Free Markets and Efficiency

There has been a lot of talk about how efficient private markets are.  So, when UPS and Target had pretty major problems, it become something of a cliché to point out that they were not making the market look so great.  I look at this issue differently -- large organizations always have efficiency, transparency, and coordination issues.  Governments get a bad rap because, by and large, they are large organizations. 

Adam Smith talked about, in the Wealth of Nations, how the streets of London were better lit because it was the municipal government providing the service.  He also had serious issues with corporations, mostly because they have precisely the issues he saw in government. 

So the myth that I would like to slay is that government is inherently inefficient.  Large organizations are inherently inefficient.  However, there are returns to scale that are extremely important.  It is useful to have a large polity to have a robust army -- it's not typical for the outnumbered army to win due to quality unless the size gap is small (just ask Napoleon about Russia).  But nobody would think Russia in 1812 was a more modern or efficient society than France. 

So this doesn't mean that we shouldn't have corporations (or government for that matter) or that we shouldn't ask for better administration (we should).  But it does mean that we should think carefully about what things are best done by which kind of organization.  It's not shocking that Kentucky (smaller than the federal government) seems to have implemented health care exchanges more efficiently.  On the other hand, a uniform legal system is something that we want implemented as broadly as possible and for which we are already willing to accept some efficiency trade-offs.

So I think the real issue is that real life is a game of rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock.  Picking the correct level at which to solve a problem is half of the battle.  Target, for example, is a fine retailer and I have had a lot of positive shopping experience there.  I use UPS and Amazon all of the time and I am delighted by the median level of service.  But I was caught in both the Target hack and had a present for my wife come the day after Christmas.  I recognize that everything is a compromise.

So I guess my wish for the new year is that we could reframe the debate into "better government" and "better business" -- just improving matters in general.  That might be a much more useful approach to the whole debate.

And, before I forget, Happy New Year from OE to our readers. 

“Because she wanted to.”

Over at Valerie Strauss's essential Washington Post column, principal Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York has a must read guest post on Common Core. The whole piece is excellent but given our renewed focus on the math curriculum, I wanted to highlight the following:

My music teacher, Doreen, brought me her second-grade daughter’s math homework.  She was already fuming over Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s remark about why “white suburban moms” oppose the Common Core, and the homework added fuel to the fire. The problem that disturbed her the most was the following:

3. Sally did some counting. Look at her work. Explain why you think Sally counted this way.

177, 178,179,180, 190,200, 210, 211,212,213,214.

It was on a homework sheet from the New York State Common Core Mathematics Curriculum for Grade 2, which you can find here.

Doreen’s daughter had no idea how to answer this odd question. The only response that made sense to her was, “Because she wanted to.” My assistant principal and math specialist, Don Chung, found the question to be indefensible.

The teachers in her daughter’s school are also concerned.  They are startled to find that the curriculum is often a script. Here is an excerpt to teach students to add using beads from the first-grade module.

T: How many tens do you see?

S:1

T: How many ones?

S: 6

T: Say the number the Say Ten way.

S: Ten 6

Scripts like this are commonplace throughout the curriculum.

Similar headaches exist at the secondary level as well. A relative, who is required to teach Common Core Algebra from the modules, shared her worries about the curriculum’s conceptual gaps, disjointed and illogical concept progressions, and insufficient time to complete lessons.

I'll be filling these points out in more detail later, but here are a few quick points:

These examples and complaints are representative of most of the reaction I've been hearing about Common Core Math. Here's another interesting example I'll probably be discussing more soon;

As mentioned before, scripted lessons tend to produce more convergent learning. This is good for standardized tests;

Scripts also have a Harrison Bergeron effect on teachers. Even in a lecture, teaching is as much conversation as presentation. You always need to listen to the students -- even if it's just to their expressions and body language -- and shape what you're saying accordingly. Scripts discourage these conversations. But while scripted lessons are very seldom optimal for any competent teacher, they are the most sub-optimal for the best teachers;

Kids have a natural tendency to go off script. It is possible to suppress this tendency but it is not always advisable;

Note the complaint about "insufficient time to complete lessons." In many ways, the CC approach appears to have been designed to favor KIPP-type schools, institutions with extended school hours and calendars, regimented class culture and disproportionately inexperienced teachers. That's not that wild of a supposition when you consider the popularity of the model, the influence of its adherents and the antipathy of the reform movement to firewalls and conflict of interest concerns;

Deeper in the weeds but arguably more important is the role of Taylorism here. The reform movement has long had a weakness for certain kinds of business theory involving management and compensation, theories that resonate with consultants but fare badly in the field. Stack ranking is probably the example that's gotten the most press recently but I'd argue Taylorism is the most influential.

