Club Troppo

Teacher Incentives and Student Achievement: Evidence from New York City Public Schools by Roland G. Fryer  -  #16850 (ED LS)

Abstract:
Financial incentives for teachers to increase student performance is an increasingly popular education policy around the world.  This paper describes a school-based randomized trial in over two-hundred New York City public schools designed to better understand the impact of teacher incentives on student achievement.  I find no evidence that teacher incentives increase student performance, attendance, or graduation, nor do I find any evidence that the incentives change student or teacher behavior.  If anything, teacher incentives may decrease student achievement, especially in larger schools.  The paper concludes with a speculative discussion of theories that may explain these stark results.

Thus reads the first of so far 113 comments on the Qld Police’s Facebook page in response to a story in the Courier Mail.

John Howard took to talk-back radio to give him a direct line through the compulsive world of spin that is the mass media.  Now the Qld Police are showing how Facebook gives them the same capacity. Here’s a story from the Sunday Mail outlining how the coppers froze to death some cute puppies under their care.

As you can see, there was even a picture of the puppies. Well, not the puppies but puppies like the puppies. This was the story.

HE Queensland Police Service will be investigated by the RSPCA after a litter of dog squad puppies froze to death for want of a cheap heating box.

The Sunday Mail has learnt five newborn german shepherd puppies died in Brisbane’s police academy kennels at Oxley after a bitterly cold night last winter.

Sources have revealed the squad was down one of its two kennel hands so could not maintain a 24-hour watch on the animals, as done for previous births, and no one was on duty the night the pups were born.

By the time the pups were discovered about 6am the next day, their body temperatures had plunged and they had suffered organ failure.

RSPCA chief inspector Mick Pecic said he would investigate whether there were any breaches of animal welfare laws, which carry a maximum $30,000 fine or a year’s jail.

At least from what the Police say on their Facebook site, this was mostly nonsense.

Some of you may have read about the deaths of some puppies at the QPS Puppy Development Program last year. We thought you might like to see some of the facts surrounding this sad incident which weren’t included in the story. . . . (Continued)

I learned this somewhat startling fact last week. I was in a group of people – public servants – who clearly thought it was a problem, something to be ‘managed’ or ameliorated in some way. After all, it’s not very balanced is it?  Anyway my guess as to why it’s happening is the same as Frances Woolley’s guess which is this.

One theory is that women don’t edit Wikipedia because it is an ”obsessive fact-loving realm that is dominated by men and…uncomfortable for women.” A recent blog comment by Jaques Giguere attributed some gender differences in on-line behaviour to lekking – a form of sexual display where males congregate and compete for mates. I like the theory, but it strikes me that posting anonymously on Wikipedia is a pretty ineffectual way of displaying one’s prowess.

My own theory is that women are less interested this kind of intellectual competition – after all, deleting someone else’s entry is kind of the scholarly equivalent of checking someone into the boards and taking the puck off them. I also think that women are conditioned or programmed (take your pick) to be modest and value modesty – it’s not feminine to go to Wikipedia and create a page about yourself, or go through entries and add references to your own work.

Anyway, if anyone else has any ideas, please enlighten us.

Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged is so popular even Angus & Robertson stock it. And now after years of rumours, it’s finally become a movie. That’s odd because it’s longer than Tolstoy’s War and Peace and climaxes with a philosophical speech that runs for 70 pages. Most critics despise it — as Jason Steger told the ABC First Tuesday Book Club: "The writing is unbelievably repetitive, tedious, banal. The ideas in it are crass".

Somehow, the global financial crisis triggered a resurgence in sales of the novel. Nobody knows how many people are actually reading the book, but fans clearly think it’s relevant to the problems of today.

What’s weird about this is that Rand’s philosophy is a kind of inverted Marxism. Without an understanding of Marx, it’s impossible to understand what Rand is on about. In a world where even China’s communist party has converted to free market economics, it’s odd to read a book by a free market evangelist who takes Marx so seriously.

Marx argued that labour was the source of all value. "Capital is dead labour," he insisted. Dead labour "that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." It is labour that creates the capitalist’s machines and once created, the machines drain work of its creativity, skill and purpose.

But for Rand, it is workers who feed off capital. Productivity increases when scientists, inventors and engineers develop new technologies. As her fictional her John Galt puts it: "The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time." Without the benefit of this technology, ordinary labourers would either starve or be forced to live like medieval peasants. As Galt says: "The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains."

Atlas Shrugged is about what happens when the creative minority go on strike.

(Continued)

I’m reading Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants which is quite good.  It is a ‘book of the article’ type of book, but I like  it nevertheless. Part Two and some of the chapters at the end are the best part of the book.

Copying from the top review on Amazon sets out the basic plot.

The central thesis of the book is that technology grows and evolves in much the same way as an autonomous, living organism.

The book draws many parallels between technical progress and biology, labeling technology as “evolution accelerated.” Kelly goes further and argues that neither evolution nor technological advance result from a random drift but instead have an inherent direction that makes some outcomes virtually inevitable. Examples of this inevitability include the eye, which evolved independently at least six times in different branches of the animal kingdom, and numerous instances of technical innovations or scientific discoveries being made almost simultaneously.

