Harm Reduction

We've been a little bit into economics and education lately, so I suppose here is a good chance to look a publich health issue of interest. In today's British Medical Journal, Kimber et al. report on a prospective cohort study looking at opiate substitution in injectable drug users.

The findings were dramatic:

For each additional year of opiate substitution treatment the hazard of death before long term cessation fell 13% (95% confidence interval 17% to 9%) after adjustment for HIV, sex, calendar period, age at first injection, and history of prison and overdose.

This is a massive effect. Just one year of treatment is competitive with interventions that we would not even think twice about: many drug treatments for cardiovascular disease fall into this range. Since we can't really randomize people to these types of treatments, the prospective cohort design is likely as good as it gets. So perhaps these types of dramatic findings, if properly replicated, can start a discussion about harm reduction once the behavior is initiated. After all, there is a large population of injectable drug users and finding ways to improve their (fairly poor) outcomes seems like a decent way to improve public health.

More on tenure

In a thread on DrugMonkey, a commenter posed this solution to tenure:

The society as a whole would benefit from abolishing tenure system and putting educators where everyone else belongs, a market place.

As you may guess, I had some thoughts about this comment. Markets are pretty amazing things but they do some things rather poorly. Mark Thoma has a good discussion of the criteria for a market to work efficiently:

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/02/markets_are_not.html

Research is, in some important respects, a public good and, like other public goods is hard to place into a market easily (in the same sense that is hard to privatize the road system). Furthermore, the NIH style grant system is an attempt (so far as I can tell) to handle the information problems with basic research in the most rational way possible under the circumstances.

This is not to say that change and reform are not possible; they are. But I find it odd that tenure is attacked whereas other forms of job security are not (for example, there is no widespread call to privatize the military). The university and NIH system are designed to introduce as mush competition into research and teaching as you can with a single buyer dominating the marketplace (that would be the federal government, via student loans and research grants).

I think tackling this requires a series of marginal improvements. Standing on the outside it is easy to suggest radical change but what do you do if the radical change results in a worse outcome than the current state of affairs? In particular, I want to see more about how to apply a market based system to higher education given all of the barriers to an efficient market that are present.

Post tenure era?

DrugMonkey has a post today called "A Farewell to Tenure". It's an interesting post in the context of Mark's discussion about the ending of teacher tenure in the K-12 system.

However, I think that the major driver of the reason that tenure can be attacked in the academic world is that there is a dual career track for many academic disciplines. The fields with lots of soft money jobs (employment based 100% on external grant funding) tend to be focused on research topics that are seen as priorities. Here there are specific metrics (such as key scientific papers published and novel ideas proposed) that make it possible to actually hold competitions for funding.

What is the analogous parallel funding track for K-12 teachers?

Thinking about teacher layoffs -- the logistics of staffing

Regarding Seyward Darby's recent article on teacher layoffs, you can find posts on why she doesn't understand economics here and here, posts on the questionable data and analysis behind her position here and here, posts pointing out the problems with the movement she endorses here and here (from Darby's own magazine) and an explanation of why the tenure 'reform' she champions would be unfair and unethical here.

But I don't believe anyone has pointed out what a logistic nightmare she wants to get us into.

Let's take the plan that Darby favors and throw in some reasonable numbers:

We take our already somewhat understaffed schools and lay off, let's say, 200,000* teachers selected based in part on some quality metric. We then run the schools severely understaffed for the next year or so until state revenues recover.

That 200K will be made up of three groups, the good, the bad and the better-than-nothing. The good are effective teachers who end up on the list through a combination of bad luck, bad metrics and bad administrators (go here to see how the last two can work together). The bad are teachers at the very bottom of the quality scale. The better-than-nothing are teachers who aren't all that effective but are probably still at least as good as most of the people you could get to replace them.

Given the flaws in our system of ranking teachers and the innate difficulty of the problem, a fair number of good teachers will end up on the list. Likewise, given the problems with recruiting teachers for problem schools, better-than-nothing teachers will continue to make up a large part of it.

