Ejumacation, infamously, doesn’t get a gig at the 2020 Summit.
… Which is kinda weird, because if there’s any field of policy where everyone seems to have a bright idea, schooling’s it. There’s a legitimate point of critique in the whole “everyone went to school and therefore has an opinion” thing, and the whole “want the best for my kids” thing (not that there’s anything remotely wrong with that, but all the superficial crud about league tables really fails to get to grips with the fact that there’s collective benefit for ALL OF US in improving the whole system rather than just picking the right school for little Janie and/or Johnny). But what also needs critique is the practice of finding some sort of study from the US (why always from the US? Because they haz economists?) and just assuming that if you plonk down the stats you’ve made a point. There’s almost an attitude of disdain for those actually slaving away in the classroom, and there’s definitely a failure to understand that getting to grips with schooling might involve much more than buying a whole lot of assumptions invented by Bill and Hillary Clinton in Arkansas, roadtested through focus groups by Dick Morris and refined by successive waves of Third Way-esque types that teachers – or unions – are the problem. Then there’s the failure to understand that glib proposals can be defeated by the fact that there’s a huge burden of day to day inertia – which is there for a reason – teachers – and students are getting on with the really hard work of educating and learning while policy wonks pontificate either econometrically or ideologically.
And nowhere does there seem to be an appreciation that for anything meaningful to change – for the better – you need to take parents, teachers and students along with you – and fight some enormous systemic and bureaucratic battles on the way. Or, in other words, change is more than just a matter of op/eds, policy papers, and statistics, but requires politics to be effective.
One of the leading proponents in the policy wars over education – who doesn’t seem to get why some people actually working in the field might not think that every problem can be magically solved by a correct statistical analysis – is blogger and economist Andrew Leigh. I must say I’ve lost a lot of respect for him after reading tigtog’s post on how he ignored points made by an actual medical doctor which called into question the validity of his lofty pronouncements about obstetrics in a paper about the baby bonus. I happen to agree with him on the policy merits of the baby bonus (leaving aside the question of the medical evidence used or abused in his paper), but there’s a bigger problem here – the disciplinary imperialism of economists (and others – it doesn’t matter in principle) who want to ignore the results of studies in other fields and come and save the world with econometrics or the method de jour. They don’t seem ever to stop and pause to think that – maybe, just maybe – the real world might be stickier and messier than shiny statistical modelling suggests. Or that people who’ve worked in this field might have produced insights that complicate the important task of reducing everything to numbers. Or that their baseline assumptions which shape the hypotheses they formulate might be open to disputation if viewed from another perspective.
For instance, the unquestioned assumptions that competition is a good, that exam results are a measure of quality, that all outcomes in education and the performance of teachers are easily quantifiable – all are domain assumptions. Occasionally there might be a minor tack to the left when the good ship Economics collides with the shoals of, you know, reality, but no amount of wind will shake her off her true course.
I mean – just by way of example – “let principals manage” – they’re not bloody trained to manage. The degrees teachers used to do to get promotion were branded “Educational studies” or “Educational administration”. There’s no actual evidence that any actually existing principals – as a class – are going to be the great judges of teachers that the theory purports they will be. There’s a good reason why Education Queensland gets HR people to sit in on the adjudications they make of prac teachers – now part of their chances to follow their wonderfully well paid vocation. Because the decisions made are often made bounded by a very limited rationality – within the workplace culture of the school itself, affected by prejudices and politics, and so on. The theory might be all very well, but…
It’s ideology, dude.
I don’t doubt Leigh’s good faith in wanting to make a difference, but I am coming to doubt his ability to acknowledge that all wisdom doesn’t reside in departments of Economics. I do wish that we had a genuine debate on education that took into account the legitimate voices of those who’ve actually worked in schools, grappled with the very hard work of turning around school systems, and are prepared to – well, bloody well learn.
The problem Dr Leigh is going to have – and one he seems to be beginning to understand with his worry that his writing gets attacked – is that he doesn’t have enough friends. This is not meant to be a personal remark – far from it – from all indications, he’s a nice bloke. But politics is about friends and enemies, and “evidence based policy” is only as good as the networks and the political in you have. There might be some truth to the old saw that “the evil teachers’ unions” resist change – but, of course, they may be resisting it for good reason. But – as the patchy results Bill and Hillary had to show for their education revolution in Arkansas demonstrate – if you can’t build a sustainable political coalition, if you can’t actually get the huge machine of schooling working for you, your econometrics don’t count. The currency of the sort of analysis Leigh does has now been discounted. He might be better off lining up on the right – where he’d find some allies. Because, you know, objectively, that’s where his assumptions have been all along. And it’s not that there aren’t people on the right who don’t genuinely care about education. It’s just that their assumptions are fundamentally conservative – as are Leigh’s.
Or – he might like to talk to some of the dreaded Education academics who are shaping up as his adversaries. Or some bureaucrats. Or some teachers’ union officials. Or some parents. Including ones that might disagree with him. And ones that might have to actually implement his “new ideas”.