And thinking about regulation, as I often do I was struck by this passage on the exponential growth of information:

The quantity of scientific knowledge, as measured by the number of scientific papers published, has been doubling approximately every 15 years since 1900. If we measure simply the number of journals published, we find that they have been multiplying exponentially since the 1700s, when science began. Everything we manufacture produces an item and information about that item. Even when we create something that is information based to start with, it will generate yet more information about its own information. The long-term trend is simple: The information about and from a process will grow faster than the process itself. Thus, information will continue to grow faster than anything else we make.

Against this it doesn’t seem so strange that the volume of regulation seems to grow something like exponentially (see diagram above and the diagram on this page).  Of course that’s a scary business, because no-one can possibly comprehend all the regulation that exists – and now they can’t really do it even in some special area – like tax law. Still, it has been this way for a long, long time. ‘The law’ was impossible for any one person to know at the time of federation. For each case is part of the law, and there were thousands of pages of law to know in 1901 on any subject – comprising the hundreds or thousands of cases in the area and all the statutes and regulation.

For a long time I’ve been suggesting that those scary graphs we see of mounting regulation – measured in the pages of new legislation and regulation are not an indication of regulatory Armageddon.  They’re the natural result of our lives and in particular the world of information becoming more complex. The line I’ve used in presentations is that what’s happening with regulation – which resembles an exponential growth curve – is similar to the shape of the curve measuring the size of software packages – like Microsoft Word.  They just get bigger and bigger over time representing an increase in functionality.

Now it would be easy to send up what I’ve just said, and say that the mounting volume of regulation measures it’s dysfunctionality. To some extent that’s probably right – but as the world gets more complex the interactions of government with that world must become more complex. If you’re regulating finance for instance as you must even with the most laissez faire system (because you must determine tax treatment) your regulatory system must comprehend the complexity of what is evolving before it.

In some ways I’d say this is one of the flaws in Hayek.  He has a strong intuition of the increasing richness and complexity of the market, but thinks the division between government and the market can be reduced to immutable principles.  Of course there’s some appeal in that, but it has its limitations. Although Hayek has attracted a strong following, his vision of the rules that should be imposed upon government rule making doesn’t seem to be coming into existence anywhere. Rather government, like lots of other things is ‘emergent’, and one’s political philosophy must somehow derive its vision of what should be, from some realistic understanding of what could be which is based upon a close understanding of what is and why.
And below the fold is a quote from Kelly’s book which has little to do with this post.  I copied it from my Kindle to here and got the wrong quote!  But it’s a good quote, so I’ll leave you with it. Over the fold. (Continued)

God help the Gillard government with someone like Wayne Swan trying to explain the carbon tax:

Mr Swan is now distancing Labor from the term “carbon tax” and accused Opposition Leader Tony Abbott of lying about how it will operate.

“What we’re talking about here is an interim price which some people describe as a carbon tax and they can do that legitimately,” he said.

“It’s just that it doesn’t operate like a traditional tax; it is not deducted from your pay packet or anyone else’s pay packet, it comes from the big polluters.

“The money from the big polluters is then paid to assist householders and industry.

All this does is give Abbott and the media the opportunity to say that Swan and Gillard are contradicting each other on whether it’s a tax or not.  It IS a tax in every sense, not just an impost that “some people describe as a carbon tax”.  It was certainly necessary to correct any misconception about its incidence, but surely Swan could simply have said: “This is a tax that will only be levied on large polluters like power generators and iron and steel smelters.  It won’t be levied on ordinary citizens or small businesses.”

However, the real problem is leaving Abbott with an open field to sow fear and confusion by failing to make public any detail at all of the proposed scheme.  Climate Change Minister Greg Combet encapsulates the government’s current “strategic” position:

Mr Combet says the Government will continue to explain the basics about the tax and it will not be rushed into announcing the finer details.

“It is important I think, when you are making important areas of reform such as this, that you put out your broad policy intentions,” he said.

“It’s the same thing John Howard did in fact when announcing support for an emissions trading scheme in July 2007.

It may have escaped Combet’s attention that John Howard lost the 2007 election and only ever announced an ETS half-heartedly in a futile bid to eliminate it as a negative for the Coalition campaign.

(Continued)

Business is not happy with Barack Obama – and why should they be? After all they were spoiled by having a real pro in the job before Obama got there. Anyway, Obama has been leaning heavily on all arms of government – fiscal policy (obviously), monetary policy (OK, well via the Fed) and regulatory policy.  He’s been trying to get poor people socialised access to medical care (which explains why a lot of Americans want their country back).

In any event regulations come with costs and benefits.  And if this graph below – with the no doubt Herculean assumptions necessary for getting such a nice neat result – is anything to go by, at least in America we’re still at the point where more regulation (if its quality is not too bad) is good for us – ie it generates more benefits than costs – and indeed so long as you’re a Democrat, it seems that benefits outweigh costs by about three or four to one. The other relationship is that the more regulatory costs you impose, the higher the net benefits (which you’d kind of expect, all other things being equal, if we were substantially below the optimal amount of regulation).

