Jay P. Greene's Blog

Building upon the work of Costrell and Podgursky, University of Arkansas alums, Josh McGee and Marcus Winters, have a fascinating report out today on how teacher retirement plans could be restructured in a cost-neutral way that would:

• Raise teacher salaries, in some cases substantially;
• Give teachers more retirement security than they now have;
• Make teaching a more attractive option for people who are unsure that they will work for decades in the same school district; and
• Offer teachers more control over when they stop working.

Of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch, but McGee and Winters have found something close.  The current system of back-loading teacher compensation to provide large pension benefits only to teachers who remain in their profession in the same state transfers wealth from more mobile or short-term teachers.  Smoothing out the spike in pension wealth and making some shift from deferred to current compensation would produce the benefits described above.  Some teachers might lose but the vast majority would come out ahead.  And the resulting system would be simpler, fairer, and more likely to attract quality people to teaching.

Here’s how McGee and Winters put it:

This paper examined the effect of cost-neutral changes to the structure of teacher compensation that, compared to current practices, would both increase teacher take-home salaries and offer a more secure retirement savings path for the majority of teachers.

Those who support the traditional DB pension systems that predominate across U.S. public schools correctly argue that such systems offer teachers a higher potential maximum retirement wealth than can be achieved under a cost equivalent smooth accrual system. However, our analysis makes clear that the higher maximum offered by the current system comes at a cost to a large share—often the heavy majority—of the teaching workforce: those who do not remain in their school systems for some three decades to become eligible for the maximum payout. In fact, these plans are explicitly designed to pay higher retirement benefits to long-career employees by reallocating wealth from teachers who exit the system earlier in their careers. As the detailed results for each of the 10 largest school systems provided in the final section of this paper demonstrate, in many systems these plans anticipate that the vast majority of teachers will not remain employed long enough to benefit from the traditional DB. Some long-serving teachers do well, but overall, this policy harms teachers’ retirement security.

This paper has also demonstrated the effect on teacher salaries of rebalancing the proportions of compensation that go to current salary versus retirement benefits. Our results demonstrate that such a reform would substantially improve teacher take-home salaries in some major school systems (though not in others). Of course, teachers require adequate retirement wealth; however, the heavy investment in retirement—only acquired by those teachers who remain in the classroom until the plan’s arbitrary normal retirement eligibility threshold—has artificially reduced teacher salaries in many school systems. If offered the opportunity, many teachers would likely prefer a system in which they took home a larger portion of their compensation than they do today.

Continuing my effort to study how cultural experiences affect students, I am conducting an experiment in which school groups can win free tickets to see live theater performances.  Since I expect that there will be more demand for these free tickets than supply, the school groups will be awarded the tickets by lottery — allowing for a rigorous random-assignment analysis that compares outcomes for students whose groups won the tickets by lottery to those who did not.  The purpose of this experiment is to learn about how seeing live performances with their school may affect student understanding of great works of dramatic literature as well as influence their values (particularly tolerance and empathy) and their taste for future cultural consumption (e.g., going to the theater in the future, going to art museums, participating in theater, choir, etc…)

The project was announced today in conjunction with TheatreSquared, a nationally recognized theater company based in Fayetteville, Arkansas.  TheatreSquared will be adding 8 weekday matinees of its performances this season of A Christmas Carol and Hamlet, allowing almost 1,400 students to see these plays on school field trips.  To apply for these free tickets, school groups can complete the online application found here.  My students, Collin Hitt and Anne Kraybill, and I will study the impact of these performances on students.

This theater experiment follows on a study my colleagues, Brian Kisida and Dan Bowen, and I conducted on the effects of field trips to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.  We similarly conducted lotteries to determine which school groups could visit the museum and studies how the experience affected students.  It also follows a natural experiment we examined in which students affected by the redrawing of school attendance zone boundaries were essentially randomly assigned to schools that went on more or fewer field trips to see live performances at the Walton Arts Center.  The results of those experiments will be published by Education Next on September 16.

(Guest Post by Lindsey Burke)

Second grader Nathan is the beneficiary of the new frontier of school choice: education savings accounts. “Two years ago, before the ESA program, Nathan spoke with a lot of jargon and mixed responses,” says his mother Amanda. “Two years ago we weren’t even sure if we were ever going to have a conversation with him. The only reason this is possible is because we could find programs that meet his needs with ESA funds.”