Just sayin’, you know…
Rant over. This was meant to be a simple link post to Helen’s latest thoughts on education. But I wanted to get that off my chest, because it’s been bothering me more and more. If we’re going to privilege expertise, how do we define that? Do economists have some additional insight those who’ve actually laboured in the fields to which they turn their gaze don’t? Are they able to dismiss entire other disciplines with a single computation? Is that what “new ideas” mean? Is that the sum total of “evidence based policy”?
Anyway, go read Helen.
NB: I’m not suggesting Andrew Leigh holds all the positions that go with the “let the market rule” stance in the education wars. I haven’t read every single one of his papers and/or blog posts. I am suggesting that in what I have read of his op/eds and posts, he shares the same fundamental assumptions that characterise what is a coherent position in the disputes over this policy field.
from Leigh:
*iz ded of lolz*
Perhaps the topic was deemed too important to let people like Phillip Adams and Hugh Jackman crap on about it?
A great post Kim.
Excellent post.
This is a debate that is more serious than the 2020 thingy. It will take a little time and it will need to engage a lot more people and views.
Great rant, Kim.
Whenever I read Andrew Leigh’s observations on education it seems that the underlying agenda is conservative – that public education is too costly, inefficient and ineffective, and that it comes down to the quality of the curriculum and teacher performance. He advocates that performance pay for teachers will fix the problem, when even his own analysis indicates the evidence is inconclusive at best. The essential question Leigh grapples with seems to be how to get more out of public education for less. After 12 years of chronic neglect it is rather like getting blood out of a stone.
Helen is correct – public education benefits us all, and it’s way past time that we addressed the problem with more resources.
Well, in another sense, that could be quite heartening. It may mean the Rudd government actually takes education seriously enough to not waste precious time and resources on it at the Utterly Pointless Twenty-Twenty game show event.
Isn’t this true of most professions? For example, the standard career path for engineers goes from “doing stuff” to “managing”. Sure, some end up doing MBAs along the way (but its not required and teachers could do the same). You’re expected to learn how to manage along the way and its true that some end up making awful managers.
Which is why some companies support a dual track to allow people to still get promoted, but not have to manage. I think the alternative of having too many people who haven’t been trained in the field they’re managing is much worse though.
Nobody has suggested that the “more resources” approach may have some equally unquestioned assumptions — for example, the twin assumptions that educational performance can’t be measured on the one hand, and that “more resources” are needed to improve this performance on the other.
One advantage of talking about what is measurable is that, well, you can actually have a discussion, beyond wondering why public schools graduates seem to have lost a “sense of wonder” they once seem to have had.
Have public schools really become worse since funding for the private system was introduced? Is it really so bad to educate some people for $5000 government-dollars per year at private schools, rather than forcing everyone to go to $10000 government-dollars per year public schools? Even if the money saved could be used to improve public schools?
Helen’s denigration of “choice” in her post is shockingly elitist, suggesting that the “aspirationals” who send their kids to independent schools are deluded by “moral panic”. I am a public school graduate from ‘05, and I can understand perfectly well why parents may want their kids in a private school environment — there really are nontrivial differences in culture (beyond the differences in academic results).
There’s no point asking for a more genuine debate if you already know that the answer is simply more money.
Gee that was a good post. Best I’ve read in the blogosphere for a while. Cheers Kim.
Kim you’re spot on about the dangers of economists going into fields that they dont have specialist knowledge in, and watching tigtog and lauredhel systematically dismantle Andrew over the last few days on some of the assumptions used in the Baby Bonus research should be a good lesson for economists everywhere.
So saying, as an economist, what our profession does well is analyse data in other fields from a different perspective – but that’s really where the bulk of value that economists can add to other fields stops. When we find unusual relationships in the data in fields of knowledge that we arent specialised in, particularly when the results of the research start flying big red policy flags, we should probably focus more on asking, if not demanding, the experts in that field answer “why” those relationships occur rather than drawing our own conclusions which may not quite be up to scratch simply because we arent across the full complexity of that particular area.
We should, essentially, stick to the data with the aim of posing new or inconvenient questions about relationships in that data that could drive new or expanded understanding of explaining observable reality.
That said, a lot of areas do have large quantities of essentially economic behaviour underlying them – like education and health for instance – so while we might have large contributions to make on how to allocate scarce resources in these areas that maximise human welfare, including large contributions to the underlying structure that delivers those services (while taking on board large and relevant input from actual health and education specialists of course), we should be more careful about the size of the boots we wear before trampling into other fields that we arent specialised in. We need to accept that we dont know what we dont know.
But while economists need to be careful, so do the actual specialists in areas where economics overlaps because on many occasions, the actual opinions of those specialists arent compatible with the quantitative observable reality. To give an example, Andrew Norton gets a lot of stick from education professionals, IMHO way too much. But considering that most of his work highlights relationships in data that effectively debunk (or at the very least seriously question the validity of) long held nostrums in education, he is an invaluable asset to driving the real debate over education policy regardless of whether one likes or dislikes his politics (which is another big issue here – partisan politics is too easily used an excuse for the dismissal of ideas rather than the engagement of them)
Another thing that economists have ALWAYS seemed to suffer a little more than most other professions (with the exception of political science) is the way we take personal ownership of our own research – which is really a bit silly. Too many good economists treat their own research as an extension of themselves rather than simply as a piece of information that needs to be treated rationally.
