One more thought on seeing McKinsey's “Closing the Talent Gap”

(And then I really have to be going)

I'm not sure they want to go with TIMSS here.

From the McKinsey report:

While Singapore does not participate in PISA, it ranked in the top three on math and science on the quadrennial Trends in International Mathematics and Science Studies assessments in 2007, after having come in first place in 1995, 1999 and 2003.

from the National Center for Education Statistics:

In 2007, the average mathematics scores of both U.S. fourth-graders (529) and eighth-graders (508) were higher than the TIMSS scale average (500 at both grades). The average U.S. fourth-grade mathematics score was higher than those of students in 23 of the 35 other countries, lower than those in 8 countries (all located in Asia or Europe), and not measurably different from those in the remaining 4 countries. At eighth grade, the average U.S. mathematics score was higher than those of students in 37 of the 47 other countries, lower than those in 5 countries (all of them located in Asia), and not measurably different from those in the other 5 countries.

My first thought on seeing McKinsey's “Closing the Talent Gap”

Where's Canada?

Here's the PDF of the report via this post from Matthew Yglesias. It just crossed my desktop and I have to be on the road in about five minutes. I've just had time to skim the report so I may be missing the obvious but the absence of our northern neighbor strikes me as strange, particularly given the report's use of PISA data.

Forget teachers-- hell, forget employees, what does it take to fire a CEO?

One of the fundamental tenets of the modern educational reform movement is faith in the private sector. In the last post, I discussed the contradictions in using that faith to justify attrition policies that are pretty much unheard of in the corporate world.

There's a second potential danger in looking to the private sector for answers. Companies are not very transparent. Most go to great lengths to hide incompetence and depict every effort as a success. There's nothing illegal or even unethical about this. If anything, the people who run a company have an obligation to present it in the best possible light.

Though you can't blame businesses for spinning their results, you can get into a great deal of trouble by imitating them. For example, a school system might adopt an innovative system of project management and never know that it was responsible for hundreds of millions in cost overruns.

Occasionally, however, you will run into a corporate screw-up so massive that no degree of opacity, no amount of spin can obscure it. When you encounter one of these, you should take a moment to remind yourself that the snafus that break the surface represent a minute share of the general population.

Which brings us to Jeff Zucker.

Zucker was brought in as president of NBC Entertainment in 2000 after a stint at the Today Show where his most notable accomplishments were moving the studio and introducing the Today Show's outdoor rock concert series.*

His tenure on the Today Show represented one of Zucker's two specialities: making tiny tweaks to a hit then claiming credit for its success. The other speciality was screwing up on an almost biblical scale. Under Zucker, NBC was the first network to ever go from first to fourth place and he came very close to destroying their lucrative late night slate. According to an executive for another network (quoted by Maureen Dowd), "Zucker is a case study in the most destructive media executive ever to exist... You’d have to tell me who else has taken a once-great network and literally destroyed it."

Zucker was grossly incompetent. The cost to share holders is difficult to estimate but it's probably in the hundreds of millions (possibly billions**). His poor performance was widely discussed in the industry.

And yet it took a change of ownership to force him out and he still gets terms like these:

Zucker's contract had been renewed last year to run through January 2013 with an annual salary of $6.3 million and a guaranteed annual bonus*** of $1.5 million. If he leaves by January, he can expect at least a $15.6 million check.

The moral of this story is: next time people tell you that schools should be run like a business, make sure to ask them which business they have in mind.




* Apparently the Today Show has an outdoor rock concert series.


** Here are some numbers from Wikipedia to put things in context:

On December 1, 2009, CNBC reported that a tentative agreement had been reached between Comcast and GE.^[26] The deal was formally announced on December 3, 2009.^[7] Under the agreement, NBC Universal would be 51% owned by Comcast and 49% by GE. Comcast is to pay $6.5 billion cash to GE. Comcast will also contribute $7.5 billion in programming including regional sports networks and cable channels such as Golf Channel and E! Entertainment Television. GE plans to use some of the funds, $5.8 billion, to buy out Vivendi's 20% minority stake in NBC Universal.^[7] After the transaction completes, Comcast will reserve the right to buy out GE's share at certain times. GE will also reserve the right to force the sale of their stake within the first seven years. The deal is subject to regulatory approval.^[7]

Vivendi will sell 7.66% of NBC Universal to GE for US$2 billion if the GE/Comcast deal is not completed by September 2010 and then sell the remaining 12.34% stake of NBC Universal to GE for US$3.8 billion when the deal is completed or to the public via an IPO if the deal is not completed.^[27][28]

*** I just love the idea of a "guaranteed annual bonus."

Forget teachers, what does it take to fire an incompetent corporate employee?