The upshot of all this is that, given population growth and the high level of teacher attrition, you will need a substantial number of the people you laid off to come back if you are to have any hope of meeting staffing targets. This wasn't as much of a problem under last-in/first-out for a couple of reasons. First, the attrition rate for new teachers was so high that many of the teachers you laid off wouldn't have been there in a couple of years even if you hadn't let them go. Second, leaving under last-in/first-out carries minimal stigma. For those who really wanted to it was easy to get back into the field a year later.

Under the 'reform' system, there is a serious stigma and a deadly asymmetry of information problem. Keep in mind that administrators are basically stuck with new hires for a year (you try finding a certified replacement in, say, November). They know that a teacher laid off under that system might turn out to be first rate, but do they really want to take the chance?

Let's say 100,000 of the laid-off teachers fell into the need-them-later category. We have screwed these teachers out of contractually obligated compensation, scapegoated them for all the problems in the education system and made them unemployable in their chosen field. Would you come back under those circumstances?

Of course, the impact is not limited those laid off. Other than the satisfaction that comes with the job, the primary attraction of teaching is job security. For generations, teachers have self-selected to be risk-averse. Faculty rolls mainly consist of people who have willingly traded any significant chance of promotion for the stability to start a family, buy a house, and spend thirty or forty years doing something they're good at.

In an industry dependent on a very large number of highly skilled labourers, this is not a bad situation, but putting those bigger, long-term questions aside, what is likely to happen when the economy recovers and we try to start restaffing? We were having trouble maintaining adequate levels before the lay-offs. Then we permanently removed around 200,000 teachers from the pool (many of whom we would have liked to have had back later). Now we are trying to hold on to teachers after having unilaterally removed a valued part of their compensation and established the precedent that contractual obligations to educators don't need to be honored.

Of course, the reformers will assure you that they have a set of programs that will solve the retention problem, but keep in mind these are the same people who have been solving this problem for a decade and their track record is nothing if not consistent.

According to this NCES paper, we were hiring around 200,000 new teachers a year before the economy collapsed. That was a difficult and expensive proposition and we often had to compromise quality to make that number. Now think about doubling or tripling the number of vacancies.

This is not going to work out well.







*without the plan that Darby thinks might merit a veto, 100,000 to 300,000 teachers could lose their jobs.

Wayward Seyward

I mentioned in my previous post that when I saw Seyward Darby had written an article entitled "Obama: Don't Touch Education Reform," I had a bad feeling. Bad and, as it turns out, damned accurate:

But this particular measure has evolved in some decidedly unappealing ways. When it was first introduced, numerous education advocacy groups asked Congress to impose constraints that would effectively compel states to reform their layoff systems. As I explained recently, most states and school districts follow a misguided "last-hired, first-fired" rule. If they must let teachers go for budgetary reasons, they start by booting those teachers who have spent the least time in the classroom. Teacher quality doesn't factor into the decision at all. Congress, though, refused to go along with the proposal—and the Obama administration didn't intervene. "Right now, the most important thing is to stop the bleeding," Senator Tom Harkin, chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, said in early May.

That was bad enough. But then, this week, House Appropriations Chairman David Obey proposed that the government pay for the legislation, in part, by taking money from other Education Department funds—and not just any old funds, but the money set aside for some of Obama’s most important school reforms. Under Obey's plan, which the full House ultimately adopted, $500 million would come from Race to the Top, a competitive grant program and probably the most talked-about aspect of Obama's education agenda; $200 million would come from the Teacher Incentive Fund, which supports performance-based compensation plans; and another $100 million would come from money for charter schools. Sounding a bit like Harkin, Obey reportedly said, "When a ship is sinking, you don't worry about redesigning a room, you worry about keeping it afloat."

...

And if the push for other funding fails? The administration will have a tough choice to make. But one thing's for sure: Letting Congress chip away at the education reform agenda now would place it on a slippery slope in the future. And that's something the country can ill afford.

"Tough choice"? Let's review:

1. We are on the verge of adding a Roman numeral to the end of the Great Depression. Under these circumstances, mass layoffs of teachers is insanely pro-cyclic. It doesn't matter which teachers you pick, the immediate economic effect is the same. Even if you had a reliable metric that could identify poor teachers, this would be the worst possible time to get rid of them;

2. You don't have a reliable metric that can identify poor teachers;

3. Much of the threatened reform package is actually a continuation of policies that have a long (sometimes decades-long) and horrible track record.