Thanks to Arizona’s pioneering Empowerment Scholarship Account program, which began in 2011, children with special needs like Nathan, as well as children from active duty military families, foster care, and children in underperforming schools can exit the public system and have 90 percent of what the state would have spent on their education deposited into an education savings account. Funds are deposited onto a restricted-use debit card, and parents are then able to direct spending to any education-related service or provider of choice.

Parents can use ESA funds, deposited into their accounts quarterly, to pay for a variety of education services and providers, including private-school tuition, private tutoring, special education services, homeschooling expenses, textbooks, and virtual education. Parents may also roll over funds from year to year, and can use the money to invest in a college savings plan to pay for college tuition in the future.

I recently evaluated Arizona’s ESA program for the Friedman Foundation to determine the extent to which parents were using their ESAs to actually customize their children’s educational experience. Using data provided by the Arizona Department of Education, I found that more than one third of families used their ESAs to tailor their child’s education, purchasing multiple services and products.

Families use their ESAs to finance a variety of education-related services from a range of providers. One family used roughly 60 percent of their ESA funds for educational therapy, 30 percent for private tutoring, and the remainder of their ESA for curricula. Another family put three-quarters of their ESA dollars toward private school tuition and invested the remaining 25 percent in a college savings fund. A third family divvied up their ESA spending on private school tuition, tutoring, curricula, and online learning.

While most families use their ESAs like a school voucher to attend a single private institution that they have chosen, approximately 34 percent use their ESAs to finance multiple education options in a given day. ESAs move beyond the worthwhile goal of choice among schools to choice among education service providers, courses, teachers, and methods—not limited to one brick-and-mortar location.

ESAs are unique in another way: whereas traditional school vouchers must be spent in their entirety, ESAs foster demand-side pressure for education providers to offer more cost-efficient educational services by creating an incentive for parents to shop for education services based in part on cost. Parents are taking opportunity costs into account, saving ESA funds in anticipation of future education-related expenses, including college tuition. During the first quarter of the 2012-13 school year, parents rolled-over 26 percent of their ESA funds.

Arizona has created a model that other states should consider: funding children instead of physical school buildings and allowing funds to follow children to any educational provider of choice. Jonathan Butcher and I also recently detailed how state policymakers could transition more traditional voucher and tuition tax credit programs into flexible education savings accounts. They could:

• Create public school education savings accounts. Parents could use a public school education savings account for traditional school classes, public charter school offerings, public virtual schools such as the Florida Virtual School, community colleges, or state universities.
• Shift existing school voucher or scholarship tax credit funds to an education savings account. States with existing voucher programs or scholarship tax credit programs should allow parents to deposit voucher or scholarship funds into an education savings account in order to gain more flexibility with their child’s funds.
• Expand the approved expenses covered by a voucher or private school scholarship. This would include expanding the uses of a school voucher or scholarship, transitioning the program into an education savings account.

We are entering a new frontier of school choice. Education savings accounts represent an advance and refinement of Friedman’s original voucher concept. Through ESAs, Arizona is moving beyond school choice to education choice.  Kym Wilber, whose son Zach is an ESA recipient, explains:

“I use Zach’s ESA funds for other things than just tuition.  Because Zach is more on the moderate to severe functioning level [in terms of special needs], his funding can be used more broadly. I have a private tutor for Zach, and I can use the (ESA) funds for that. With the ESA, I can actually go out and buy things for our home program, such as additional speech tools.”

Providing that level of customization to every child would bring American K-12 education into the 21st century and ensure no child is relegated to the existing monopolistic system in which limited effectiveness is all too prevalent in states across the country.

Alex Rodriguez is one of the highest paid athletes of all time.  He also has to be one of the most despised.  But this is precisely why the Yankees and MLB officials are getting away with a blatant effort to cheat A-Rod out of money for activities from which they benefited financially.

Yes, it is obvious that A-Rod has used performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) that are banned by baseball.  Yes, A-Rod often behaves like a jerk.  But being a jerk who cheats with drugs does not explain why the MLB is seeking much higher punishment of A-Rod than other baseball players who are also PED-using jerks.

The explanation is money.  If A-Rod is suspended for using banned substances the Yankees do not have to pay him during his suspension.  Given A-Rod’s sky-high salary, that saves the Yankees a large chunk of change.  It also lowers the Yankee’s payroll enough to avoid the “luxury tax” imposed on big spending teams.  And given that A-Rod has been injured and a sub-par player recently, losing his availability is a minor inconvenience to the Yankees relative to their enormous potential savings.  The Yankees are rooting for a big penalty.

