Pie Fight

Variable teacher pay in Sweden

Via Eduwonk, who is either a slightly poor writer or is genuinely surprised that a county like Sweden would be working harder to have robust social policies than the US. Uh, it's Sweden, dude - they're kinda famous for it.

Sweden did: ($$):

In Sweden the fixed pay scheme for teachers was abolished in the mid-1990s as part of an agreement designed to enhance local autonomy and flexibility in the school system. The government committed itself to substantially raise teacher salaries over a five-year period, but on the condition that not all teachers received the same increase. There is accordingly no fixed upper limit and only a minimum basic salary is centrally negotiated, along with the aggregate rise in the teacher salary bill. Salaries are negotiated when a teacher is hired and teacher and employer agree on the salary to be paid upon commencement of the term of employment. Teachers’ work roles and performance are considered in the negotiation and linked to the pay. There is now much greater variety in teachers’ pay, with those in areas of shortage and with higher demonstrated performance able to negotiate more.

It may seem strange that a social democracy so willing to limit economic freedom would embrace market-oriented reform of teacher pay. But according to this, Swedish policymakers concluded that "an expansion and improved quality of social services could not be accomplished without improving the efficiency in the public sector." And the unions agreed, "in order to improve salaries and working conditions."

Mend the gap

At BPD, a decent discussion on the gender wage gap. As one commenter rightly (I think) points out, some of this is a gender issue, but probably more of it is a socio-economic one. Because women do most of the childcare, they probably do tend to put in shorter hours and, over a long period of time, produce less (even if they're able to produce more per hour). From a business's standpoint, this is why men, on aggregate, are often a better bet. It's also why Scandinavia has loads of occupational segregation: the public services are in a sense set aside for women so they can combine childcare with decent work (and working hours). At the same time, though, those northern countries are trying to encourage more men to take paternity leave, which would, in effect, reduce the gender economics problem by making men as big an employment risk as women.

You pays your money you takes your chances

Ezra Klein publishes a handy table comparing developed nations' healthcare inputs and outcomes.

Inequality we can live with, inequity we can't

In class on Friday I argued that inequality is inevitable, but what we should strive for is equity. There's always going to be a bottom 10% of every society; what matters is how miserable life is for that 10%. I'm guessing it's a damn site better in Sweden than in Mississippi. Matt Yglesias has similar feelings, spcifically with regards to the fetishisation of the conept of meritocracy.

SEDUCTIONS OF THE MERITOCRACY. There's some real insight in David Ignatius's column from Davos, but this really cheeses me off:

"We want the brilliant mathematician whose mother is a chambermaid in Romania," says [Harvard President Larry] Summers. That's the most attractive face of globalization -- the idea that the great universities are creating a colorblind meritocracy that doesn't care where you're from as long as you did well on the SAT.

People need to think harder before holding this up as a worthy ideal. Suppose we were creating "an intelligence-blind pigmentocracy that doesn't care how well you did on the SAT, as long as you were born with pale skin." That would be bad, right? Since people shouldn't have crappy lives just because they have dark skin. So why should people have crappy lives just because they're in the bottom 30 percent of the intelligence distribution curve? Granted, unlike with skin color, it's good to have some inequality determined by "merit," because if you didn't allow any, it would be hard to generate any kind of economic activity and absolute living standards everywhere would be very low. But there are real limits to how far that rationale can take you. People should read Michael Young's book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, in which the term was coined -- meritocracy was supposed to be a bad thing.

Worst of all, in some ways, is that a social/economic system that affords unjustly high levels of reward to the clever is likely to attract a huge number of extremely clever defenders. It further invites these people to confuse "merit" -- the possession of skills that happen to be demanded at a high level by people who can afford to buy them -- with the intuitive idea of merit as meaning something like "goodness." In the famous dream where people would "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” standardized test scores didn't enter into the picture.

Getting paid getting (super) rich

Via Yglesias:

Brad DeLong asks:

What skills and assets do the top 1% of America's pretax income distribution have today that lead the market to grant them 14% of total income, when their counterparts back in 1980 were granted only 8% of total income? What skills and assets do the top 0.01% of the American pretax income distribution--that's 12,000 tax units--that led the market to grant them 100 times average income in 1980, and 300 times average income today?

It's a good question.