Fredrick Taylor always had a rather questionable foundation (particularly involving data) and his methods have been associated with some rather notable failures. Nonetheless, he set the business model and the culture of modern management consulting, a mindset that is tremendously important in the reform movement. Given all that, it's not too surprising to learn that possibly the most important figure in the new curriculum movement, David Coleman, got into the education field without any teaching experience due to his work as a consultant with McKinsey & Company.

Weekend blogging -- In Memoriam

Peter O'Toole

Michael Ansara

Ray Harryhausen

Richard Matheson

Jean Stapleton

Jonathan Winters













(Ansara was also Mr. Eden)

A holiday message from the creative class to Richard Florida -- screw you

Last Saturday was the big party of the year for the LA hot jazz/country blues scene. Droves of musicians, actors, writers and directors converge on a small house in Venice Beach, along with a smattering of historians and engineers (sound and software). Every year, numerous people make an allusion to the stateroom scene in Night at the Opera (and with this crowd, everyone gets the reference). There weren't any famous faces (unless you're really into jazz or roots music), but it was an accomplished crowd with Grammys, Broadway credits, glowing NYT, WSJ and NPR reviews and numerous impressive collaborations.

A few hours in, it struck me that almost all of the people at this party fell squarely into Richard Florida's creative class. In fact, most of the people I associate with on a regular basis fall into Florida's rather broad definition. What I heard last night further reinforced some things I've been observing for years now about the disconnect between the picture painted by pundits and social commentators and what it actually means to make a living through creativity in today's economy. It's a complicated situation but I think I can boil the gist down into the following fairly brief statement:

Screw you, Florida.

The super- creative core of this new class includes scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designers, and architects, as well as the "thought leadership" of modern society: nonfiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts, and other opinion-makers.

From "The Rise of the Creative Class" by Richard Florida

Florida paints a bright picture of these people and their future, with rapidly increasing numbers, influence and wealth. He goes so far as to say "Places that succeed in attracting and retaining creative class people prosper; those that fail don't." It wass hard to read something by Florida and not envy that rising class, at least it was until it hit me that he was talking about me and people I knew and our lives weren't going nearly as well as he suggested. As Thomas Frank put it "The creative class has never been more screwed."

Except for a few special cases, this may be the worst time to make a living in the arts since the emergence of modern newspapers and general interest magazines and other mass media a hundred and twenty years ago (even in the depression you had the WPA -- “Artists have to eat too”). Though we now have tools that make creating and disseminating art easier than ever, no one has come up with a viable business model that supports creation in today's economy.

With the exception of a few select areas where you can find lots of wealthy patrons, it's just not a reasonable career path. At the party this weekend, out of dozens of nationally and internationally recognized musicians, perhaps three or four were making a middle-class or better living at their craft; most were either getting by on very modest means and/or had day jobs.   Artistic professions used to have teaching to fall back on but those jobs have been getting crappier and yet harder to find over the past thirty or so years.

The picture is somewhat brighter on the STEM side, but not that much brighter. The collapse of teaching has hit us too. In the private sector, it's hit-or-miss if you're not flavor of the month and even if you are among the lucky few:

Companies (including the hungry ones) have gotten surprisingly picky;

You'll probably need a graduate degree (and the debt that goes with it);

There's little security even while you're hot;

The specialists who get the most money are also the most vulnerable to changes in tech and taste.

In other words, it's a lottery ticket and, considering the odds, the pay-off isn't all that great.

Florida's framework has rather publicly come crashing down lately, but, even at its peak, it never stood up to serious scrutiny. Like most of the utopian urbanists, his collection of anecdotes, cherry-picked statistics and wildly unjustified causal inference was only convincing because people wanted to be convinced.