We have often heard (and I do mean often) that schools need to emulate the firing practices of corporations and promptly fire the incompetent regardless of tenure with the institution.

One of the flaws with this suggestion is that corporations don't actually do this. Anyone who has built attrition models for a large company can tell you that, unlike layoffs, firings of employees with more than four years of tenure are extremely rare. Defenders of corporate practices would argue that those employees who make it to the four year mark are almost all competent, that pretty much everybody you'd want to fire has quit or been fired by that time.

The trouble with this defense is that, though it may be perfectly reasonable in isolation, it is difficult to reconcile with the standard reform argument. You can't believe that the culling process is this effective and still accept the premises that education should follow the corporate model and large scale firings of tenured teachers will significantly improve our schools.

Moving past that paradox, how do corporations handle the occasional incompetent? Even if we stipulate to an amazingly effective culling process, a few losers will inevitably make it through. Anyone who has logged some time in cubeville will tell you these people can be difficult to dislodge. Removing them disrupts the company, hurts morale and entails admitting a huge mistake. Faced with with all this, companies often employ the same strategies that reformers decry in schools -- they either shuffle incompetents off into meaningless make-work jobs or they leave them where they are.

Most of the incompetents go unseen by the general public but there are some conspicuous exceptions, something I'll save for the next post.

Alphametics, the SAT and the theory behind math tests

I once saw an alphametic in an SAT question -- simpler than this one but with the same basic principle. My first thought (after, "Was that an alphametic?") was what a great question.

Of course, solving alphmetics is a completely useless skill. No one has ever or will ever actually needed to do one of these. It is that very frivolousness that makes it such a good question for a college entrance exam. It requires sophisticated mathematical reasoning but it comes in a form almost none of the students will have seen before.

For comparison, consider a problem you would not see on the SAT*, factoring a trinomial that wasn't the square of a binomial (this is another skill you'll never actually need but it's not a bad way for students to get a feel for working with polynomials). Let's look a two students who got the problem right:

Student one hasn't taken algebra since junior high but understands the fundamental relationships, finds the correct answer by multiplying out the possibilities;

Student two was recently taught an algorithm for factoring, doesn't really understand the foundation but is able to grind out the right answer.

Obviously, we have a confounding problem here, and a fairly common one at that. We would like to identify understanding and long term retention but these can easily be confused with familiarity with recently presented information (particularly when certain teachers bend their schedules and curricula out of shape to teach to the test). The people behind SAT have partly addressed this confounding by including puzzle-type questions that most students would be unfamiliar with.**

All too often, the people behind other standardized tests deal with the issue by pretending it doesn't exist.




* Not to be confused with the SAT II, which is a different and less interesting test.

** The type of kid who reads Martin Gardner books for recreation would generally do fine on the SAT even without the familiarity factor (though the prom may not go as well).

Battered Party Syndrome?

Joseph and I generally try to avoid being overly political in this forum but just in terms of behavioral science, the following question is going to bother me all day.

Have the Democrats actually reached the stage where they will refuse to take an overwhelmingly popular position because, when they win, it makes the Republicans mad?

An alphametic pre-footnote

Light posting today, but since I'll be mentioning alphametics in an upcoming post I thought I'd give you something to chew on while you're waiting.

In 1924, the great Henry Dudeney published the following puzzle in the Strand Magazine:

S E N D

+ M O R E
__________________

M O N E Y

Each letter here represents a digit 0 through 9. If you substitute in the proper digits, the first two numbers (words) should add up to the third.

No one who reads this blog should have any trouble with this, but if you do, Wikipedia has a good step-by-step solution (though it does assume a passing acquaintance with number theory).

One more while we're on the subject

Though my recent posts on the subject have been a bit one-sided, I have to share my favorite example of copyrights being used to suppress (or at least attempt to suppress) creative output.

