissioned by Fiserv, which develops online bill paying systems, showing that using the Internet to pay bills, do automatic deductions and send electronic checks reduced customer turnover for banks by up to 95 percent in some cases.

With 44 million households having used the Internet to pay a bill in the past 30 days — up from 32 million five years ago and projected to reach 55 million by 2016 — it’s a shift that has major ramifications for competition.

There’s even evidence that fewer consumers are switching banks, with 7 percent of them estimated to be moving their primary account to a different institution in 2011, down from 12 percent last year, according to surveys by Javelin Strategy and Research.

Emmett Higdon, a consultant who managed Citibank’s online bill payment product from 2004 to 2007, said that “for the consumer, it’s a double-edged sword.” While customers value the convenience, inside the industry “it was known that it would be a powerful retention tool. That’s why online bill paying went free in the first place. Inertia is powerful in the banking industry.”

Ironically, I actually see that these services are a point in favor of the banking industry. If these services are entered into voluntarily and make banking much more pleasant (which I can definitely confirm) then it is not a surprise that it is hard to move banks. Heck, I think it might have been harder back in the old days when you had to show up at a teller during banking hours.

Instead, we are seeing the banks seek out the point at which cost and convenience meet. Honestly, given the costs of handling cash, I think that they are nuts not to try and encourage electronic payments. After all, one option that Bank of America customers have is to start using cash for purchases and stop using debit cards.

My major barrier to the use of cash is the silly idea that we have to add sales tax to the posted price, making it impossible to calculate the amount due at the register (as the sales tax may vary by product, especially in a grocery store). If posted prices were the actual amount spent, I would be the master of exact change!

Update on BoA severance

In a recent post, I referenced the decision of Bank of America to give a very large settlement package to two departing executives. Given how tone deaf the settlement seemed, many people assumed that it was part of an employment contract. Mark, my co-blogger, has many times talked about the importance of upholding contracts (see comments on this post).

It turns out that the decision to pay $11 million dollars in severance was voluntary and not required at all by any contract.

A classic natural experiment

This post was requested by Mark.

One interesting natural experiment in diet and exercise was rationing in wartime Britain where the population ate less and exercised more (petrol was also rationed). The results were fairly impressive:

As a result of the balanced diet provided by rationing, children's health improved and on average they were taller and heavier than before the war.

The incidence of anaemia and tooth decay dropped - while the average age at which people died from natural causes increased, despite the stresses and strains of war.

The principles behind rationing sound surprisingly similar to today's health messages: reduced consumption of meat, fats and sugar and more of the sort of foods, such as vegetables, which provide essential vitamins and minerals.

this led to other health benefits:

A war-time regiment would also help reduce your risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, as well as cancers such as post-menopausal breast cancer, kidney and colon cancer.

The same outcome of rationing was seen in Australia:

The government feared that rationing would result in deterioration in health on the home front but, in fact, the outcome was positive. Rationing resulted in a decline in diet related problems like obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

So it is clear, that whether or not the wartime Commonwealth diet was optimal, there is a known population-level intervention that will result in better health outcomes: restriction of food.

Now, as a matter of public policy, I am clearly opposed to doing this in a coercive manner (but then I still see tobacco smoking as a personal choice). But it is clear that relatively simple diets can have surprisingly positive health benefits.

More on Groupon

As a follow-up to Mark, the comment thread to this post is worth reading. One clever reader noted, in the S-1 groupon just filed:

Our merchant arrangements are generally structured such that we collect cash up front when our customers purchase Groupons and make payments to our merchants at a subsequent date. In North America, we typically pay our merchants in installments within sixty days after the Groupon is sold. In most of our International markets, merchants are not paid until the customer redeems the Groupon.