Narrow versus broad searches

The ever interesting Felix Salmon has a post today on hedgehogs versus foxes that I found quite interesting. In it, he makes a distinction between a careful and incremental approach to knowledge (traditional research) versus a fast and haphazard approach (blogging). I find this especially fascinating because I tend to be an incrementalist as a research (let's refine the current optima) whereas I am much more willing to discuss things for which I am not always an expert on a blog.

What struck me as most interesting is that a complete strategy for improving a field likely embraces both approaches. The bloggers (foxes) are racing around asking naive questions in the search for an undiscovered solution. The academic researchers (hedgehogs) are refining the known solutions to make them actually optimal. Both approaches are actually very useful, on their own terms.

The thing to keep in mind is that the fox approach is going to generate a lot of failure. When I do epidemiology methods research, I always keep in mind that just beating he standard practice in the field is very hard to do. Heck, for a lot of problems, just getting substantial improvement in estimation over a carefully thought out linear regression model (regardless of whether the outcome is continuous or not) is surprisingly challenging. It can certainly be done and for some classes of problems, like time to event, the improvement is dramatic. Even more difficult, the current tools have been carefully refined and well understood -- developing a superior alternative is hard (just look at the number of methods papers published every month in statistics in medicine).

But every once in a while, a new idea shows up that leads to dramatic improvements, one way or the other, over conventional approaches. I think bloggers do a lot of the grunt work of looking around and trying to see if there is a superior paradigm or approach to looking at the current problems. Then academics take the slow and difficult process of incremental improvement.

It's a nice way of looking at the relation between these two approaches.

Risk Taking and success

Tyler Cowen, on his ever excellent blog, quotes a reader on how people take chances in some areas of their lives and are quite bland in others. I found this interesting at several levels. First, I tend to agree with the general principle that we have only so much energy (mental or physical) to spread between tasks and that you can be focused on only so many at a time. Second, I think it blends in well with Mark's recent skepticism that risk taking is as good of a universal strategy as it seems to be if you read business advice books.

The reason is that success is not a single dimension, nor is happiness. If you have the incredible natural talent and drive to be the very best you can possibly make a risk taking strategy work because you have the ability to recover from failure. In the same sense, the very rich can try high risk investment strategies as they may still be well off even if the strategy fails. My favorite example of this is somebody like Garth Brooks trying to be Chris Gaines; Garth was a sufficiently well known star that he could recover when the "Chris Gaines gamble" did not work out.

But to reach these levels of focus, is it not likely that other things in life may have to be sacrificed? It is true that highly successful people are driven and focused but do need to remember that this focus often comes at a surprising cost. Alexander the Great was a successful general but would anybody envy his personal life?

All of which is to say that strategies for success are complicated, at best, and that people aren't simple at all. Which, come to think of it, is probably a good starting point for all of these discussions.

Uh-oh

Seyward Darby is writing about education reform again. This hardly ever ends well.

Role models

While browsing the business section yesterday, the title and author of one of the books caught my eye so I picked it up and scanned the back cover:

Inspiration. Success. Confidence. Passion.

No one is born with these qualities, but they are the key ingredients for reaching goals, building careers or turning a blueprint into a breathtaking skyscraper.

I learned that the author would share "the life lessons and hard-won insights that made her a rising star in the business world" and that whether the reader was "landing that first job, navigating the workplace,or making a lasting impact," the author would show how to "Step up and get noticed at work -- focus and efficiency will open doors."

The author's name was Ivanka Trump.

The book is the Trump Card.

It's available in paperback.

How blogging is like SCTV

The creators of the cult classic, Second City Television had a admirable approach to editing. They stopped when they ran out of things to say. If that meant slight gems like "Western Redundancy Playhouse Theatre" or "The Wacky World of Poverty" only ran a couple of minutes then that's how long they ran. The writers also weren't afraid to keep going as long as a premise held out. If they had an hour's worth of ideas for a Poltergeist parody, they would give it an hour.