In 1994, Saul Zaentz, the man who had acquired the rights to the music of Credence Clearwater Revival sued John Fogerty for plagiarism because a song on Fogerty's latest album (which Fogerty wrote, played and sang) sounded like a CCR song (which Fogerty also wrote, played and sang). In other words an artist was basically sued for sounding like himself.

Zaentz lost and had to pay the court costs, but if Fogerty hadn't been a famous rock star with a new hit record on Warner Bros., how for do you think he would have gotten?

Intellectual Property and Monopsony

Joseph and I seem to be on a binge (purge?) of intellectual property posts, collecting piles of facts and observations on the subject. Somewhere in one of those piles we need to make room for the concept of monopsony.

From Wikipedia:

In economics, a monopsony (from Ancient Greek μόνος (monos) "single" + ὀψωνία (opsōnia) "purchase") is a market form in which only one buyer faces many sellers. It is an example of imperfect competition, similar to a monopoly, in which only one seller faces many buyers. As the only purchaser of a good or service, the "monopsonist" may dictate terms to its suppliers in the same manner that a monopolist controls the market for its buyers.

In entertainment, the norm is to have a huge number of artists trying to sell their products or services to a small number of buyers. Not only are there few buyers but access to these buyers is tightly controlled. The result can be an effective monopsony.

The results can look like this:

CrazySexyCool eventually sold over 11 million copies in the US, and became one of the first albums to ever receive a diamond certification from the RIAA,^[12] and won a 1996 Grammy Award for Best R&B Album and a 1996 Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group for "Creep".^[6] However, in the midst of their apparent success, the members of TLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 3, 1995.^[16]

They declared debts totaling 3.5 million dollars, ... the primary reason being that each member of the group was taking home less than $35,000 a year after paying managers, producers, expenses, and taxes.

Here the New York Times spells out some of those expenses:

The arithmetic is simple and sobering for aspiring stars: The average wholesale price of compact discs and cassettes is about $8 a unit. Thus, an artist with a 12 percent royalty rate, which is typical, gets about 96 cents per unit, or $480,000 on a "gold" record. From that, the record label recoups a portion of its advances to the artist for recording costs, music video production, tour support, independent promotional efforts, limousine services and so forth -- often as much as $170,000.

In other words TLC, which was only getting a seven percent royalty rate, was paying for pretty much everything, including a million or so just for the video for "Waterfalls."

The history of popular entertainment is filled with examples of creators selling million (sometimes multimillion) dollar properties for the equivalent of kind words and PEZ. This is not something you find in an efficient market.

A very good point

Tyler Cowen has a very good point:

Social Security offers cash benefits, whereas Medicare is an in-kind benefit, in the form of health care (which in turn is distinct from health, itself another in-kind benefit). Therefore always cut Medicare first.

That's all.

I think there may be come cases where this view is incorrect on the margins. But as a general principle it should be front and center in the public debate (especially given that, at the moment, the two programs are roughly equal in cost).

After all, treatment for medical conditions is nice but basic food and shelter might be preferable, if one can only have one of the two. If one can have both that is obviously better but it is worth noting Paul Krugman's point on which program has sounder finances going forward.

Other degrees of patent protection

Mark has a very interesting post on the length of copyright of intellectual property. I thought that I would compare these laws (which appear to give nearly 100 years of protection) to those for pharmacuetical drugs. From wikipedia:

In the US, drug patents give twenty years of protection, but they are applied for before clinical trials begin, so the effective life of a drug patent tends to be between seven and twelve years.

Medications have enormous development costs, the low end of the estimates are $100 to $200 million dollars (the cost of the clinical trials, alone, is enormous). Yet we are content to give them an effective period of copyright of seven to twelve years.

This is an area of copyright law where we have attempted to balance the need to reimburse development costs with the value of allowing an innovation into the open market. Why do we see laws that are so much stricter with ideas like "Mickey Mouse" and "Superhero"?

It is certainly food for thought!

Alice in Lawyerland: would the laws Disney lobbied for have prevented Disney from existing in the first place?

(disclaimer: I have cashed a number of royalties checks over the years so the following is obviously not an attack on the concept of intellectual property. I like royalty checks. I'm just worried about the consequences of taking these things to an extreme.)