MOOCs and analogies

Matt Yglesias has a very nice post pointing out the issues of over-hyping MOOCs as a way to transform education.  He points out that TV watching of sports hasn't reduced demand for live attendance of sporting events:

At any rate, it would be dumb to assume or assert that the ability to watch education videos online will have the exact same relationship to live instruction that television has to live sports. The analogy is instructive simply because it's difficult to summarize all the ways that TV broadcasts have changed sports. In some ways, access is broader and more egalitarian than ever. In other ways, access is narrower and more exclusionary than ever. In some ways you see substitution. In other ways you see complentarity. It's complicated.

 This isn't a unique insight (I heard Mark Palko talk at length about how VCRs did not disrupt classroom teaching in any important way).  But it is important to remember that the potential to disrupt is not the same as actual disruption.  Nor may the interplay between live and broadcast media be simple and straightforward. 

More on the complicated politics (racial and otherwise) of the education reform movement

Like NYC, Chicago has been in the forefront of the reform movement, particularly when it comes to replacing traditional schools with charters and, like most of the country, it has been the site of increased push back over the past couple of years from parents, teachers' groups and surprisingly aggressive journalists.

One target has been the United Neighborhood Organization and its executive director Juan Rangel. This piece by the Chicago Reader's Mick Dumke and Ben Joravsky from back in 2012 nicely illustrates some points made previously about the way many reformers use racial politics:

The United Neighborhood Organization is the former Alinsky-styled community group that's built an empire of 11 charters and counting through what executive director Juan Rangel describes as years of "hard work."

What he doesn't stress quite as much is the political clout and connections UNO has cultivated with mayors Richard Daley and Rahm Emanuel, as well as Governor Pat Quinn, to the tune of about $30 million a year in public funding. And counting.

As for the Reader, well, in our tongue-in-cheek political roundup to close out 2011, we honored Rangel, in a manner of speaking, with the Halliburton Award, given to the private contractor who quietly runs a wing of government.

To his credit Rangel hit us right back, posting a link to the piece on his Facebook page with his own snarky wisecrack: "I usually don't promote the rants of people who despise charter schools, who are knee-jerk UNO haters or who just plain loathe successful Hispanics, but this week's Chicago Reader made me LMAO.... Check it out! If you want a hard copy, you can find one in any gentrified neighborhood where Hispanics have been displaced."

To the credit of both Rangel and the journalists, they managed to arrange an interview and a tour of one of the chain's schools.

Another row of children—all wearing the UNO brand—obediently files down the hall.

"Look at these kids. There are people who say they can't stand in a straight line. We're here to say it's doable. [The accusation that critics of charter schools don't believe that minority kids can succeed is a common piece of movement rhetoric. The part about not being able to stand in a straight line is a new one on me. MP]

"White liberals, they think they know what's best for our community. This community has a lot of assets—it's family oriented, there's good housing here. But the schools are crappy."

And the schools are crappy, he says, because some people send the message that it's normal for Hispanic kids to fail. And most of those people are white liberals.

In fact, Rangel keeps bringing up white liberals until we ask who exactly he's talking about. What about his white liberal benefactors and supporters, such as Arne Duncan, school board member Penny Pritzker, state senator Heather Steans—and Rahm Emanuel?

Rangel doesn't say a word.

But Mayor Emanuel's a white liberal, isn't he?

Pause.

Let's take it step by step. We all agree that he's white—right?

Nervous laughter.

OK, back to that tour . . .

As long as we're on the subject of Mayor Emanuel, we note that he seems to visit UNO schools a lot—using them as a backdrop when he holds a press conference to rip the regular public schools or the teachers union.

"I don't think that's a prop," says Rangel. "I don't have a problem when the mayor or others highlight us as example. We're very proud of that. People say we've sold out and all that, but we're still pushing the envelope. You can't say we're not out there. You can disagree with what we do, but you can't say we're not doing something."

In short, he's not apologizing for presenting UNO as the voice of Hispanics in Chicago. "When people say, 'How does UNO get a $98 million windfall in these tough budget times?' Well, that's for them to figure out."

I came across this interview because Rangel is back in the news due to another aspect of the reform debate, the way that the cozy relationships between the reform advocates in office and the advocates in business is raising concerns.

