Ear Rational Thoughts

Teacher Rankings

This post from Alex Tabarrok came out a while ago, but I want to mark it:

The Times obtained seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District and used the information to estimate the effectiveness of L.A. teachers — something the district could do but has not.

... After a single year with teachers who ranked in the top 10% in effectiveness, students scored an average of 17 percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in math than students whose teachers ranked in the bottom 10%. Students often backslid significantly in the classrooms of ineffective teachers, and thousands of students in the study had two or more ineffective teachers in a row.

What's good for the students...

What's good for the students is bad for the teachers. And what's bad for the teachers is bad for the Democrats. Which is where we get this from:

Established in 2004 as a five-year pilot program, OSP is among the most heavily researched federal education programs in history.

OSP targeted about 2,000 of the poorest kids in DC who were stuck in some of the worst schools in the country. It gave their parents a $7,500 scholarship to attend a private school of their choice.

... Everyone knew OSP would be a bargain. DC has among the highest spending per pupil in the nation. At a conservative estimate of $17,542, the public schools spend over $10,000 more per child than the $7,500 spent through the scholarship program.

Not just the cost savings, but the program improved graduation rates significantly, as well as other measures of students' knowledge.

Simply put, OSP has a profoundly positive effect not just on students, but on the city and the country as a whole.

So when it came time for Congress to reauthorize OSP, it would seem to be a no-brainer: Expand the program.

Instead, they killed it.

But we can't complain. As Obama said, "in our democracy, government is us." So everything the government does is by definition approved by the people. Which means we must want this. We just didn't know it.

Uncorrelated Excellence

John Goodman, in a post that is good throughout:

In general, a bureaucratic system is one in which normal market forces have been systematically suppressed. In such an environment, there tends to be a sea of (relative) mediocrity, sometimes punctuated by little islands of excellence. Further, the islands of excellence tend to be randomly distributed. They do not correlate with much of anything.

This picture not only describes most public school systems around the world, it also describes most health care systems. (In fact, I can’t think of a single exception.)

He points out that in health care as in education, no matter how you slice it, results don't seem to be correlated well with anything you can transplant. Higher spending as often leads to worse results as better. Interventions into schools by well-meaning judges, city governments, etc. seem to have no statistically significant impact. Adding IT or changing the way hospitals are paid likewise has no consistent impact on health care.

Needless to say, I am sympathetic to the point that bureaucracy tends to lead to random results. I think it may be one of the reasons there is a wide discrepancy between the left and right on the use of government. I suspect most people can't mentally handle the notion that things are random. So what they do to resolve such situations is ignore one half of the results. If you ignore the part where the government is doing well, you are a conservative; if you ignore the part where the government fails, you are a progressive. It's the only way that two intelligent people can look at the same series of events and see the policy implications as 180° off from each other.

H/T Arnold Kling

Indulgences

Courtesy of Don Boudreaux quotes a friend responding to a piece in the WSJ:

Joe Queenan’s rant on the dismal prospects of the class of 2010 makes ridiculous claim that “Even the Pilgrim toddlers in 1620 had better prospects” than today’s graduates.

He goes on to point out all the ways this is - obviously - ridiculous. But this was more interesting:

Sure, today’s job climate is tough. And bright young drama and music major Ivy League graduates like Mr. Queenan’s friend may wish they’d majored in accounting or engineering instead indulging their passion for the arts at $40,000 a year.

This seems to be a fundamental issue with young people today (and really, ever). The notion that if you get a college degree in anything, people will automatically pay you. But in reality, the reason college graduates get paid more is because they are capable of making more of what other people want. Getting a degree is something you want is not the same.

The Teachers' Union

Don Boudreaux addresses the president of a teachers' union:

One of your organization’s spokeswomen (speaking today on WTOP radio) explained that performance-based pay for teachers is “unfair” to teachers. The proffered reason is that so much of a child’s intellectual development is affected by home environment, neighborhood influences, and other factors outside of teachers’ control that it is impossible to determine each teacher’s success or failure simply by measuring changes over time in the academic abilities of that teachers’ students.

Fair point. But if it’s true that teachers have so little influence over their students’ learning that it’s “unfair” to tie teacher pay to the measured academic performance of their students, then what’s the use of public schooling? If what students learn or don’t learn is largely outside of the influence of their schoolteachers, why spend all of these resources, year after year, on government schools?