In 1998, the Walt Disney company had a problem: their company mascot was turning 70. Mickey Mouse had debuted in 1928's "Mickey Mouse In Plane Crazy" which meant that unless something was done, Mickey would enter the public domain within a decade. This was a job for lobbyists, lots of lobbyists.

From Wikipedia:

The Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998 extended copyright terms in the United States by 20 years. Since the Copyright Act of 1976, copyright would last for the life of the author plus 50 years, or 75 years for a work of corporate authorship. The Act extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier. Copyright protection for works published prior to January 1, 1978, was increased by 20 years to a total of 95 years from their publication date.

This law, also known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Sonny Bono Act, or pejoratively as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act,[2] effectively "froze" the advancement date of the public domain in the United States for works covered by the older fixed term copyright rules. Under this Act, additional works made in 1923 or afterwards that were still copyrighted in 1998 will not enter the public domain until 2019 or afterward (depending on the date of the product) unless the owner of the copyright releases them into the public domain prior to that or if the copyright gets extended again. Unlike copyright extension legislation in the European Union, the Sonny Bono Act did not revive copyrights that had already expired. The Act did extend the terms of protection set for works that were already copyrighted, and is retroactive in that sense.

Mickey had been Disney's biggest hit but he wasn't their first. The studio had established itself with a series of comedies in the early Twenties about a live-action little girl named Alice who found herself in an animated wonderland. In case anyone missed the connection, the debut was actually called "Alice's Wonderland." The Alice Comedies were the series that allowed Disney to leave Kansas and set up his Hollywood studio.

For context, Lewis Carroll published the Alice books, Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, in 1865 and 1871 and died in 1898. Even under the law that preceded the Mouse Protection Act, Alice would have been the property of Carroll's estate and "Alice's Wonderland" was a far more clear-cut example of infringement than were many of the cases Disney has pursued over the years.

In other words, if present laws and attitudes about intellectual property had been around in the Twenties, the company that lobbied hardest for them might never have existed.

There's nothing unusual about a small company or start-up exploiting lapsed or unenforced copyrights to get a foothold. The public domain has long been fertile ground for stage companies, record companies, publishers, and producers of movies or radio and television; it's just been getting a lot less fertile lately.

Instrumental Variables

Reading this post by Andrew Gelman got me thinking: how do we really know if a variable is an instrument? Demonstrating that a variable is an instrument often seems to be a matter of telling a compelling clinical story but leaves one with strong and unverifiable assumptions.

This is a real issue with the Physician Preference instrument in pharmacoepidemiology where it has the potential to be either a major advance or a blind alley. But how would one know for sure? I suspect that it is more likely the former than the latter but sorting this out with any level of certainty isn't easy.

Any insights out there?

Study: Teacher bonuses don't affect student tests

from the AP:

ATLANTA – A study released Tuesday found that offering performance bonuses to teachers does nothing to raise test scores, raising doubts about the viability of the Obama administration's push for merit pay to improve education.

The study released Tuesday by Vanderbilt University's National Center on Performance Incentives researchers found that students in classrooms where teachers received bonuses saw the same gains as the classes where educators got no incentive.

"I think most people agree today that the current way in which we compensate teachers is broken," said Matthew Springer, executive director of the Vanderbilt center and lead researcher on the study. "But we don't know what the better way is yet."

The ultimate superpower is litigation

As part of our ongoing series on the surreal world of intellectual property (see the last post), here's a fun fact from comic book writer and historian Don Markstein:

Marvel and DC Comics are arch-rivals when it comes to market share in the comic book industry. But they're capable of an amazing degree of cooperation when it comes to maintaining their shared position as the industry's leaders. One of the ways they cooperate is in maintaining a joint trademark on the word "superhero" — as if Charlton, Harvey, Archie, ACG and Gold Key, to name only a few of the dozens that used both the genre and the word back before they established their mutual legal hegemony over it, never existed — to say nothing of Dark Horse, Image and others that use the genre today and aren't permitted to use the word.

In fact, here's a Dell comic book that actually made the term its very title, long before Marvel and DC decided to sew up rights to it. This should serve as a beacon to anyone willing to attempt to withstand the mighty onslaught of their lawyers, and point out that the word was in general use, with nobody even attempting to prevent others' using it, even before Superman.