Finding a new explanation of something is just as valuable in terms of expanding human knowledge as finding that a new explanation doesn’t really explain something. Progress is often a process of elimination – and decreasing the number of possible alternatives that that can fundamentally, or even partially answer a given question is an important contribution by any yardstick.
On what basis, Leon? Generalising from your own experience?
There’s nothing in my post which suggested that I’ve prejudged the debate. I’d love to see one which isn’t doomed to collapse into the two stereotypical alternatives of “more markets” and “more money”. Advocates of public education also need to think laterally and creatively. Having said that, I think there is no doubt that more resources are needed, but just tipping in more money without examining other causes for problems that do exist and assessing what problems really do exist is a counterproductive approach.
Chris – I think the difference is that’s increasingly perceived in other professions – ie law firms now recognise that they get better results if they delegate human resource management issues to people trained in that area rather than having partners do it in an ad hoc and part time way. Principals’ main function is to provide educational leadership. That seems to be obscured in the whole devolution approach where their control of staffing is seen to be key. It doesn’t seem to take into account the fact that leadership of existing staff is probably more crucial to setting the tone and direction of a school.
I also cited the example of HR people sitting on the panels which adjudicate on the performance of prac teachers for a reason – it’s quite possible that prac teachers will have had personality clashes with their classroom teacher, and the principal’s assessment of that class room teacher can also be a variable. This is a crucial decision for the intending teacher’s career, and it needs some checks and balances.
Since Kev came “to help” in Canberra, we’ve already had Kyoto, Sorry, the Murray, and even a Health overhaul. Given how these major issues played out in the election, it’s surely Education’s turn for attention – as soon as Kev get’s back from Teh Foreign Policying!
I totally agree with this conclusion from Helen:
We also need more selective schools and a national curriculum (instead of HSC, OP, and what-not).
Thanks for the comment, Possum – wise words!
Great post Kim.
Thanks, everyone.
I just wanted to emphasise again that I’m not having a personal go at Andrew Leigh. I think Possum’s fine elucidation of some of the pitfalls and advantages of non-specialist expertise being applied to a particular policy domain sums it all up very well.
Sure you get HR to do things like working out how much long service leave someone has, but I’d be pretty concerned if HR are doing performance evaluations or working out who to hire. HR can help with this defining procedures etc, but something is going very wrong if they’re making the final decisions on these.
I think its important that there is someone local to the school to both represent the local staff to remote management as well as represent the remote management to the local staff. Trying to do this remotely is a recipe for disaster.
Ultimately I think there needs to be a single person at the school identified as being responsible for what happens at the school and given the powers (eg budget and staff control) to ensure that this happens. If principals are unable to do this, then split the role.
HR isn’t just personnel administration, Chris. If you’ve got good HR people, you’ve normally got some organisational psychologists among them who are expert in performance assessment and evaluation.
I think that’s a good idea!
Not hijacking, but this is precisely the concern I was trying to voice in the 2020 thread. Non-qualified experts can miss the forest for the trees sometimes…
I really hope Rudd can revitalise the ed dept.
Here, patrickg, I think it’s more a case of expertise in one domain (economics, statistics) being purported to be expertise in another (education).
In February, it was revealed that special schools such as those belonging to the Exclusive Brethren were being overfunded, which was part of Howard’s legacy. At the time, Gillard said it was a concern, but that she was not prepared to tackle the issue of disparity of funding for private schools until later this year. She said that funding to schools such as the Exclusive Brethren would continue at the present unfair level for the rest of the year, and then gradually be reduced year by year, for about five years, until their was funding parity between private and public schools. The sudden withdrawal of public funding for private schools was seen as too disruptive to the operation of private schools. In other words, Labor’s agenda is to work slowly towards parity.
I don’t think that’s right, silkworm. Labor promised explicitly to maintain current funding levels for private schools until 2012 – the period of the current funding agreement. The parity you’re thinking of would have to come from increasing funding to government funded schools.
See:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/03/16/gillard-school-education-and-social-inclusion/
Look, humility is always in order – for an economist as well as every other expert. But beyond that, I’m really finding it hard to agree with much of what you say, Kim. What do you think education policy should be guided by? “Teachers’ instincts”? That’s as disastrous as building your health policy around doctors’ instincts (and that is not disrespecting either teachers or doctors).
It’s just that they will be closely focused on trees and in no position to see the forest. And that’s even assuming they can rise above pure self-interest (we all have a remarkable capacity to genuinely believe that what is in our personal interest must be in the public interest).
My reading of the quantitative evidence doesn’t always coincide with Andrew’s (the point about his conservative presuppositions has force). But its another thing to disregard quantitative evidence, because the real life alternative to evidence-based policy is faith-based policy.
No, not teachers’ instincts, dd. But people don’t seem to realise quantitative evidence is available from within education studies. Economists didn’t invent social science statistics, you know! (Sociologists did…)
Of course there are legitimate issues with regard to the view people involved in the system might have. That doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. It also doesn’t mean that research done by people in Education Faculties should all be discounted (or just ignored, which is what I think is happening largely).
