"An alternative explanation is the one I’ve explored in my writings on the disappearance of human labor from production.... My analysis of the political economy... is that we are experiencing a slow transition from a capitalist order in which accumulation is based on the exploitation of labor, into a “rentist” order based on rents accruing to land or intellectual property. Such a society is not, in my view, functionally compatible with the ideals of broadly-distributed critical thinking or practical work skills.
"In a rentist order, an increasing percentage of the population becomes superfluous as labor—but they are still necessary as consumers. For reasons of ideological legitimacy and political control, the fiction that everyone must “work” is maintained, but work itself must increasingly be pointless make-work. What kind of populace is suited to this habit of passive consumption and workday drudgery? One that accepts nonsensical and arbitrary rules—whether they are the rules of endless work or endless consumption. Students who learn to answer the questions the testing bureaucracy wants answered, irrespective of their relationship to scientific knowledge or logic, will be well trained to live in this world."

Comment: This line of argument seems to me much better suited as a rhetorical attack on these (truly stupid and awful) educational practices than serious social analysis. It's a way of saying "You think you want X? Let me tell you what X is good for, let me tell you what you'll get along with X, and you see if you really want it." Bertrand Russell used to argue like this all the time, but he didn't really believe that (e.g.) opponents of sex ed. truly wanted more syphilis. Similarly, I don't think that fools do things like this to schoolchildren because it makes them more suitable for the rentist society of the future; I think it is even more pointless and accidental than that.

"The people who watch over the students are known as invigilators. This is a fantastic word. Apparently it is standard British English. It is not a term unique to Rwanda. Since I am the faculty member whose class was taking the exam, I am listed as the chief invigilator. There is also usually a another faculty member present, known as a secondary invigilator."
I am definitely using this word the next time I give an in-class exam.

This actually looks more like a job for nonparametric regression, or even relative distribution comparisons, but still...

It's the comparison of the same teacher in the same year on the same subject but in different grades which clinches the model being an EPIC FAIL.

To be clear, the bad data analysis is on the part of whatever hacks came p with the value added model being used here. These results are insane.

"I think he is right about these kids being comfortable with the “formal process” of applying to investment banks etc., but I don’t think he dives deep enough into why this is true. The fact is, the kids who get into Harvard nowadays are, generally speaking, professional test takers. They are moreover dependent on outside metrics for evaluating themselves. If you took away tests and grading systems, these kids would be desperately unhappy, because that’s how they’ve been trained all their lives to think about their self-worth.
"When I was a tutor at one of the undergrad houses at grad school, I was incredibly impressed with the international group of undergrads I was in charge of; their credentials, even at the age of 20, were amazing, and their knowledge and self-possession were stunning. Same with the high school kids I taught at math camp last summer. But one thing I saw time and time again was how much they needed to please some outside authority. It’s like they never decided whether they themselves liked their major or whether it was a good fit- it was instead about whether they’d be successful and whether it would be an impressive path for them. So, external metrics of success.
"Here’s my diagnosis. These kids are vulnerable to Wall Street investment firms and to things like Teach for America because they have application processes at all. But life, normal adult life, doesn’t have an application process. You actually, at some point, need to figure out what you want to do and what makes you happy. You need to take a leap of faith that your native talents and desires will end you up at a reasonable and interesting place.
"Actually you don’t ever have to decide that, you could just keep doing what you think looks good to other people and pleases your parents or friends, without regard to whether it fulfills you at all. That’s kind of what’s happening I think with the 36% of the Princeton undergrads going to finance."

"Attention conservation notice: 3200 cranky words on the PhD over-supply "crisis.""