Now you match this up with this, admittedly anecdotal example:

A good mate who owns a restaurant and did one of these deals after said it was outright amazing - many people would come in and spend EXACTLY the amount of the coupon. They didn't want to go 50c under and heaven forbid they went 50c over and have to pay more at full price

Even worse, you seem to have to more effects. One is a priming effect. New customers assume your $30 entree is worth $15. That is poison. The second is that merchants have begun to do things like "Groupon lines" (rational from their point of view to focus on the full-paying customers first) that reduce the value of the service.

So the business model involves a slow reimbursement to the merchant (waiting for money is death in a small business where cash flow issues can be fatal), enormous discounts (typically 75% off, with the last 25% coming in slowly), and "bargain hunters" who are unlikely to become regular customers.

As a final point, consider:

Perhaps Groupon management thinks it is creating a sustainable Prisoner’s Dilemma, one that ultimately destroys value for the local merchant ecosystem but benefits Groupon. In other words, Groupon could grow so big that local merchants have to use it, even though it ultimately hurts them. In game theory terms, Groupon creates an equilibrium point at “All Local Merchants Defect,” and then, having forced merchants into this value-destroying equilibrium, takes a cut for having rigged the game. Obviously, Groupon couldn’t share this thinking publicly. They would just continue to use the attract-loyal-new-customers argument even though it no longer makes any sense for a ginormous Groupon.

This may sound cynical. But if this is Groupon’s game plan, it isn’t cynical. It’s naïve. Most local merchants simply don’t have enough value in their collective ecosystem to share anything remotely like this much value with Groupon. This isn’t a stable equilibrium, it’s a suicidal one. The local merchants will have to stop using Groupon en masse not long after they first start experimenting with it.

The only way this works is if process quadruple for restaurants (because everyone uses a groupon). Maybe more than quadruple because you replace cash in hand with a 60 day payment. Why would restaurants not break this equilibrium and offer 60% off if you show up without a groupon? Immediate cash in hand, much higher profits, the customer pays less and they don't have to buy a groupon in advance.

And if you don't get this type of prisoner's dilemma, then it is hard to see where the sustainable value is going to be in this business model when your clients will eventually hate you.

One more thought

Mark, Andrew Gelman and I have all weighed on on the article written by David Rubinstein. So I think the high points have been hit.

One thing that I think was interesting, though, was his decision to be defiant about his career. Comments like:

Why do I put “worked” in quotation marks? Because my main task as a university professor was self-cultivation: reading and writing about topics that interested me. Maybe this counts as work. But here I am today—like many of my retired colleagues—doing pretty much what I have done since the day I began graduate school, albeit with less intensity.

Seemed to me to be extremely revealing. I think that one possibility is one of culture. I grew up in a social democracy and I would feel shame if I thought I was "milking the system". My father used to explain the low Swedish unemployment rate to me as being a cultural phenomeon (in Sweden the shame of not working is high).

On the other hand, I occasionally see people bragging about how they bilked the system as if this is a point of pride and not deep humiliation. I wonder if there is a cultural divide here as I would find behavior to be shameful. Consider this statement:

Committee meetings were tedious but, except for the few good departmental citizens, most of us were able to avoid undue burdens.

Why would he not be ashmaed not to have been a good departmental citizen? I am always worried that I am not carrying enough administrative burden in my department and concerned when another faculty member is overloaded.

Or this comment:

To be sure, some of my colleagues were prodigious researchers, devoted teachers, and outstanding departmental, university, and professional citizens. But sociologists like to talk about what they call the “structural” constraints on behavior. While character and professional ethics can withstand the incentives to coast, the privileged position of a tenured professor guarantees that there will be slackers.

So why are character and professional ethics not valued? Why does an confession as to a lack of professional ethics sound like an attack on the profession and not an admission of a personal failing. Mark pointed out the comments on his teaching ability and I have to admit it sounds like he wasn't the most focused professor ever.

Or perhaps I misunderstand some parts of this situation??