I also think there needs to be more understanding of how difficult change is to effect in such a large and complex system – that seems to be recognised in health, but discounted in education. That’s not an anti-change argument, but an argument for the importance of coalition-building, as I said in the post.
Maybe we’re not disagreeing here – I think they can provide great input into how the performance assessment is done, but I do question whether they can actually do the performance assessment – eg are they able to fully understand the goals that were set for the employees and what they achieved compared to others without having the domain specific knowledge?
I don’t deny that HR certainly has an important role in helping to filter out unsuitable candidates for positions or advising on how to handle situations when people aren’t performing.
I’m with you there — we could also do with narrative-based history
. Seriously though, good points.
I don’t think anyone could fault what I understand is Andrew Leigh’s overall objective, which is to improve learning outcomes for disadvantaged students. However, his solution is fundamentally flawed. He wants to find a way to identify the most effective teachers and then give those teachers incentives to go teach the disadvantaged students.
All the argument about whether you can measure teaching performance, and if so how, misses the point – the solution itself is impracticable. Imagine a system picking up the really effective teachers at Killara High or North Sydney Girls or James Ruse so they could be induced to go to Mount Druitt or Casino or Canley Vale … to be replaced by teachers identified by the system as under-performers. The schools would be blockaded by soccer mums in their Pajeros and Hondas.
Much of Andrew’s work seems to be examining whether something could be done in theory without considering whether it could ever be done in practice.
Surely education would improve if educational outcomes were more closely related to post formal education outcomes, and in turn if post educational outcomes were more closely related to educational outcomes. And that is not going happen is it, for people who do not occupy upper middle class jobs? The fact that education is inherently, perhaps not consciously, framed by social class, may not be a bad thing except that is integral to a social system of violence – you know competition and its metrics, internalized and externalized, are good, the race goes to the strong in the dog eat dog world. A dead end job is not simply a dead end for dead enders. It is a social construct.
For my 2c I don’t think one frucking red cent of OUR public monies should go anywhere near any private school anywhere. This could be reviewed every five years or so…just in case churches and wealthy tax-dodgers actually start chipping in to the public monies and anteing up and want to stop being mistaken for blood sucking leeches.
Stop these rorting rorters rorting the current system! No free riders! Pay the fare or get off the bus!
Kim: I sympathize with your rant. Teachers do cop it from everyone. And experts in one domain assuming that their knowledge is automatically transferrable to another, without bothering to understand the work done by others in the area, can be extremely annoying. The number of IT projects that are screwed up by managers who don’t understand anything about IT – and consequently get some of the basics wrong, including some of the stuff about organizational change you’re incidentally mentioning in your post – is scary.
But I think you’re making a possibly incorrect assumption – that Andrew necessarily needs or wants to go around seeking to persuade a coalition of people to implement the conclusions of his research. For a lot of academics, it’s enough to do your research, publish your conclusions, and if they’re taken up by somebody, great. Not everybody has the social skills – or the patience – to do the nitty-gritty work of coalition-building, any more than everybody has the analytical skills to do academic research; to some extent, the personality characteristics required can be mutually exclusive. Personally, there’s only been one occasion where I’ve really played practical politics of the kind your describing (it was internal organizational politics in a community organization) and it’s really hard, and didn’t come naturally.
Furthermore, professional disciplines do often have a tendency to start conflating the interests of their practitioners and the interests of those who use their services, and sometimes do disappear up blind alleys that only somebody from outside the discipline is able to recognize. For instance, the very research lauradhel and tigtog were pointing to in their disagreement with Andrew Leigh tends to suggest that Australian obstetricians are rather too eager to pull out the scalpel. Doctors are also notoriously skeptical about the capability of anybody other than doctors to provide health services, or regulate their profession, for instance. Is it not possible that, on some occasions, similar things might happen to the teaching profession, even if completely unconciously?
Education “doesn’t get a gig”????
From my perusal of the 2020 gabfest site, education certainly DID.
Actually, it was in topic 1, considered as an integral part of national infrastructure according to the relevant URL, although the sidebar link to the page was “Productivity Agenda:”
From http://www.australia2020.gov.au/topics/infrastructure.cfm
Heading on that page: The productivity agenda – education, skills, training, science and innovation. Bolding in the blockquotes below is mine.
The first sentence of the first paragraph?
And one of the four dot points they were supposed to cover (others including improvements to the digital economy which also relate to education)?
I’ll note if you improve maths/science teaching, logical analysis required for competence in any discipline (as well as being an involved citizen) is improved.
btw: My own submission to the topic, which was then part of “Economy” rather than productivity, has been cut and pasted here.
Dave – point taken, but education and education as part of productivity/innovation ain’t the same thing. It’s applying a very particular frame to any discussions that may transpire before they even begin.
Robert @30:
That was exactly our point in large (although we got sidetracked by nitty-gritties regarding selection bias etc) and one that Joshua Gans at least could clearly see: their own data showing that elective interventions were being easily delayed by 2 weeks or more in order to qualify for the baby bonus supports the criticism that obstetric interventions generally are being done too early, which runs exactly counter to Andrew’s hyping of “overcooked” babies.