"A review of 39 studies indicated that achievement test scores decline over summer vacation. The results of the 13 most recent studies were combined using meta-analytic procedures. The meta-analysis indicated that the summer loss equaled about one month on a grade-level equivalent scale, or one tenth of a standard deviation relative to spring test scores. The effect of summer break was more detrimental for math than for reading and most detrimental for math computation and spelling. Also, middle-class students appeared to gain on grade-level equivalent reading recognition tests over summer while lower-class students lost on them. There were no moderating effects for student gender or race, but the negative effect of summer did increase with increases in students' grade levels. Suggested explanations for the findings include the differential availability of opportunities to practice different academic material over summer (with reading practice more available than math practice) and differences in the material's susceptibility to memory decay (with fact- and procedure-based knowledge more easily forgotten than conceptual knowledge). The income differences also may be related to differences in opportunities to practice and learn. The results are examined for implications concerning summer school programs and proposals concerning school calendar changes."

"Can you find the complete circuit? Can you identify different types of cellular life? Or help Darwin's finches choose their next meal? Of course you can! This silly collection of coloring pages includes more than 60 pages featuring classic Nerdy Baby line drawings. All of the letters of the alphabet are included with fun definitions. Kids can also color famous scientists, count subatomic particles, and imagine what will grow in their petri dishes. Equal parts nerdy and ridiculous, this book will challenge and delight the most precocious of young scientific minds."

"In reality, however, the numbers show that wage inflation is — literally — the least of the problems when it comes to university cost inflation. Check out this excellent report, for instance, entitled “Trends in College Spending, 1999-2009″. The first thing to note is on page 26: spending on faculty compensation is never more than 40% of total spending, and “has remained steady or decreased slightly over time”. Then have a look at the numbers.

Overall, if we exclude for-profit schools, which were a tiny part of the landscape in 1999, we have seen tuition fees rise by 32% between 1999 and 2009. Over the same period, instruction costs rose just 5.6% — the lowest rate of inflation of any of the components of education services. (“Student services costs” and “operations and maintenance costs” saw the greatest inflation, at 15.2% and 18.1% respectively, but even that is only half the rate that tuition increased.)

The real reason why tuition has been rising so much has nothing to do with Baumol, and everything to do with the government. Page 31 of the report is quite clear: “except for private research institutions,” it says, “tuitions were increasing almost exclusively to replace losses from state revenues or other private revenue sources.”

In other words, tuition costs are going up just because state subsidies are going down. Every time there’s a state fiscal crisis, subsidies get cut; once cut, they never get reinstated. And so the proportion of the cost of college which is borne by the student has been rising steadily for decades.

There are other culprits, too, behind the rise in tuition costs. Surowiecki touches on one when he talks about “the arms-race problem”, where “colleges compete to lure students by investing in expensive things, like high-profile faculty members, fancy facilities, and a low student-to-teacher ratio”. Another is simply the ever-increasing amounts of money being spent on administration rather than instruction. And a third is the fact that administrators at many high-profile universities have no incentive to decrease costs, and in fact have an incentive to increase costs, since total spending outlay tends to show up as an input in university-ranking algorithms.

But of all the reasons why tuition’s going up, teacher productivity is — literally — at the bottom of the list. Whether or not teachers today are or are not more productive than they were in 1980 (and I suspect that actually they are more productive), that’s not the reason student debt in America is approaching one trillion dollars."

To think through later.

"After fifteen years of teaching anthropology at a large university, Rebekah Nathan had become baffled by her own students. Their strange behavior—eating meals at their desks, not completing reading assignments, remaining silent through class discussions—made her feel as if she were dealing with a completely foreign culture. So Nathan decided to do what anthropologists do when confused by a different culture: Go live with them. She enrolled as a freshman, moved into the dorm, ate in the dining hall, and took a full load of courses. And she came to understand that being a student is a pretty difficult job, too. Her discoveries about contemporary undergraduate culture are surprising and her observations are invaluable, making My Freshman Year essential reading for students, parents, faculty, and anyone interested in educational policy." --- I'd not dream of DOING this, but I should probably read it.