Dan Mihalopoulos off the Sun Times has generally taken lead on this part of the story:

Juan Rangel, longtime leader of the clout-heavy United Neighborhood Organization, is out as UNO’s $250,000-a-year chief executive in the wake of a scandal that cost the group millions in state funding and led to a federal investigation of its bond dealings. Rangel’s departure “by mutual agreement” with the board of the not-for-profit group that operates the largest charter school network in Illinois is effective immediately, UNO officials said Friday. Rangel had three family members on the UNO payroll. Sources said two of them quit recently, including Rangel’s nephew Carlos Jaramillo, UNO’s deputy chief of staff.
...

Rangel has close ties to politicians including Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose 2011 campaign Rangel co-chaired, Ald. Edward M. Burke (14th) and Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago), who sponsored a $98 million state school-construction grant to UNO in 2009. The state money — believed to be the largest government subsidy for charter schools in the country — fueled UNO’s rapid growth as a
charter operator. But the way UNO spent the money helped bring an end to Rangel’s rapid rise in Chicago politics.

Rangel’s top aide, Miguel d’Escoto, resigned in February, days after the Chicago Sun-Times reported UNO had given $8.5 million of business — paid for with the state grant — to companies owned by two of d’Escoto’s brothers. The revelation prompted Gov. Pat Quinn to suspend grant payments to UNO in April, which temporarily halted construction of a new UNO high school on the Southwest Side.

Rangel offered a public apology, saying he had “failed to exercise proper oversight.”

Quinn lifted the suspension, and work on the UNO Soccer Academy Charter High School resumed. But Quinn disclosed recently that he has suspended payments from the remaining $15 million after the federal Securities and Exchange Commission began investigating UNO over its bond dealings.

In September, the SEC’s enforcement division in Chicago told UNO the agency “is conducting an investigation . . . to determine if violations of the federal securities laws have occurred.” The SEC asked for documents related to $37.5 million the group borrowed from private investors, as well as records involving the state grant.

Happy Holidays from XKCD

Christmas from the Archive

The Internet Archive to be specific. Lots of fascinating stuff here. A music historian I know has an ongoing project digging through the radio collection and he's constantly coming up with something of artistic or historical interest. (If any pop culture historian would care to join the fray, take a look at "Singles and Doubles," a collection of shows with only one or two known episodes. )

Here are some Christmas-themed videos I dug up from the Archive. No new finds, but plenty of off-beat clips. We've got:

Two shorts from Edison studios;

Two non-jolly Christmas episodes from the original Dragnet;

An influential animated feature from the Soviet Union, with some very American added footage;

An early effort by Jean Renoir;

The debut production of the Hallmark Hall of Fame;

A CBS News special report from the mid-Sixties, interesting both for its subject matter and its reminder of how much TV news has changed over the years.


A Christmas Carol (1910)





The Night Before Christmas




A Gun For Christmas





The Big Little Jesus (1953)





The Snow Queen (Animation) (1959)






The Little Match Girl





C (Dec. 24, 1951)



Christmas In Appalachia, 1965

More evidence that the NYT feels strongly enough about education to take a stand, not strongly enough to follow the debate

As previously mentioned, this NYT editorial managed to get the Shanghai PISA story so wrong that they praised China for following pretty much the opposite of its actual policy. The questions about Shanghai's test scores have been widely covered in publications like the Washington Post so, barring the possibility of an incredibly clumsy bluff, it appears that the NYT editorial board made no attempt to follow the story beyond skimming O.E.C.D. press releases.

This isn't an isolated case; it's a trend in the NYT editorial page coverage of education reform. In just this one op-ed, in addition to the up-is-down Shanghai claim, we have:

National Council on Teacher Quality's report on teacher prep programs being treated as authoritative despite having been largely discredited by Rutgers' Bruce Baker and numerous others (among other problems, the NCTQ study's methodology mainly consisted of looking at course names in school catalogs);

Canada cited as a model without mentioning that the country's education policy consists largely of taking the NYT-endorsed tenets of the reform movement (more charters, choice, and accountability, less teacher autonomy and tenure) and doing the opposite;

Completely omitting Sweden, the country that, by some standards, most fully embraced American style reform and which then saw its PISA scores drop like a stone;

Ignoring the historical context that shows that the U.S. has always been in the middle of the pack on international math tests, even when we were in the process of putting a man on the moon.