Cross-disciplinary analysis of policy initiatives is nearly always the way to go. Possum @10 nails it:
Kim – Sorry off topic. But why is that kitty so peeved?
Helen’s denigration of “choice” in her post is shockingly elitist, suggesting that the “aspirationals” who send their kids to independent schools are deluded by “moral panic”.
This is a misrepresentation, and you know it. I was making a very specific point, as others who read my post attentively will see: the current concept of “choice” in establishing which school your child will attend is a misnomer, it’s actually an absence of choice, people being railroaded into the private system due to the running down of the public. “Choice” means actually having,you know, a choice. Having an excellent high school in the travel-able vicinity which won’t hold any children back. Given that, you are perfectly welcome to send your child to Spaghetti Monster Grammar – but not on my tax dollar.
I am a public school graduate from ‘05, and I can understand perfectly well why parents may want their kids in a private school environment — there really are nontrivial differences in culture (beyond the differences in academic results).
I am a non-selective public school graduate from the 70s, got 100% in one subject and 99% and 97% in two others (yes, arts subjects, but still). I know what can be achieved. It has also been quite well established that public school graduates, if they choose to continue to tertiary education, do better than their privately educated peers.
I mean, VCE subjects (HSC as it was then.)
Its not costing you the tax payer any more money when someone sends their kid to a private school instead of a public one. In fact its costing you less money.
I’m all for increasing funding for students attending public schools, but there is no reason that this has to come at the expense of funding for private schools – it may even backfire and we’ll end up with less money per student in public schools if too many move to public schools.
I think you have to be pretty careful at interpreting that sort of data. It could be interpreted to indicate that the private schools did a better job of extracting better results through better teaching. The same studies also show that students from selective public schools do worse than both private and normal public schools, so I suspect its more to do with getting a bunch of smart people together who end up encouraging and helping each other to do better (with less distractions).
I’m very interested in this as well, given that I’m still deciding about schools for my own little people.
I’ve seen the studies that indicate that Private school students with the same entry scores as public school students tend to do better at university. I’ve also seen the inferences drawn around the “spoon feeding” of private school students, sense of entitlement, etc.
Can anyone point me at any stats regarding employment in chosen field, salary, and so on, 5 years after graduation?
Better Uni marks are a great thing, but unless it transfers to better outcomes after the under-graduate degree, it may not be the best indicator to be using.
I’ve seen the studies that indicate that Private school students with the same entry scores as public school students tend to do better at university. I’ve also seen the inferences drawn around the “spoon feeding” of private school students, sense of entitlement, etc.
Did you get public and private switched around in your first sentence, Darin? because I’ve read reports of studies that show that public school educated students do better than private, and it is thought that it is perhaps the gearing of education to a hight TER rather than teaching them to be larnin’.
Yeah everything I’ve ever read on the subject says that public school kids do better at Uni. When I was at private school homework, study etc was rigidly disciplined. My marks dropped off when I switched to the public school because it wasn’t so much. They picked up again in yr 11 because I knew I needed to do well then to get in to Uni.
>
And no-one was pushing me I had to push myself. Which is pretty much how Uni works. If I hadn’t already had to learn to self-start I think maybe I wouldn’t've done so well at the tertiary level.
Yes, Sorry about that. With the fact that they call the private school I went to a public school, things get a bit messy.
Let’s say “state schools” get better results at Uni….
Although I feel things will be a lot more blurred in the near future with a growing number of schools of both types offering the IB around Brisbane. Perhaps that will give a better indication of the larnin skills people are being taught.
Adrien at 34 – I imagine because it haz eccentric conjugation.
Which is one reason to choose your university course based on your interests rather than on potential earnings. The motivation will come naturally. Thats also related to one of the other suggestions on the difference between private and public school students results at uni – that the private school ones are more likely to be pushed into courses by their parents that they are not interested in and so are less motivated.
On the private school student performance at university issue, I summarise the research here, and in the links in that post.
In summary:
1. In first year, students from non-selective government schools on average do slightly better than students from private schools and selective government schools who received the same ENTER score. However, as the average ENTER score for students from private schools and selective government schools is higher, it is likely that their average grade is higher. Unfortunately, none of the published studies look at second or later years.
2. Private school students, reflecting their initial stronger ENTER scores, are more likely to complete their degrees. However, if ENTER scores are conrolled for statistically completion rates are the same between school sectors.
3. Private school graduates have higher annual incomes, but this is not controlling for occupation or any non-salary income sources.
Kim:
You say “but education and education as part of productivity/innovation ain’t the same thing.”
Point taken, and agreed. However, at least talking of “human capital agenda” in the same breath as “essential infrastructure” puts it squarely in the face of economic “rationalists” who don’t see human capital as important.
Further, your general points are well made, and I hope you (and other good thinkers on this page – you know who you are) are stimulated by this discussion to make a submission via this official 2020 page by 2008-04-09, which is getting awfully close. There is a 500 word limit per topic.
I also hope some of you cut-and-paste your submissions here on LP.
