Pie Fight

PhD on different systems for educating disaffected teens

It'd be fun to do a PhD comparing the strengths and weaknesses of how America educates disaffected teens with how England does it.

More money, less control

The very good Mike Baker of the BBC writes:

As Blair departs, many will hope for an end to "initiative-itis" and policy overload. No more targets. No more bully-pulpit politics. No more "modernising" of the comprehensives. But they will be disappointed. Gordon Brown is just as fond of targets. He will insist on a something-for-something return for every extra pound that goes to education.

In a recent interview, he told me education would be "my passion ... my priority". The big question for Brown is: why, after so much more investment, do teachers, lecturers and parents still feel dissatisfied?

I think Julian Le Grand's "knights and knaves" work answers that final question.

Patience capital and non-cognitive development

Download patience_capital_and_the_demise_of_the_aristocracy.pdf

I'm not sure I buy the premise of the above paper on 'Patience capital and the demise of the aristocracy', but it's an interesting one, and some of the arguments are interesting. For instance, there's a good point about the fact that urban artisans had a life characterised by a steep income slope (making nothing as an apprentice, pretty little as a journeyman, and hopefully a good deal more as a master) that encouraged long-term planning and financial discipline; this in contrast to those (both poor and rich) in rural areas, for whom the land was worth basically the same when they were 20 as when they were 60. For the latter, lifetime income had more of a tendency to be flat from year to year; thus notions of investment in the future and the accumulation of capital would have been less salient - or so goes the theory. (See bottom of page for data on the landed aristocracy's attitude to business.)

Most interesting for my studies, though, is the notion of patience capital (think the Marshmallow Test, and the ways in which parents strive to teach their children patience and other key non-cognitive skills) is an interesting one.

It may be particularly related to positive outcomes for low-income children who attend decent daycare programmes, argue some. Remember, these kids - eg in the Abecedarian or Perry High Scope project - tend not to show greater cognitive development than their peers over time, but they do show better outcomes. Here's a snippet:

Heckman (2000)
and Heckman and Krueger (2003) review the evidence from a large number of
programs targeting disadvantaged children through family development sup-
port. They show that most programs were successful in permanently raising the
treated children’s non-cognitive skills, turning them more motivated to learn,
less likely to engage in crime, and altogether more future-oriented than children
of non-treated families. On the other hand, the programs were less successful in
raising cognitive skills as measured by IQ test scores.3 The most effective pro-
grams where those targeted to children at a young age, although positive effects
are also documented for programs targeting adolescents. These studies show
how important family transmission is in this particular form of human capital
accumulation, of which the notion of patience discussed in this paper is a com-
ponent. Similar conclusions are reached by a number of studies in child develop-
ment psychology (see e.g., Goleman 1995, Shonkoff and Philips 2000 and Taylor,
McGue, and Iacono 2000). Coleman and Hoffer (1983) argue that the emphasis
on patience and self-discipline is the key of the effectiveness of Catholic schools
in the US. [p 8]

There's also an argument in there that would be useful for understanding cultural transmission, eg through engaging in Lareau-ish analysis of parenting styles:

In our model, in contrast, parents invest in their children’s patience. In this re-
spect, our paper is related to the growing literature on cultural transmission (e.g.,
Bisin and Verdier 2000 and 2001, Hauk and Saez-Marti 2002, Saez-Marti and
Zenou 2004).5 In this literature, parents evaluate their children’s life prospects
from the standpoint of their own preferences, and actively try to manipulate chil-
dren’s preference to induce choices that parents regard as desirable. As these
papers, we argue that economic incentives are crucial in determining the effort
parents exert in affecting their children’s preferences. [p 10]

OK, up above  I promised data on the landed aristocracy's attitudes to business.  (it's really worth having a look at the table in the pdf; for some reason I can't seem to paste it into this post.)

Table 2 reports the professional choice of Cambridge graduates during
the period 1750–1899. The vast majority of students at Cambridge during this pe-
riod were sons of members of the landowning class, so their professional choices
(other than landowning) give us a good idea of which professions younger sons
entered. Strikingly, until 1850, not a single graduate got involved in banking or
business (widely defined as any “profit-oriented activity”), and even after 1850
the percentage remains surprisingly low.

School lotteries

UPDATE: Harry Brighouse, Mike Baker and Fiona Millar all have their say. All good stuff. Here's an excerpt from CT comments:

Essentially most of the selection criteria remain the same, and selection is still limited to those in catchment, with the single change that the factor ‘closeness-to-school’ has been replaced by ‘random selection’ (still within catchment, and still balanced against other factors such as siblings’ school location, exceptional circumstances etc).

I’d have to agree wholeheartedly with this change, because ‘closeness-to-school’ is a factor that is by definition manipulable by parents, and more importantly, more easily manipulable by wealthier parents. A defensible choice agenda has to pay SOME attention to the ease and difficulty with which people can make the relevant choices, otherwise the resulting distribution looks likely be inegalitarian, right?