I might give them a partial pass on Sweden -- the topic was, after all, countries that were doing better than us -- but still...

401(k) plans: a never-ending story

I have worried about this issue before, but it is never bad to keep up with the reminders:

 If you have a 401(k) plan through your employer or an IRA or other investment account through your bank, the financial institution may try to set you up with a "financial adviser" to help steer your investment decision-making. This person will claim to be giving you advice in your own interest but in fact is under no legal or professional obligation to advance your interests. His real job is to steer you into high fee products that are lucrative for his employer. This is not criminal fraud that the FBI will investigate. It's not a civil offense that the SEC will investigate. It's not illegal. The Labor Department tried to change the rule and impose a fiduciary standard at least for employer-sponsored plans but congress stepped in to tell them no. You're never going to have a world without some sociopaths breaking the rules (read Josh Levin's amazing reporting for a spectacular example) but what we have is a world where congress steps in to make sure that deliberately peddling bad advice to middle-class savers isn't against the rules.

The part of this that I find the most painful is that these problems are occurring in parallel with a quest to reduce the level of social security.  People seem to get a reputation for being "tough-talking realists" for saying that entitlement spending (especially retirement funding) is unsustainable.  But there is no essential need for companies to try and hide the costs of these funds and the realistic impact that has on the rate of return.  In fact, doing so would be a positive social good in that people could save at more realistic levels.

On the other hand, 401(k) have a captive audience (you can't change your 401(k) provider without changing your job).  So they have a vested interest in extracting as much value as possible from the investors as the person who decided to contract with them is the employer.  So long as the people invested in the plan don't realize (while they are employees) that the plan gave bad advice, there is little impact to the employer.  So a classic principal agent problem. 

But there is no fiscal reason to do this to retirees.  After all, high profits for private firms should not be a political goal that trumps everything else.  And reputation won't matter as firms can always re-incorporate or change their name. 

So this suggests a different agenda -- not to improve retirement conditions for older adults but to support the finance industry.  Industry support is fine, but it really should be transparent. 

The Shanghai Surprise -- something that people who followed the PISA story closely were already talking about

In the wake of the release of the PISA scores, one of the big topics was Tom Loveless's Brookings research which seemed to show that not only was Shanghai unrepresentative of China but the city's PISA scores weren't actually representative of the city.

Theoretically, at least, the ban against Shanghai’s migrant children attending primary and middle schools (up to age 14) was lifted in 2008.  For high schools (and the potential PISA population), Shanghai adopted a point system allowing some migrant children with highly educated parents or other high status characteristics to attend.  That system went into effect July 1, 2013 so it is too early to gauge the impact of this very modest reform.  And it obviously would have had no effect on Shanghai’s school population for PISA 2012.

The barriers to migrants attending Shanghai’s high schools remain almost insurmountable.   High schools in Shanghai charge fees. Sometimes the fees are legal, but often in China, they are no more than bribes, as the Washington Post has reported.  Students must take the national exam for college (gaokao) in the province that issued their hukou.  An annual mass exodus of adolescents from city to countryside takes place, back to impoverished rural schools.  At least there, migrant kids might have a shot at college admission.  This phenomenon is unheard of anywhere else in the world; it’s as if a sorcerer snaps his fingers, and millions of urban teens suddenly disappear.

The story was widely covered. The Washington Post's Valerie Strauss did an excellent summary. Joshua Keating also had a good write-up at Slate. And not surprisingly, Diane Ravitch has been all over it.

All of these pieces came out before December 17, 2013, which was when the New York Times Editorial Board published this:

Shanghai: Fighting Elitism
China’s educational system was largely destroyed during Mao Zedong’s “cultural revolution,” which devalued intellectual pursuits and demonized academics. Since shortly after Mao’s death in 1976, the country has been rebuilding its education system at lightning speed, led by Shanghai, the nation’s largest and most internationalized city. Shanghai, of course, has powerful tools at its disposal, including the might of the authoritarian state and the nation’s centuries-old reverence for scholarship and education. It has had little difficulty advancing a potent succession of reforms that allowed it to achieve universal enrollment rapidly. The real proof is that its students were first in the world in math, science and literacy on last year’s international exams.