The paradox of New Haven

Mark has been discussing Edward Glaeser and his comments on how universities can create urban prosperity. Now, I am a big fan of universities and think that they serve an important role in global economic development. However, I am dubious that they make any particular community prosperous. Consider New Haven, CT -- the home of Yale University (recently ranked the #11 university in the world).

According to wikipedia, the poverty rate in New Haven is 24%, which compares unfavorably with the rest of the United States where it is 14%. The poverty rate in New Haven, despite the presence of Yale, is nearly twice that of the United States as a whole.

Now, one might note that many of the poor residents of New Haven are likely to be students. This is true. But these students still use municipal services and thus require the local tax base to support them (in addition to the long term residents). They do not (after they graduate and make additional income) send money back to New Haven so, in a sense, New Haven is actually subsiding the urban communities that Yale graduates move to.

So, it is actually possible that a large university in a small community could be a drag on the economy due to the lower per capita tax base. Plus, you have a large segment of the population with only a short term interest in the community which may make long term planning more difficult. And New Haven, CT is not the only university town that I can think of with high levels of poverty.

Furthermore, if a strong local university (like the University of Washington) is a solution to urban poverty (as it was presented in the Detroit versus Seattle comparison of Edward Glaeser) then it is unclear why a stronger economy has not grown up around Yale which is a strong school by any measure.

This example highlights, I think, that predicting what factors create a prosperous community is a difficult question and not one that has easy answers.

Update: The discussion continues here and here.

Universities and Growth

Mark had a really nice post about one of Edward Glaeser's points. Mark points out that it seems odd that Glaeser overlooked the schools in the Detroit area when he pointed out how important the Univeristy of Washington is to Seattle's success. Curiously, he did not mention Microsoft, which seems to also be an important explanation for Seattle's success. I think the underlying issue here is that simple explanations (location of schools) do not really describe complex phenomenon (relative prosperity) well.

If you look at the the top ranked schools, there are really two major clusters in the United States (one in the Northeast, peaking in Boston and one in California, peaking in San Franscisco). But the causal direction is unclear to me -- did these schools become excellent due to their proximity to vibrant economies or vice versa?

Or are these factors independent, which schools like Princeton might argue for.

What type of instrument or experiment could we use to decide on this?

These questions matter because we care about how to best handle things like economic slumps. It might be that there is no effective policy response (that would be worth knowing). But, at the very least, overly simple explanations should concern us.

Castles and Crusades

Mark has been doing a games section on the blog (it's cool and you should check out some of his posts). If we are lucky, he might do a post on Kruzno, eventually.

The Castle Keepers Guide has now been released for Castles and Crusades making the base game system complete. For fans of older style role playing games this is a major milestone, admittedly one that comes late in the day. But it's a good book and has a lot of the "look and feel" of Gary Gygax's classic writing. It's well worth a look.

Some Thoughts on Personal Finance

It was unfortunate that Mark decided not to write about personal finance as I think that there is a lot to say about this topic. In particular, I agree that it was odd that this article was treated as a revelation. Consider this comment:

I won’t bore you with the math, but this meal plan cuts out all the extras. No snacks, no OJ, no organic milk at $5.99 per gallon, no Parmesan cheese sprinkled on top of that pasta, no frozen yogurt at night in front of DWTS. The husband brown bags it to the office. I’ll admit I included my coffee, at $2.15 per week, because I consider it essential, along with milk for the kids at every meal.

I have actually been extremely poor and I begin to think that most financial journalists have never been in that state. I remember saving up to buy powdered skim milk (as the only possible option) and would never have dreamed of affording organic milk. Some of the cheap food options that are listed are good but I remember buying huge bags of rice (10 kg, if I remember correctly) so I could stretch a tiny food budget out over a month. I notice this level of extreme economy is absent from the discussion.


In a lot of ways this is a good thing. The United States is wealthy country and it is good that inexpensive food is an feature of our society. But one should not mistake this advice as being how one would actually deal with dire poverty.