Now, on to my own thoughts. My first one is that I'm very much in favour of school lotteries, as it'll cut down on people like Ladyfriend and I from moving to where the good schools are, and will force the middle class to use voice to improve the schools they're stuck with rather than exit to congregate at the best state schools. As for the fear that the middle class will abandon state schools, I ain't buying. Only 7% of the school population attend independent schools, and they are generally very expensive - too expensive for most middle class parents. Tony Blair and his gang forget this - they seem to assume that most of the middle class is in a similar income bracket as themselves (a mistake also made by the odious Nick Cohen in his incessant rants about how hard life is for couples who earn 'only' 100k between them.) Here in the real world, most of the middle class can afford the partial exit of moving to where the best school are, but not the full exit of leaving the state school system entirely. And as for the idea that so long as the middle class's kids are in state schools, everything's hunky dory: bollocks! When some state schools are full of middle class kids and other state schools only a few miles away are full of low income kids, it's a de facto indepent private school system, but at taxpayer expense.

However, the beeb has an article saying that there's research arguing that lotteries don't actually level the playing field. The article is quoted below, but as far as I can tell, it says very little about the issue at hand. Perhaps the Beeb was just looking for something, anything, and thought this was enough?

Dr Jarvis said: "Our research suggests that lotteries of over-subscribed school places would produce the worst of both worlds - greater educational polarisation and longer, more environmentally damaging car journeys to distant schools by middle-class parents."
[....]

She and Dr Alvanides looked at 50 primary schools in Newcastle and selected two for intensive study, one in an affluent part of the city, the other in a deprived area.

They worked closely with 10 families from one school and eight from the other.

All but two of the 18 had been allocated a place at their "first choice"  school.

None of the poorer families owned a car and walked their children to school, whereas most of the affluent families had two cars and drove there.

When preparing their applications almost all the poorer families had visited just one school, their priority being a "happy child". They paid little heed to future secondary school transfers.

The better-off families had visited two or more, some going to five or more - including private schools - in their search for a "good school". They spent a lot on after-school activities.

The researchers believe they have uncovered significant lessons, most importantly on "the false view that policy makers have of the way parents in different walks of life make choices (assuming they have choices to make) about their children's education".

Hot for teachers' rights

Mark Kleiman discusses the role of teacher unions in determining the quality of schools (research verditc: somewhat helpful). The unfoggedetariat discusses.

Free larning'!

Uni classes being offered free over the internets. And in Ezra's comments, a great phrase: 'the sheepskin effect', ie the difference in earnings between someone who is just shy of a degree and someone who has the piece of paper.

Praiseworthy?

Via Unfogged, and NY magazine article arguing that praising clever kids for being clever fucks them up; instead, you should praise them for working hard. Bronson and his partner also have some posts on the topic.

From unfogged comments, a potential book reference:

I'm really surprised the article doesn't mention Alfie Kohn (does it?), whose book Punished by Rewards is far and away the most readable, straightforward treatment of this issue.

Posted by: Witt | Link to this comment | 02-15-07  4:21 PM

 

What colour is your grass?

Good news: everyone's unhappy with their education system, even countries like Holland and Sweden that are held up as beacons to the rest of us.

Who says working class kids don't swot?

More from the interview with Learning to Labour's Paul Willis. (Note how Willis isn't actually catching the interviewer out: the latter refers not to middle class kids in the school, but to the school's middle class culture):

Tillekens: In the book, there is some permanent clash going on between the middle-class culture of the school on the one hand and the working class culture of the "lads" on the other and you yourself, so it seems, take a partisan view in this struggle.

Willis: Yes, well I'm not sure if the ear'oles in any sense are middle class. For me this is another misunderstanding of the book. Both the lads and ear'oles represent working class culture. So, at school, there were two working class roots at that point and as the subsequent history of the lads and ear'oles shows, in time many of them did change places, depending on the accidents of the labour market.

Learning to labour

Below the fold, an idea for my diss. One of the books that might influence it is Paul willis's Learning to labour. In trying to ascertain why, as Willis asks, working class kids let middle class kids get away with taking all the good jobs, one key idea may be the cultural production of meaning in everyday life. As Evans says in her observations of estate life in Bermondsey, working class people are often very proud of many aspects of working class life, and will seek to reproduce those aspects - eg a sense of close kinship and community, the ability to have a laugh, not taking oneself too seriously, and not buckling in to authority. These are good values. The problem is that their reproduction often conflicts with doing well in school, which is of course the ticket into middle class jobs.

Along these lines, it sounds as if Willis's more recent work might be useful:

In my recent book, I'm saying that schooling is a kind of early modernist formation of cultural transmission and there's a huge question about what it means for the subordinate class.