I know that it is hard to feel bad for A-Rod.  He gets paid so much and has been such a disappointing player.  But the Yankees were dumb enough to sign a contract for his outrageous salary.  They shouldn’t be able to sneak out it by exploiting A-Rod’s unpopularity.  Justice is not achieved by cheating the disliked.  Justice requires that people get what they are owed, even if they are unpopular.

And for all those fans who despise A-Rod and other professional athletes for their high salaries, remember that the owners have even higher salaries and are making profits off of the players even after promising them enormous sums.  The professional athletes have extraordinary talents for which we, the fans, voluntarily pay large amounts of money to team owners who voluntarily offer high salaries to players.  Those players deserve every penny they are promised.  Hating talented people who earn large amounts of money is nothing but petty jealousy.

A system where team owners don’t have to pay players who are caught using PEDs unreasonably benefits the owners and encourages cheating.  Owners offer enormous salaries for higher-performing players, which provides incentives to players to use PEDs.  The owners benefit from those cheating players because of their higher performance.  If the players are caught, only the player suffers.  The owner, who benefited from the cheating, is off the hook financially and experiences no other loss from the cheating other than the loss of the availability of that player.

A better system of incentives would require owners to pay players even if they are suspended for PEDs.  This would provide a strong incentive to owners to avoid signing players who they strongly suspect to be cheating.  In turn, it would discourage players from using PEDs in the hopes of getting a better contract.  And it would encourage teams to monitor their own players more tightly to make sure they were not using PEDs.  If we want to drastically reduce the use of PEDs in baseball we can’t let the owners off the hook financially when players are caught.

In the TV series Lost some of the characters believed that a set of six numbers had to be entered into a computer every 108 minutes or something terrible would happen.  At least initially, it was unclear whether this compulsion to type The Numbers really would save the world from destruction or was just a manifestation of madness.

Typing 6 numbers into a computer every 108 minutes comes to mind when I think about the role that Twitter plays in education policy debates.  Some people feel the urgent need to type fewer than 140 characters into Twitter on a very frequent basis.  Are they saving the world from something terrible or are they suffering from a form of madness?

Judging by the high status of many of these manic Tweeters you might think they are saving the world.  They include respected academics, think tank leaders, and foundation officials, so it would seem that they really must engage in these compulsive acts to prevent something terrible from happening.

Unfortunately, I think they are suffering from a form of madness.  Issuing dozens of 140 character messages every day has no real impact on making the world better.  It just encourages shallow thinking and petty sniping.  In the history of the Universe it is highly unlikely that any Tweet influenced or helped anyone.  Yes, maybe an occasional link to an interesting article was influential, but how many interesting articles can one link to each day? It is virtually certain that dozens of Tweets per day have never done anything beyond soothe the Tweeter’s manic anxiety.

Yet, we see that many seemingly respectable education policy analysts feel the compulsion to type 140 characters more frequently than every 108 minutes.  And millions of Foundation dollars are being allocated to organizations based on “metrics” that include Twitter counts.  What a remarkable waste of Foundation money, not to mention the time of highly educated individuals who could be engaged in productive tasks.  Even worse, manic Twittering has coarsened education policy discussions by substituting superficial slogans and snark for actual thought.  It has electronically lobotomized people into thinking that “tight-loose” is actually an argument.

To gauge the extent to which this madness has overtaken education policy analysts I’ve updated my Narcissus Index to see how frequently people are Tweeting.  When I published the Narcissus Index on April 2 I recorded how many Tweets people had issued as of that date.  I collected information on how many Tweets they had sent as of this morning to calculate the number of Tweets people have sent over the last 134 days.  In the table below you can see the number of Tweets issued over the last 134 days as well as the average number of Tweets per day, rounded to the closest whole number.

I also calculated how many minutes, on average, went by during every waking hour between Tweets.  I assumed that people slept 8 hours per day, so there have been 2,144 waking hours since April 2.  That works out to 128,640 waking minutes.  Dividing that number of minutes by the number of Tweets since April 2, we can see how frequently people Tweet.  Of the 81 people for whom I had information as of April 2, 3 have discontinued use of Twitter. (Good for them!)  The results for the remaining 78 are listed below.  I’m sorry I can’t easily add new people because I only have the April 2 info for these people.