It is rare in any medium to be free make things the length they ought to be, but a blog is one of the few exceptions. In a blog you you spend hundreds of thousands of words on a subject or you can cover it in the span of a haiku. We don't always make the best use of that freedom but we should at least appreciate having it.

An actress prepares for the wrong role -- 3:06


Dick Cavett finds the perfect guest -- 2:44



A schlocky horror show accidentally books an art film -- 8:11

Paper review times

Disgruntled PhD has a nice post about an issue for early career scientists:

Another point to remember is that you can't submit to multiple journals at once, so the reviewing time is an opportunity cost for the researcher. This is of particular relevance for students like myself, who need to get papers published quickly in order to be able to show them on a CV and thus get a job (and the opportunity to do more research.

Later on, when one has a track record, it makes sense to aim high on a paper that has potential. It's never possible to be sure about a specific paper as one of the factors that goes into the decision of a journal to accept or reject a paper is what other papers have arrived recently. Back when I started out in Epidemiology (seems like a lifetime ago), this was true of our journals (like the American Journal of Epidemiology) as well. Fortunately, AJE has made a massive effort to improve things. This paper by Raymond J. Carroll shows a review time for AJE in 1999 of 15 months (figure 3). Yikes!

On the other hand, it is unclear what the optimal point is. I know of researchers who submit all of their papers to the top five medical journals "just in case" because it only takes a couple of months and, who knows, lightning might strike.

But it remains a very tough problem for junior people, like myself, who need to maintain momentum (both the volume of papers and the speed of papers). I do like the BMC Medicine model where the general journal reviews the paper and then refers the paper to a sub-journal if they think it would work there instead. I would publish in BMC journals a lot more if I was not so broke as I like their actual policies and practices a lot!

Mark

My co-blogger (and half owner) of this site, Mark, has a great eye for poor reasoning and likes to point it out. You can see the reaction to one of his forays here.

Charms and Mogul Dust

The recent discussion of Seth Godin (see here, here and here) got me thinking about how far business gurus will go out their way to build an association with the fabulously successful, even when that success is built on incredible talent and/or luck and could not possibly be applicable to a general audience. Godin does it with Dylan, probably the most influential songwriter of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Another popular example is Michael Jordan, quite possibly the greatest basketball player ever.

There is really no way to draw a useful analogy between the careers of Dylan and Jordan and what the rest of us face, but of course, that's not the point. The gurus use these men in their examples for the same reason that our ancestors would dress up like bears and growl and snarl at each other around the campfire. It's a primitive but still appealing magic of association and imitation.

Eating a box of Wheaties with Derek Jeter on the front will not raise your batting average, wearing a LeBron James jersey will not help your jump shot and trying a career move just because it worked for Dylan or Jordan will probably turn out to be a bad idea.

One less reason to read the New York Times

Olivia Judson is taking what is supposed to be a year's sabbatical from her column at the New York Times. You can't really begrudge her the time off; she's certainly earned it. Still it makes me nervous. Sabbaticals have a way of turning into permanent departures and that's not hit the paper can take. For a long time now, Judson has been the designated outlier, balancing out a tremendous amount of mediocrity.

We've lost Judson's subtle and entertaining insights into evolution. We're left with John Tierney asking if your dog is really sincere.

Publishing Equilibria

This comment at the end of a blog post by Andrew Gelman got me thinking:

On the other hand, the current system of scientific journals is, in many ways, a complete joke. The demand for referee reports of submitted articles is out of control, and I don't see Arxiv as a solution, as it has its own cultural biases.

I wonder if the problem here is not one of equilibria. Journal articles have become the an important way to measure productivity and to define success. As a result, researchers who are good at producing journal articles prosper. To change the system you have to overcome the intertia of the decision makers often being those reseachers who were successful at the current system.

Most systems of prestige tend to be hard to overturn and it's unclear as to what would be a good pathway to doing so. I tend to wonder about marginal improvements as these are more likely to be adopted. But it is pointless to fight for scientific expression to be done on blog posts if employers count grants and papers to determine future employment.

So what are the improvements at the margin that are possible?