Concerns with data driven reform

Dead Dad has a post on Achieving the Dream, which is intended to improve outcomes at community colleges. Two of his commentators had really interesting insights. Consider mathguy:

Consider the effect of No Child Left Behind. I've seen a noticeable decline in basic math skills of students of all levels in the last 5 years. Every year, I will discovered a new deficiency that was not seen from the previous years (we are talking about Calculus students not able to add fractions). Yet NCLB was assumed to be "working" since the scores were going up. It seems that K-12 was devoting too much time preparing the students for tests, at the cost of killing students' interest in math, trading quality instruction for test-taking skills. Is NCLB a factor in the study? Are socio-economic factors examined in the study?

or CC Physicist who stated:

I look at what Asst Prof wrote as an indication that a Dean, chair, and mentor didn't do a good job of getting across the history of assessment. Do you know what "Quality Improvement" program was developed a decade earlier, and what the results were of the outcomes assessment required from that round of reaffirmation of accreditation? Probably not, since we have pretty good communication at our CC but all the negative results from our plan were swept under the rug. The only indication we had that they weren't working was the silent phase-out of parts of that plan. Similarly, data that drove what we did a decade ago were not updated to see what has changed.

I think these two statements capture, very nicely, the main issue I have with the current round of educational reform. One, if you make meeting a specific metric (as a measure of on underlying goal) a high enough priority then people will focus on the metric and not the actual goal. After all, if you don’t then your name could be posted in LA Times although with your underperformance on the stated metric. So we’d better be sure that the metric that we are using is very robust in its relation to the underlying goal. In other words, that it is a very good representation of the curriculum that we want to see taught and measures the skills we want to see students acquire.

Two, trust in evidence based reform requires people to be able to believe the data. This is one area where medical research is leaps and bounds ahead of educational research. A series of small experiments are attempted (often randomized controlled trials) while the standard of care continues to be used in routine patient care. Only when the intervention shows evidence of effectiveness in the trial environment is it translated into routine care.

In education, such trials are rare indeed. Let us exclude natural experiments for the moment; if we care enough to change the education policy of a country and to violate employment contracts then it’s fair to hold ourselves to a high standard of evidence. After all, the lotteries (for example) are not a true experiment and it’s hard to be sure that the lottery itself is completely randomized.

The problem is that educational reforms look like “doing something”. But what happens if the reforms are either counterproductive or ineffective (and implanting an expensive reform that does nothing has a high opportunity cost). The people implementing the reforms are often gone in five to ten years but the teachers (at least now while they have job security) remain to clean up the wreckage afterwards.

I think that this links well to Mark's point about meta-work: it's hard to evaluate the contributions of meta-work so it may look like an administrator is doing a lot when actually they are just draining resources away from the core functions of teaching.

So when Dead Dad notes: “Apparently, a national study has found that colleges that have signed on to ATD have not seen statistically significant gains in any of the measures used to gauge success.” Why can’t we use this evidence to decide that the current set of educational reform ideas aren’t necessarily working well? Why do we take weak evidence of the decline of American education at face value and ignore strong evidence of repeated failure in the current reform fads?

Or is evidence only useful when it confirms our pre-conceptions?

Administration

I was reading Mark's post today on principals and I thought it was interesting to see that Dean Dad has a post from the other side of the fence today as well. Some of the points in the Dead Dad post are extremely insightful. Consider the following question:

I’ll answer the question with another question. Good, strong, solid, peer-reviewed scientific data has made it abundantly clear that poor eating habits lead to obesity and all manner of negative health outcomes. There’s no serious dispute that obesity is a major public health issue in the US. And yet people still overeat. Despite reams of publicity and even Presidential support for good eating and exercise habits, obesity continues to increase. Why?

In other words, reform is hard to do even when you know where you want to go. In cases where the evidence is weak or where budgets are falling, the problem gets even worse. And, of course, right now we are experiencing a fall in most education budgets in the United States.