"Celebrating pornographers who go the extra mile when set dressing classroom porn and actually write something on the blackboard. What do they write, and is it correct? (Humour site - Safe for work)"

"Procedural thinking may be the 21st century's most essential yet endangered way of thinking. Of course the best way of teaching it to your kids is to live in the 1980s and buy them a BBC Micro, but that is getting harder and harder in these days of touchscreens and it being 30 years too late. Now children's games designers Exploit (tm) have introduced a new range of children's games for exactly the purpose of teaching procedural thinking skills to your kids. Each game in the new range is designed to be played by children and adults together and involves rules of age appropriate complexity. Standard play of these games should allow the player with the most foresight and self-control to win most of the time (ie the adult). Within each ruleset, however, is hidden a loop-hole which, if discovered, should allow the unscrupulous player crushing victory after crushing victory. The thrill of discovering and using these loop-holes will train your kids in the vital skills of system analysis, procedural thinking and game theory. Parents can either play in "carrot" mode, feigning ignorance of each game's loop-hole and thus allowing their children the joy of discovery; or they can play in "stick" mode, exploiting the loop-hole for their own ends and using their child's inevitable defeat, amidst cries of "it's not fair!" as encouragement for them to engage their own ludic counter-measures."

See also Harris's summary paper in _Science_, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6044/826.full

I am a bit surprised that he doesn't point out that this year's teacher predicts last year's "value added".

Shorter; Incentives fail to elicit more effort when people are already working as hard as they can.

What was the Joan Didion line?  "Surprising absolutely no one who had bothered to think"?

"After five or ten more years, the mess they’re making in public schooling might be so undeniable that they’ll say, “Oops, that didn’t work” and step aside. But the damage might be irreparable: thousands of closed schools, worse conditions in those left open, an extreme degree of “teaching to the test,” demoralized teachers, rampant corruption by private management companies, thousands of failed charter schools, and more low-income kids without a good education. ...All children should have access to a good public school. And public schools should be run by officials who answer to the voters. Gates, Broad, and Walton answer to no one. Tax payers still fund more than 99 percent of the cost of K–12 education. Private foundations should not be setting public policy for them. Private money should not be producing what amounts to false advertising for a faulty product. The imperious overreaching of the Big Three undermines democracy just as surely as it damages public education."

Conversation with Kristina suggests an alternative hypothesis: going to a Big Name school raises your income in every profession; students have a target income level, and would rather do something socially redeeming/fun if it doesn't cost them too much; therefore students who go to Big Name schools don't earn more, on average, but might have a broader range of jobs.  Testable... Anyway, there are obviously big problems of self-selection and self-regulation involved here.

It would, I suppose, be unprofessional to print this out and tape it to my door before office hours and advising...

To put it the blurb "shorter" form: "Oppositional culture?  _What_ oppositional culture?"

"consequences of students ... not being randomly assigned to teachers within a school. It uses a [Value-Added Measure] to assign effects to teachers after controlling for other factors, but applies the model backwards.... [S]tudents’ fifth grade teachers appear to be good predictors of students’ fourth grade test scores. Inasmuch as a student’s later fifth grade teacher cannot possibly have influenced that student’s fourth grade performance, this curious result can only mean that students are systematically grouped into fifth grade classrooms based on their fourth grade performance. ... The usefulness of value-added modeling requires the assumption that teachers whose performance is being compared have classrooms with students of similar ability (or that the analyst has been able to control statistically for all the relevant characteristics of students that differ across classrooms). ..."

Not only has the black-white test score gap narrowed tremendously over this time (1978--2004), but the black level is now just about where the white scores started at. One would really like to hear this explained by, say, Charles Murray. (Well, actually, I wouldn't...)

"School effectiveness analyses have largely ignored the role of the family as an important source of variation for children's educational progress. Sibling analyses in developmental psychology and behavioural genetics have largely ignored sources of shared environmental variation beyond the immediate family. We formulate a multilevel cross-classified model that examines variation in children's progress during secondary schooling and partitions this variability into pupil, family, primary school, secondary school, local education authority and residential area. Our results suggest that about 50% of what has been labelled as pupil variation in school effectiveness models is really between-family variation and that about 22% of the total variance is due to shared environments beyond the immediate family." --- Haven't read the paper, could be crap.

In which Chris struggles to save at-risk youth.

Thank God, I do not teach in the UK.