Of course thinking in terms of whether we’ve got the optimal total volume of regulation makes about as much sense as wondering whether the script of a play has the optimal number of letters in it. It’s a sufficiently crude way to think that it ‘s likely to do more harm than good. However if the graphs are to be believed it reinforces a pretty important point that I’ve been making for a long time which is that we’re unlikely to get far with what I call the Michelangelo theory of regulation.

You will recall that Michelangelo described his own miraculous sculpture as involving nothing more than taking a block of marble and removing the marble that didn’t belong to the sculpture. This formulation is memorable and funny for various reasons, not least of which that being aware of this idea does nothing to help us sculpt like Michelangelo. And yet this is the basic theory behind ‘regulation review’. The idea is that one erects procedural quality hurdles which act as obstacles to bad regulation and the result will be . . . good regulation.  But if regulation can generate such net gains, is this a smart way to be trying to optimise the value of regulation. I think not.

Btw, this argument applies whether one thinks the charts above are broadly right or not. I don’t have a view on that – and for the reasons explained, don’t need one!

Dunera Boy Erwin Fabian, about whom I’ve written at least twice before is at it again – which is to say he has another exhibition on. He’s in his mid-nineties now and still working away every day in his North Melbourne studio (which is an old tin shed). I went to the opening the other day and tried to put something up here before I went, however I was unable to get any good graphics.  There are still no good graphics of the exhibition on the relevant site, but to the right is a graphic of a sculpture of an earlier exhibition.

You should pop along if you can make it to Collingwood. I think the sculptures are some of the best of his that I’ve seen.

One point I’ve not raised before is that Erwin’s sculptures have always been priced at such stratospheric levels that I’ve never really been tempted to buy any – ever – though we had a small one in our house which he gave to us a long time ago.

The sculptures at the exhibition range from $95,000 to 35,000 and none had sold at the end of the opening. Perhaps Erwin has ready buyers in London and Germany, where he was born and where he also exhibits.

In this week’s Missing Link Friday: bloggers complain about talkback radio; Andrew Bolt shares a bizarre political fantasy; and, tacked on the end, the usual list of other interesting stuff.

Angry radio

The whole point of talkback radio is to get the audience emotionally engaged. News and information might be the raw material, but if you think people are listening to stay informed, you’re missing the point. As American writer David Foster Wallace observed , it’s an industry "that manages to enjoy the authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved."

At the Failed Estate, Mr Denmore is shocked by what talkback has become:

Journalists of my generation were taught that to maintain a broadcasting licence and to meet one’s professional code of ethics, one was expected to observe laws concerning undisclosed paid comment, sub-judice, contempt of court, racial vilification, incitement to riot, defamation and just plain public decency. But apparently no longer.

He suggests boycotting advertisers and pressuring politicians to re-regulate the industry giving "proper teeth to those who police it and to take off air for good those who breach publicly agreed standards."

At Wild Woman-Crazy Crone, tarot reader and astrology aficionado GlitterGoddess blogs about Alan Jones’ recent interview with Prime Minister Julia Gillard . She writes: "The incivility is just unacceptable as is promoting hate as a way of winning the ratings games." She also suggests a boycott.

At Ethical Martini, University of Queensland lecturer Mark Hayes asks his students whether they enjoy being shouted at in the morning. Why then do they insist on listening to commercial radio?

When independent MP Tony Windsor started receiving death threats, he blamed the shock jocks at talkback radio. According to National Times columnist, Peter Hartcher: "The shock jocks are the volunteer sergeant-majors in the ‘people’s revolt’ summoned by the commanding general, Tony Abbott."

At Larvatus Prodeo, Kim writes: "so-called public debate has been debased by vicious and personalised abuse". She blames politicians:

The truth is that the vicious nature of what is wrongly represented as public opinion under all sorts of guises (“the talkback radio audience”, “Western Sydney”…) has gone too far, and those like Tony Abbott who stoke it, quite deliberately and with all intent, by – for instance – calling for a “people’s revolt” should be called for that.

Dr Wood Duck says: "The Tony Party appears to have entered the ugly drunk phase."

(Continued)

I gave a talk this morning at the Australian Digital Alliance policy seminar.  Somewhat to my surprise I’m the patron of the ADA and so had to sing for my supper. My talk had the title reported above.  As an economist among lawyers I was in some trepidation as to how it would all go. As I’ve observed in other contexts, I watch a lot of the legal discussion of IP in a state of bewilderment.

I was . . .  alarmed at how much of a meal lawyers can make of things that economists see as non-issues (like how to get the last penny of royalties to the copyright holders of ’orphan works’ – that is works that are not ‘public domain’ but for which rightful owners of copyright can’t be found.)  I was sitting in a lengthy session about this and other not dissimilar problems in amazement that no-one reached for an economic perspective on this stuff (even if they didn’t want to treat it as the final word).

Anyway I got quite a few requests for my slides, so here they are (ppt). I understand the National Library will provide a video podcast to which I’ll link when I know where to link.