It's perhaps worth noting that there has always been a sort of overclass, and that one of the great achievements of the first 4/5 of the 20th century was to reverse that trend. I kind of think the uber-rich looked up and said "Hey, we want to go back to the good old days." David Harvey put this forth in a very impressive U Chicago podcast.

 

Education v inequality, public v private schools

Both Drum and Yglesias discuss the study indicating that, once you control for basic demographic factors such as income and parents' educational attainment, private school students actually do worse than those at state schools. Here's a pretty picture:

I think Yglesias is dead-on when he says that in socieites with high inequality, schools are burdened with the task of reducing that inequality - but that it may be too much to ask. Over the course of my lifetime, I'll be really surprised (but pleasantly) if education proves capable of overcoming inequality.

There's a broader lesson/problem here for almost all efforts at educational reform, namely that study after study of education at almost all levels tends to point in this direction -- educational outcomes vary widely, but almost all of this is accounted for by the differences in inputs. Socioeconomic variables account for a huge proportion of the variance in outcomes, not only between whole schools (i.e., schools full of poor minority students do worse than schools full of middle class white ones) but also within schools (i.e., poor minority students tend to do worse even if they attend a school mostly full of middle class white kids).

Roughly speaking, as a society we've given our schools the task of trying to ameliorate America's huge levels of inequality, but education simply seems to be inadquate to the task. Nobody knows a reliable method of making schools that are capable of overcoming disadvantages that kids from certain families face ex ante. One thing that does seem to work pretty well is having the government offer bribes to "at risk" kids to do better in school. This tends to make people queasy for a variety of reasons, but the empirical evidence suggests it works and I think we should try it.

Here's the eduwonk piece on bribing kids. What's particularly interesting is the observation that when trying to improve schools, we don't tend to look at thekids themselves as anything more than passive actors - we talk endlessly about incentives for teachers or schools or parents, but we don't spend very much time at all talking about incentives that might really make a difference in children's efforts and aspirations.I wonder if bribing pupils wouldn't be a rlatively potent fix in terms of outcomes per input, but seems a tad too unpalatable for nations that still pretend that the most important thing about learning is learning for its own sake, as opposed to its ability to give you opportunities and capabilities as an adult.

The new frontier for education reform?
        This story is from another era by blog standards--almost a year ago--but I've been curious to see more discussion about it. Peter Orszag pointed me to this a while ago, from star economist Roland Fryer ($):

His most ambitious project, which grew out of his belief in the power of environment, is an experiment designed to see if incentives can inspire minority students to improve their grades. For all the talk about education reform, Fryer says, he feels that one party is being overlooked: the students themselves. ''I'm troubled by the fact we're treating kids as inanimate objects,'' he says. ''They have behavior, too. They respond to incentives, too.''

Fryer recently ran a pilot experiment with third graders at P.S. 70 in the Bronx. If a child achieved a certain score on her reading test or improved by a certain percentage, she got a small prize.....

[Joel] Klein asked Fryer if he might be interested in expanding his incentive experiment into 15 or so low-achieving schools. At P.S. 70, the rewards had been pizza parties or field trips. This time around, Fryer planned to give cash -- $10 per good test for third graders and $20 for seventh graders.

Isn't Fryer right about the logic of education reform? We say our public schools should incorporate incentives for excellence, much as other institutions do. NCLB has created more incentives for schools to perform. Eduwonk and others are working hard to create more incentives for teachers to perform. So isn't this the next step--incentives for kids to perform?

The usual approach is high-stakes tests. But isn't it also true that the prospect of being left back doesn't provide much incentive for kids who (a) are too young to grasp all the consequences of being held back or (b) aren't expecting to graduate in the first place? Pizza parties, gift cards, and cash could reach many more kids--and with smaller social costs than retention.

The article describes Fryer's effort to answer questions from principals.

Fryer addressed each issue as best he could. But one question kept coming back at him: if we start paying students to test well, aren't we sending the message that learning is not its own reward?

Playing the piano eventually becomes its own reward, but countless parents have used every kind of bribe to encourage their kids to practice more. Nothing wrong with that: The kids don't need to love piano while they're kids; they just need to learn it so they can love it when the time comes. And reading, unlike piano, is something kids need to learn whether they ever love it or not.

Will be very interesting to see what comes of this.