Anthony Grafton on the state and value of the academic humanities in the US; nominally a review of Menand's new book, which Grafton describes as astonishing (and not in a good way). Some truly fine bits of writing in here.

"The American university is under attack from two directions .... On the one hand, outside pressure groups have staged massive challenges to academic freedom, beginning in the 1960s with attacks on faculty who took stands against the Vietnam War ... more recently with well-funded campaigns against Middle Eastern Studies scholars. Connecting these dots ... distinct pattern of concerted efforts to undermine the legitimacy of forms of scholarly study deemed to threaten the status quo. At the same time ... erosion of university budgets and the encroachment of private-sector influence and business-friendly priorities into academic life. From the dwindling numbers of full-time faculty to the collapse of library budgets ... a system increasingly beholden to corporate America and starved of the resources it needs to educate the new generation of citizens." - From the co-author of _Mrs. Chiang's Szechuan Cookbook_ (and the standard history of McCarthyism)

Not a group of tags I ever expected to have occasion to type.

uh-oh.

"The aim of this paper is to study whether a child's schooling choices are affected by the schooling choices of other children. Identification is based on a randomized targeted intervention that grants a cash subsidy conditional on school attendance to a subgroup of eligible children within small rural villages in Mexico (PROGRESA). This policy change spills over to ineligible children if social interactions are relevant. Results indicate that the eligible children tend to attend school more frequently, and the ineligible children acquire more schooling when the subsidy is introduced in their local village. Moreover, the overall effect of PROGRESA on eligible children is the sum of a direct effect due to cash transfers and an indirect effect due to changes in peer group schooling. Interestingly, the social interactions effect is almost as important as the direct effect."

"Your graduate work was on bacterial evolution, but now you're lecturing to 200 freshmen on primate social life. You've taught Kant for twenty years, but now you're team-teaching a new course on “Ethics and the Internet.” The personality theorist retired and wasn't replaced, so now you, the neuroscientist, have to teach the "Sexual Identity" course. Everyone in academia knows it and no one likes to admit it: faculty often have to teach courses in areas they don't know very well. The challenges are even greater when students don't share your cultural background, lifestyle, or assumptions about how to behave in a classroom."

Sure. But: "Examined broadly, the history of manual labor in this country doesn't suggest that physical jobs secured more respect by convincing people of their complexity. They secured more respect by unionizing, and thus becoming good, even coveted, positions."

"I packed a backpack and took off for the romantic frontier-land of New Zealand with nothing but $500 and a working visa in my pocket. The six months I spent there were a far cry from what I thought the adventure would be, but it was educational. Culminating in my job at the cardboard factory--where I was surrounded by people who hated their jobs but had no other viable option.

In a flash, I grasped the true value of a college degree. It didn't matter what I majored in. It didn't even matter all that much what my grades were. What mattered was that I got that rectangular piece of paper that said, "Lane Wallace never has to work in a corrugated cardboard factory again.""

This will be an... interesting experiment. (For instance, can they really turn MBAs into math teachers in 3 months?)

A review of Newt Gingrich's ph.d. thesis on the colonial Belgian educational system in the Congo.

This reminds me how much I benefited (I think) from my own Montessori schooling, and makes me feel guilty about my decidedly non-Montessori teaching. It does not, however, make me want to play video games.

"Immediately before the vote on his motion, which was defeated eight to one, West gave his final remarks, arguing that the children are our future and that it's the school board's obligation to make sure they are fully versed in the unspeakable horrors still to come."

More piling on vs. Stanley Fish. I'd add that when European universities began in the middle ages, the three big subjects were law, medicine, and theology, and the last was not about rapturous contemplation but producing higher officials for the Church.

What is a university for? More specifically what is a _professor_ for?

Good piece on links between manufacturing, education, urban revitalization & social capital. Stupid title.

Earnest, wonky evisceration.

"the stories of decline in intellectual or scholarly standards that are profoundly anti-intellectual or unscholarly in their content and claims."

The only good thing about this is that it might get some people to read Heckman's (truly impressive) work on the causes and amelioration of inequality.

Brad explains the facts of life.