One of its strengths is that the city has mainly moved away from an elitist system in which greater resources and elite instructors were given to favored schools, and toward a more egalitarian, neighborhood attendance system in which students of diverse backgrounds and abilities are educated under the same roof. The city has focused on bringing the once-shunned children of migrant workers into the school system. In the words of the O.E.C.D, Shanghai has embraced the notion that migrant children are also “our children” — meaning that city’s future depends in part on them and that they, too, should be included in the educational process. Shanghai has taken several approaches to repairing the disparity between strong schools and weak ones, as measured by infrastructure and educational quality. Some poor schools were closed, reorganized, or merged with higher-level schools. Money was transferred to poor, rural schools to construct new buildings or update old ones. Teachers were transferred from cities to rural areas and vice versa. Stronger urban schools were paired with rural schools with the aim of improving teaching methods. And under a more recent strategy, strong schools took over the administration of weak ones. The Chinese are betting that the ethos, management style and teaching used in the strong schools will be transferable.

If you're curious, you can click here to see Tom Loveless's head exploding.on Twitter.

Our annual Toys-for-Tots post

[update: A reluctant plug for Toys 'R Us. They still carry metal Tonkas and at least here in LA they're having a sale on musical instruments with guitars and keyboards going for $20.]


A good Christmas can do a lot to take the edge off of a bad year both for children and their parents (and a lot of families are having a bad year). It's the season to pick up a few toys, drop them by the fire station and make some people feel good about themselves during what can be one of the toughest times of the year.

If you're new to the Toys-for-Tots concept, here are the rules I normally use when shopping:

The gifts should be nice enough to sit alone under a tree. The child who gets nothing else should still feel that he or she had a special Christmas. A large stuffed animal, a big metal truck, a large can of Legos with enough pieces to keep up with an active imagination. You can get any of these for around twenty or thirty bucks at Wal-Mart or Costco;*

Shop smart. The better the deals the more toys can go in your cart;

No batteries. (I'm a strong believer in kid power);**

Speaking of kid power, it's impossible to be sedentary while playing with a basketball;

No toys that need lots of accessories;

For games, you're generally better off going with a classic;

No movie or TV show tie-ins. (This one's kind of a personal quirk and I will make some exceptions like Sesame Street);

Look for something durable. These will have to last;

For smaller children, you really can't beat Fisher Price and PlaySkool. Both companies have mastered the art of coming up with cleverly designed toys that children love and that will stand up to generations of energetic and creative play.

*I previously used Target here, but their selection has been dropping over the past few years and it's gotten more difficult to find toys that meet my criteria.

** I'd like to soften this position just bit. It's okay for a toy to use batteries, just not to need them. Fisher Price and PlaySkool have both gotten into the habit of adding lights and sounds to classic toys, but when the batteries die, the toys live on, still powered by the energy of children at play.

Divergent and convergent educational outcomes -- the sour grapes effect

This is another topic that we've kicked around for a while that's recently become more relevant (from a previous post):

As much as I complained about them at the time, the education classes I had to take to get certified did have some highly useful concepts. One of those was the distinction between convergent learning (where you want all students to reach the same final answer) and divergent learning (where you want each student to come up with a unique answer). Before you made a lesson plan or write a test, you were supposed to ask yourself where you want to see convergence and where you want to see divergence.
...
There is an common but fatally naive misconception that convergent learning goes with math and science while divergent learning goes with arts and humanities. Almost all subjects start with a large convergent learning component including the arts (try picking up an instrument and see how much divergence your teacher tolerates in the first few lessons). More importantly, ALL subjects are fundamentally divergent at a high enough level. Writing a novel, composing a symphony, proving a conjecture or designing an aircraft are all creative exercises in constrained problem solving. We demand that certain conditions be met but we expect that each solution (or at least the method behind it) will be unique.