Yes. I’m going to fuse a couple of subthreads and leap off on a (possibly slightly indulgent but relevant) tangent here: this, for me, is a powerful argument in favour of better attention to in-depth, multi-disciplinary education. On a personal note, I think I would have been struggling to develop or articulate cogent arguments against Leigh’s analysis without a solid tertiary grounding in all three of medicine, feminism, and medical anthropology, combined with self-education and medical practice experience.
And yet, real cross-disciplinary education is the exact opposite of what tends to result from a superficial “productivity”-lovin’ + a strict-user-pays approach to education. Specialise early, pump ‘em through, first degree or certificate on the board, say goodbye to education, then out into the workforce to slave off the debt and only engage in limited, productivity-directed post-graduate ed. And typically no government or employer subsidies or support for second or third degrees in apparently “unrelated” disciplines. Real education has ended up being very much a devalued luxury item.
Thanks, Dave. I’ll certainly give it some thought.
And lauredhel is spot on and makes a really strong point.
Makes sense to me. A kid whose tertiary achievement, despite an inferior school education, is bound to have better personal resources. And hence, our kid will do better on the level playing field of university.
Kim, while I strenuously disagree with almost all Leigh’s conclusions re; education, I for one am glad he’s getting these ideas out in the public eye, as errant as the approach may be.
Like some other commenters here, I believe Leigh’s greatest strength is in the collection and analysis of empirical data (although I have some methodological and epistemological nit-picks there too) and his greatest weakness is the conclusions he then attempts to draw from that data.
To be charitable, Leigh is out there doing what many of us lament the lack of in Australia – he is being a “public intellectual”. Or rather, he is being 90% of a public intellectual – he is producing a voluminous body of work (although not so much of it is peer-reviewed) and getting attention for it, but seems unfortunately less well equipped to deal with the ethical responsibilities that can arise from standing by that work and the policies that might flow from it. This might be due to the disciplinary constraints and assumptions of modern economics as practiced in the university.
In my view, Leigh exhibits a seeming naivete about how his conclusions can be picked up and run with by some folks with truly nefarious motives in mind. As a crude caricature, it’s almost like the nuclear physicist who stammers “but…but…I didn’t know they were going to use it for that!”
Oh, I don’t disagree, Mercurius. As I said, I don’t question Leigh’s good faith in undertaking and propagating his research, and I think there is a degree of naivete at work here.
I am dead keen for a serious education debate. Am at pointy end of it demographically. Anyone got a conversation starter?
LP has one of the most prolific comments threads in the oz blogging business, so I’ve found it interesting to not only read Kim’s comments, but also see what others have to say about the specific issues of education and how economists do their work. A couple of quick responses.
* I’d like to think I’m not all that easy to pin down ideologically on education. I do think we should run randomised trials of merit pay schemes, but I’m not 100% sure it’ll work. Similarly, I’d advocate some ideas traditionally associated with the left: raise the compulsory school leaving age to 17, give more funding to ensure low-SES schools can hire great teachers, and pay Indigenous kids a weekly stipend to attend school (or at least trial it). Oh, and I spent a week last year arguing the left-wing perspective on private schools in a 2007 debate with Andrew Norton. A major part of my research is on inequality, and it’s really what animates my thinking about schools.
* Ed Sector, my favourite US education thinktank, recently ran a conference on the role of teacher unions in education reform. I’d like to do something similar in Australia at some point. We’re not going to achieve anything significant in Australian education without getting union leaders, and members, on board.
* My guess is that the specific issue with tigtog and laurelhed has more to do with form than substance. I’m pleased that my coauthor Joshua Gans was able to do a better job than me in engaging with their comments, and hopefully the next time we cross swords, I’ll end up being more persuasive.
The stated questions for the Education stream of the 2020 summit are :
What should be our approach to the early years development of our children?
What can be done to reduce the wide variations in outcomes and school effectiveness?
What should the “public commitment” to education be? Can “public” education only be delivered through “public” schools?
What can we do to ensure the highest quality teachers at all stages of the system, and for all subjects?
What can be done to extend participation in adult learning to those with the greatest learning needs and lowest participation rates?
What options are there for funding the education system, given the complexities of federalism?
How does an economy with low private investment in research and development innovate?
What can be done to ensure that Australia attracts and retains the most talented, creative and highly skilled people?
What can be done to foster innovation in the workplace and encourage the transfer of ideas across businesses?
What kinds of collaboration can best connect scientists to others in the economy?
What kinds of differences could the developing digital economy make right across the education lifecycle?
How can we continue to improve student retention rates at secondary school?
Great comment thread, folks.
Less I be misconstrued as advocating ‘throw more money it’ I support the notion that increased spending on education should be rationally and strategically directed. That would also apply to the public education bureacracy with its penchant for new and improved TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) with every change of Minister which chew up increasing amounts of resources in wheel-reinvention and red-tape box-ticking.
However, it is obvious that the public system has been systematically starved for more than a decade, and as with starvation, some immediate relief is required as well as longer term strategies for sustainable food production. Paying teachers more to attract and keep the best and brightest, and upgrading buildings and equipment are no brainers hardly requiring extensive academic and economic analyses. We need to at least establish a sustainable baseline for ongoing viability.