Child support is working, so let's break it

Via Drum:

CHILD SUPPORT....Mark Schmitt writes today that Republicans and Democrats worked together for more than ten years in the 80s and 90s to create a genuinely effective system of enforcement for child support payments. It passed in 1996 as part of welfare reform:

And it worked. In 2004, 51% of child support was paid. From 18% to 51% is a huge transformation. I doubt that anyone in the mid-1990s would have predicted that. One study showed that improved child support enforcement was responsible for a quarter of the reduction in welfare caseloads.

As Mark writes, getting this passed was hard work, a triumph of serious policymaking.

I imagine you can guess the rest of the story, can't you? Serious policymaking is not in vogue in today's Republican Party, which has decided to slash $4.9 billion from this program. And why not? It might be working great, but it doesn't benefit the K Street business interests that fund the GOP, and that's all that matters. Take that, family values.

Social exclusion readings

Persistent poverty - Case Report 5

Conditional cash transfers in Latin America

Equality of opportunity

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Download equality_of_opportunity.htm

The beat goes on

They get letters. One throuhg three offer particularly excellent points, I think. In order, it's almost impossible to say that academy schools per se make the difference, when those schools are getting far more money than regular state schools do; even if you believe what I just said, it's outrageously unfair to present academies statistics without including the context of the results of the schools they replaced; and the middle class doesn't actually need to be brought back into the state system - almost all are still there, just concentrated in the best schools.

The struggle for decent schools

Friday January 27, 2006
The Guardian

In one respect Andrew Adonis (Letters, January 24) is correct. If you provide state-of-the-art facilities plus a significant state-provided increment on the school budget, you will usually achieve better examination results. Who could ever have expected such an outcome?

In order to prove his case - or otherwise - I would be willing to sanction an experiment in Liverpool whereby several of our secondary schools in old building with poor facilities would have their facilities replaced at £30m a time and annual extra per pupil funding - without becoming academies. Then after a few years we will be able to gauge whether or not it is academy status and private sector sponsor involvement per se which is the determining factor for improved results.
Paul Clein
Executive member for children's services, Liverpool city council

---

Your attack on academy schools was unfair and missed the point (Academies among worst exam performers', January 19). Academies are replacing some of the worst schools in the country. Many of the students who took their GCSEs in the summer had been educated at failing schools for many years, before transferring to their academy with only a year or two left of secondary education.

At the Business Academy Bexley, we have come in for much criticism for "poor" results this year: 29% of our students received 5 or more A*- C grades, but that is only half a story. In the year before the academy was founded, just 6% of students achieved the same level of results at our predecessor school. We have made great strides in just three years. Along with the other academies, we should not be judged on one year's bald statistics, but on how well we provide a steady and lasting step-change in educational standards.
Robert Burton
The Business Academy, Bexley

David Hill suggests that one of the major aims of the government's education white paper is to bring middle-class children back into the state sector (Letters, January 19). The vast majority of them never left. Instead, these children attend the best-resourced state schools in their area, this made possible by the greater mobility afforded by their parent's greater income. These better-resourced schools are those which stand to gain the most from the government's proposals, particularly in regard to admissions policy, further widening the gap between those schools attended by the rich and those attended by the poor.
Richard Gough Thomas
Sheffield

David Hill states that everything Labour does is geared towards enticing middle-class parents back to state schools. I wonder what the majority of Labour's working-class supporters would think of such an admission.

With the recent education white paper it looks like Labour is trying to entice the middle classes by destroying the comprehensive system, creating a many-tiered schools system based on selection and a situation where more schools end up in private hands. Rather than winning people over to the notion of a decent state education, it looks like the middle classes have won Labour over to the idea of destroying state education as we know it.
Joe Hartney
Edinburgh

Simon Jenkins is fooling himself if he thinks there are two equitable ways of admitting pupils to schools (Blair and Adonis are taking our schools back to the 30s, January 25). The evidence from Buckinghamshire, where the 11-plus never went away, is that selection entrenches social divisions.

The pass rate for Bucks county primary school children was 23% in 2005. The pass rate for children whose parents could afford to send them to independent preparatory schools in the county was 59%. There is nothing fair or class-blind about the 11-plus.

As Jenkins puts it, the only equitable way of admitting pupils to schools is central to the comprehensive principle, "entry [should] be open to all in the local community as determined by catchment area, warts and all. The task of the state is to make that school as good as can be".
Ian Scoones
Secretary, Bucks Parents for Comprehensive Education