Pretty much by definition, divergent outcomes are problematic when it comes to metrics. This can lead to what we might call the sour grapes effect, convincing ourselves that a certain attribute isn't important because it's difficult to measure or to work with. "Looking where the light is good" is always a questionable strategy, but it becomes particularly worrisome when the results of the analysis are used to assign resources.

We are, of course, talking about huge amounts of money and there has been no real effort to insulate the parts of the reform movement coming up with radical changes in what we teach and how we teach it from the parties who stand to make billions of dollars from these changes. 

One of the "benefits" of highly standardized teaching methods (taken to its logical extreme in the large number of scripted presentations found in Common Core-based lessons) is that they tend to produce more convergent outcomes. Pedagogically, this convergence may actually be a bad thing, and indication that these students have not actually thought through the questions on their own. It does, however, make the outcomes much easier to measure.

Paradigm shift on trade and inequality

Life has been busy so posting is light. But this point by Matt Yglesias cannot be missed:

But of course this isn't something that just happened. A lot of research has come out in recent years indicating that contrary to the blithe assurances of economists expanded trade with China has in fact reduced the earnings of American workers substantially. At the same time, these developments have made America richer overall. Which is to say that the resources exist, in principle, to make investments in Social Security, education, universal health care, wage subsidies, etc. that leave everyone better off. We just haven't actually done those things. And that, at the end of the day, is my bottom line. The broad shape of the economy is always shifting. What matters for big distributional outcomes isn't really those shifts, it's what the political process does with them. Our process has done a little of what we should be doing (Obamacare, for example) but also a fair amount of the reverse—as seen in the relentless drive for Social Security cuts.

This insight is really the heart of the inequality discussion.  People try to frame it as a form of social justice (let people keep what they earn).  But access to markets is, and always has been, regulated by governments.  Even in the state of nature, customs arise to facilitate trade and barter. 

But the failure to redistribute really makes trade policy look stupid.  Why should workers sacrifice earning power so other people can become richer?  Sure, there is an "on average" issue.  But that is only interesting if the wealth is broadly shared.  The relentless attack on taxes and social security seems to break the implicit social contract of "if we are richer then we will all be better off".

Now add in this new stuff on Canadian exceptionalism  (more Canadians work more than Americans and the gap widened when the US cut tax rates) and it all looks like a "bill of goods".  After all, taxes might well be the mechanism by which the gains from improved trade wealth are shared.  And yes, there may be some deadweight loss, but one presumes that the increase in trade wealth is large or they wouldn't be worth capturing.

[EDIT: Frances Woolley has some smart things to say about Noah Smith's argument.  But we don't need the strong form he proposes to spot a problem.  The tax effect has to be massive to overcome the wealth distribution argument.  Some of the arguments, like the different marginal tax rate on the second earner, suggest tax policy reform and not necessarily lower taxes]

It's killing me that I am too busy to properly develop these points but they are really, really important. 

Treatments and payback curves

[Epidemiology examples used by marketing statistician -- proceed with caution.]

In one sense, education research is like much of the research done by epidemiologists: the outcomes researchers are most interested in are complex and take years, even decades to fully express themselves. In both cases, we are generally forced to rely on relatively simple, short-term indirect metrics.

Treatments (at least treatments with significant effects) are likely to have some effect on the relationship between the outcome and the indirect metrics. For certain questions, you're OK as long as the relationship maintains the same direction; for other questions, though, these changes have a way of unexpectedly causing serious problems.

One of the issues that comes up at this point is how short-term your metric can be. You might be able to get a read on the cardiovascular impact of a blood pressure drug in a couple of weeks.  The analogous impact of a diet and exercise program might take a year to show up. Health researchers are well aware of these concerns; education researchers, particularly those influential with the reform movement, tend to be more nonchalant about the robustness of short-term indirect metrics. Given the trend toward deferring pedagogical and policy decisions to these metrics, that's a big concern.

I pointed out a case earlier where learning a different approach to multiplication put a student at a disadvantage in elementary school but had a significant pay-off in more advanced grades. On the other end of the spectrum, there are methods of covering material that improve test scores for a short period but which don't necessarily lead to retention.

Ideally, the benefits of an education are spread out over decades. It may not be practical to measure those benefits directly, but we can keep in mind the limitations of our proxies. This point will be coming up again in this thread.