A fully competitive free market approach to education can only produce winners and losers – the best teachers and resources go to the private sector, further entrenching advantage and disadvantage. As a nation and civil society we need to do better than that, both in terms of social equity and bottom-line economic well-being.
Coming from someone who just lectured me by email about “politeness”, this is astonishingly, colossally rude. I have put an enourmous amount of substantive, informed reasoning and data to you, at length, and you have waved the lot away and dismissed it as being all about me being “cross” and “impolite”, and now as being all about “form”?
Wow. Just wow.
Andrew, inasmuch as we have vigorously asserted that handwaving speculation outside your field of expertise is “bad form”, then I guess your sentence which lauredhel quotes in #55 might have a loose connection to something pointy, but it was the substance of your particular interpretation about delayed births and “overcooked” babies which was the point at issue. Neither lauredhel nor I object to most of your purely economic arguments against the Baby Bonus, nor to your arguments that a timeshift in pre-scheduled birth interventions due to bonus adjustments will have implications for resource planning in health administration of obstetric wards.
However, you have made arguments that there will be health implications from timeshifting these pre-scheduled birth interventions. Those arguments simply do not stand up. The ease with which pre-scheduled birth interventions can be delayed indicates that they are routinely performed needlessly early, and the speculation that delaying birth interventions will lead to “overcooked” babies is simply embryologically unfounded.
We’d be happy to continue debating this with you in the appropriate thread over at Hoyden, as this thread was going in very interesting directions about education, and it shouldn’t be derailed.
“who doesn’t seem to get why some people actually working in the field might not think that every problem can be magically solved by a correct statistical analysis – is blogger and economist Andrew Leigh”
I very much doubt Dr Leigh believes in the kind of magic you are talking about.
“The problem Dr Leigh is going to have – and one he seems to be beginning to understand with his worry that his writing gets attacked – is that he doesn’t have enough friends.” “…if you can’t actually get the huge machine of schooling working for you, your econometrics don’t count.”
If that is truly your view, then why so much attention?
IMO, Dr Leigh is doing exactly what more economists (and academics from other disciplines for that matter) should be doing – getting their research out into the public domain and encouraging discussion. Not everyone is going to agree with that research, but isn’t that precisely the point?
“Do economists have some additional insight those who’ve actually laboured in the fields to which they turn their gaze don’t?”
Well, no. And yes. Conventional wisdom from within a field is conventional for reasons other than truth or accuracy. Sometimes the objectives with those inside a field are not perfectly aligned with the wider world. Opinions based on research from experts in other fields should be encouraged. Where the conventional wisdom turns out to be correct, such outside opinions can serve to firm conventions up. Where it is wrong, it can be further challenged and changed.
Lauredhel (Comment 46) said:
Three cheers from me!!!
I’m troubled by the ever-earlier ages at which kids are forced to specialize (now barely halfway through secondary education). Thankfully, I was at a school where most of the better science/maths students were almost all pushed to Latin and/or French, although by year 12 I was hauled before the principal who wanted me to choose between arts and sciences. He shut up when I said “Private schools pride themselves on forming rounded and civilized citizens. You should be pleased I’m both”.
Personally, I’d argue that an extra year (or two) of secondary education before university is necessary to provide an in-depth, multi-disciplinary education. Fat chance that’ll happen though.
ENOUGH SIMPLISTIC MISREPRESENTATION OF ECONOMICS
Contary to the glowing endorsements by the usual LP suspects in the comments thread, this post is a simplistic rant that reflects a deep ignorance of the subject being attacked.
Really? Any evidence or relevant experience? As an economist, my extensive experience is that we think about this sort of thing consistently when doing modelling and/or interpreting modelling results.
Again, any evidence or experience? In asking this, please don’t presume that economists not taking on board the findings of other researchers or perspectives is the same thing as economists not considering the merits of those findings or perspectives. As an economist, I have often consider the merits of viewpoints put by, for instance, sociologists and demographers on matters I’ve worked on. Its just that they’re not always particularly pertinent, enlightening or convincing.
This is not an assumption of economics, questioned or otherwise. Ever heard of “wasteful competition” for instance, which you’ll find discussed in any first year economics text?
Whether that is the case or not, Kim has certainly demonstrated enough ignorance about economics to indicate that her view on this matter is not credible.
Hear hear, Tom N.
I was waiting for someone to bring up wasteful competition. I’m really glad it wasn’t me, though.
Turning to Dave’s point about forced specialization: I don’t know about his specific proposals, but I do think there has to be away for people of intelligence and goodwill to engage in a cross-disciplinary fashion – without spouting rot. I’m thinking here of Robert Manne writing an entire book (Shutdown) on economic policy when he clearly knew nothing about said economic policy. Economics is not particularly hard, although mathematical/statistical facility clearly helps. It’s certainly not rocket science or epidemiology.
I didn’t (and still don’t) know much about sociology, but I’ve picked Mark’s brains at various times for reading material and learned a great deal. Surely Dave’s right that a good quality general tertiary education will – if you’re patient – allow you to learn about other disciplines and appreciate their particular strengths an weaknesses. That said, David Zyngier’s comments about Andrew Leigh’s research betray a worrying inability to grasp even the basics of what Andrew’s trying to achieve. So maybe not.