However, it was interesting how Dead Dad was unable to resist worrying about tenure as a barrier to reform:

There’s also a fundamental issue of control. Faculties as a group are intensely protective of their absolute control of the classroom. Many hold on to the premodern notion of teaching as a craft, to be practiced and judged solely by members the guild. As with the sabermetric revolution in baseball, old habits die hard, even when the evidence against them is clear and compelling. There’s a real fear among many faculty that moving from “because I say so” to “what the numbers say” will reduce their authority, and in a certain sense, that’s true. In my estimation, this is at the root of much of the resentment against outcomes assessment.

Even where there’s a will, sometimes there just isn’t the time. It’s one thing to reinvent your teaching when you have one class or even two; it’s quite another with five. And when so many of your professors divide their time among different employers, even getting folks into the same room for workshops is a logistical challenge.

Of course, accountability matters. Longtime readers know my position on the tenure system, so I won’t beat that horse again, but it’s an uphill battle to sell disruptive change when people have the option of saying ‘no’ without consequence. The enemy isn’t really direct opposition; it’s foot-dragging.

I think that this line of thinking may also be part of why there is such a huge push for reform of teacher job security. Administrators are under enormous pressure to reform the education system and teachers may be very resistant.

Of course, one element that may be left out is that the teachers may be resistant to change for good reasons. When you have been in an organization long enough, you realize that a lot of reform can be about trying "old ideas all over again". These reforms can be both time consuming and ineffective. They may even lower outcomes due to the friction of implementation.

Let us consider a business analogy. One way that corporations tried to handle bad outcomes is a series of "re-orgs". These changes in structure have two good properties. One, the people in charge seems to be doing something to address issues by making changes. Two, a series of re-organizations can make it very hard to track a long term pattern of bad management as units break apart too often for performance to be easily tracked.

The ability of tenured people to resist cosmetic reforms is, obviously very frustrating to administrators who have little ability to influence the organization but seemingly unlimited accountability. However, endless re-organizations did not, in the end, help corporations like General Motors. Instead, they may well have accelerated the decline by focusing on making changes that were more cosmetic than effective. So do we really need to import the worst practices of modern corporations into the educational system?

[This post is also relevant -- Mark]

Cost of Education

I was speaking with Mark about this post and an interesting point came up. Teachers already have long and structured hours (pre and post class supervision, class hours and lunch duty) plus work at home (marking -- which at the high school level is never finished during the workday). KIPP has teachers also available by cell phone. In the private sector it generally involves a pretty hefty pay increase to put an associate on a pager.

When we talk about the need to increase our investment in education, are we really prepared to increase either the number of teachers or the median salary of teachers? After all, we are currently talking about teacher layoffs. Perhaps Mark, who has more practical experience in this matter, can comment?

Reflections on the KIPP posts

I want to explicitly emphasize this point in Mark's last post:

One is the eighty/twenty rule. Some students take more time than others and, not surprisingly, the students who lower a school's test average and management metrics are the ones who consume the most time and resources.

In the light of the KIPP website (which he discusses here):

Having teachers available by cell phone after school for homework help

Now, let us consider two effects of this policy. One, the school day is a lot longer for a teacher than it used to be. Add in the rigorous extracurricular activities and the (seemingly 24 hour on call status) and at best you are creating an environment where investing more resources in teaching creates better outcomes.

But I don't think that this is going to be the main effect. If you consider Mark's eighty/twenty rule, you create enormous incentives for teachers to gently nudge out the student who calls for an hour and half to discuss homework every single evening. Even if the teachers at KIPP don't do this (a proposition of which I would be highly sceptical), I would be deeply concerned about what whether this approach was scalable.

It think it would be critical to determine if an approach was scalable before basing massive reforms off of it. I am happy for innovation and improvement in education to continue but I think that we should proceed carefully and based on the evidence. In education, for reasons that evade me, people seem to be very non-critical about the evidence.