ENOUGH SIMPLISTIC MISREPRESENTATION OF ASTROLOGY
Contary to the glowing endorsements by the usual LP suspects in the comments thread, this post is a simplistic rant that reflects a deep ignorance of the subject being attacked.
Really? Any evidence or relevant experience? As an astrologer, my extensive experience is that we think about this sort of thing consistently when preparing charts and/or interpreting chart results.
Again, any evidence or experience? In asking this, please don’t presume that astrologers not taking on board the findings of other researchers or perspectives is the same thing as astrologers not considering the merits of those findings or perspectives. As an astrologer, I have often consider the merits of viewpoints put by, for instance, psychics and numerologists on matters I’ve worked on. Its just that they’re not always particularly pertinent, enlightening or convincing.
This is not an assumption of astrology, questioned or otherwise. Ever heard of “Venus in Scorpio” for instance, which you’ll find discussed in any first year astrology text?
Whether that is the case or not, Kim has certainly demonstrated enough ignorance about astrology to indicate that her view on this matter is not credible.
Let’s face it: almost all astro-bloggers and astrology laureates [1] agree with Gummo’s position.
Physicists and their unions will rant and rail that astrological tools are applied to their discipline but, let’s face it, they lack the mathematical skills of astrologers.
1. Like that other great science, economics, astrology created its own prize, called it a Nobel and encouraged everyone to treat it as a genuine Nobel Prize.
I don’t know that it’s ever-earlier. Perhaps it got later and then got earlier again. But I was forced by the system to make an absolutely clear-cut Arts/Sciences choice at fifteen, at the end of what’s now Year Ten; that was in 1968/9, and it was the same for everyone. And I have regretted it ever since.
It was the same for me in 1982; I only managed to carry German through to senior level and had to drop all history and geography in order to do Biology and Chemistry. I still regret it too; I loved history.
It was the same for me going through in the mid-late 90’s. Although compared to university the high-school subjects of physics, chemistry, etc are all very broad in their subject matter. Unfortunately there’s only so many hours in the school day and we can’t teach people everything.
This is something I think seems to have been forgotten in much of the education debate. The valuable role of education in forming a civilized society, and that education is more than just preparing people for the next step in life. Primary school focuses on preparing students for secondary school, secondary school focuses on tertiary education; and university focuses on creating graduates that industry are looking for. Like many other facets of life in today’s world the focus has become about the next few years at the cost of greater value over the long term. Moving towards a systematic rating of teacher performance will focus on what is easily measurable, the distinct and immediate improvements in students abilities, at the cost of the long term investment of a broad and quality education.
“Private schools pride themselves on forming rounded and civilized citizens”
Riverview obviously did a wonderful job on People Skills Abbott.
“Thankfully, I was at a school where most of the better science/maths students were almost all pushed to Latin and/or French”
Fair enough except that it seems perfectly acceptable for Latin and French students to remain mathematically and scientifically untutored; in particular it is no barrier to writing intemperate blog posts on fields of which they know little. CP Snow’s “two cultures” still exists.
Kim, you point out (correctly) that educationalists do use social science techniques. But I attended an interesting lecture a couple of years ago by William Becker – an editor of the Journal of Education Economics – that bemoaned the low standard of technique used, and the subsequent prevalence of results that are simply wrong but which have entered into educationalists’ conventional wisdom. Now Becker may or may not be right (he had an entertaining range of horror stories to cite), but it seems to me that confidence in this sort of “wisdom” does benefit from scrutiny from expert people outside the field. Both statisticians and social psychologists have done a lot of that in economics, f’rexample, with considerable effect.
And yes, Tom N. is right. Non-economists consistently underestimate the methodological (not just econometric) sophistication of good economists. Maybe because economics is a field almost as ill-served by its popularisers as evolutionary biology.
That’s an interesting point, derrida.
I’ve done some work in Education Faculties once or twice, and it may be that the particular backgrounds of education academics don’t lend themselves readily to using statistical methods to inform policy debates – ie educational psychologists tend to focus on micro-problems (and that’s not a criticism), while some of the policy folk have come out of a teaching and administration background and don’t have a lot of training in higher-end stats. Some projects I’m aware of have in effect bought in statistical expertise, but maybe we’re back at the desirability of collaboration point here!
There is a standard pattern of intellectual debate that generates more heat than light: cliometricians vs. social historians, ‘economic rationalsits’ vs. Puseyites, optimists vs. pessimists on 19th century living standards, the totalitarian school vs. revisionists in Soviet history etc. Bright young things challenge the orthodoxy in the name of an empirical quantitative approach, often valuable but they fail to realise how rubbery their evidence is or admit how low are their R-Sq. Often this takes a old left vs. new right form, although the revisionists in Soviet history were on the left. You need both approaches. The best example I saw was Peter Shergold’s (the ex-PMC head)book on 19th century American living standards. Social analysis is only possible because individuals are conscious but social processes are not explained by what people think: Cain & Hopkins’ British Imperialism is a great example. But