Of those 78 people, 22 send out a Tweet more often, on average, than every 108 minutes.  They meet the Lost threshold for saving the world from destruction.  Larry Ferlazzo manages to Tweet every 16 minutes of every waking hour over the last 134 days.  Sara Goldrick-Rab is not far behind at one Tweet every 18 minutes.  And RiShawn Biddle manages one Tweet every 23 minutes.  Diane Ravitch may be slacking as she only Tweets every 46 minutes of every waking hour over the last four months.

Keep in mind that these people must also shower, eat, go shopping, talk with family and friends, etc…  It’s summer, so maybe they went on vacation or took a day at the beach.  Just think of the number of available minutes consumed with Tweeting.  Presumably they also have jobs.

As long as Foundations continue to allocate funds based partially on Twitter “metrics” and as long as the rest of us continue to treat this manic behavior as not only normal, but something to be admired, we will continue to encourage it.  Folks may even rightly think of it as an important part of their jobs, even though it does virtually nothing productive in the world.  Or does it save the world?

Wait, I have to type 4 8 15 16 23 42…  Phew!  Disaster averted.

(Edited to correct typos)

My student, Collin Hitt, and colleague, Julie Trivitt, have an amazing paper on how we can efficiently measure an important non-cognitive skill that is strongly predictive of later life outcomes.  A growing number of researchers have come to realize that lifetime success is partially a function of traditional academic achievement (cognitive skills) and partially a function of what are called non-cognitive skills, such as hard work, self-discipline, determination, etc…  Schools may play a central role in conveying both types of skills, but for the most part we have only been collecting information on cognitive skills in the form of standardized test results.  The main difficulty in expanding the types of measures we collect to include non-cognitive skills is that we have not developed efficient mechanisms for doing so.

Hitt and Trivitt have taken an enormous step forward to solve this problem.  They have discovered that student non-response on surveys (not answering questions or saying they don’t know) is an excellent measure of non-cognitive skills that are strongly predictive of later life outcomes.  In particular they examined survey response rates from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY) given to students ages 13 to 17 in 1997.  The number of items that students answered was predictive of the highest level of education students attained by 2010, controlling for a host of factors including measures of their cognitive ability.  If students care enough to answer questions on a survey they are more likely to care enough to pursue their education further.

They then examined another data set to see if they found the same relationship.  They did.  The number of items that students in Milwaukee answered in a survey when they were in 9th grade was predictive of whether they graduated high school and went to college later, controlling for their academic achievement and other factors.

If this holds up when examined with multiple data sets, it will be an amazing breakthrough for researchers.  We will finally have a fairly easy to obtain measure of an important non-cognitive skill that is predictive of later life success.

When studying voucher or other school choice programs, for example, we have observed modest test score benefits for participants, but fairly large attainment benefits.  This suggests that school choice has larger effects on non-cognitive skills, but up until now we haven’t been able to observe these non-cognitive benefits without waiting nearly a decade to see if students graduate high school and go on to college.  With the Hitt and Trivitt measure, we will have an early warning indicator of whether students are acquiring non-cognitive skills and are more likely to have higher attainment later.

I am not suggesting that the Hitt and Trivitt measure can be used in an accountability system, since it is certain not to work once high stakes are attached.  But for research purposes it could be incredibly useful.

Developing an accurate and efficient measure of non-cognitive skills is especially important because one commonly considered measure, the self-reported “grit scale” developed by Angela Duckworth, may not be holding up very well.  In the recent Dobbie and Fryer evaluation of the Harlem Promise Academy, it actually appears that the Duckworth scale was a contrary indicator of later life success.  That is, students who rated themselves higher on the grit scale were less likely to succeed.  We have also tried the Duckworth scale in an experiment and found that it was uncorrelated with other, behavioral measures of non-cognitive skills, such as time devoted to a challenging task and delayed gratification.  But the self-reported grit scale was related to a student self-assessment of honesty, suggesting that the Duckworth scale may really measure how highly students will rate themselves more than actual grit or other non-cognitive skills.

Of course, the Hitt and Trivitt measure requires a lot more testing and field research, but it is one of the more exciting recent developments in education research.

When I was a counselor at Sun Fun summer day camp in Glencoe, Illinois we had an annual tradition of “boys day.”  The girls had a sleepover the night before, so they all went home to finally get some sleep, while just the boys and male counselors remained at camp.  We would divide the boys into color-coded teams and have a “color war” pitting each group against the others in every activity from singing to lanyard-making.  At the end of the day, following a giant capture the flag contest, the boys were so riled up that we could have conquered neighboring Winnetka and claimed it for Glencoe.  Hubbard Woods was ours for the taking!

At the time my fellow counselors and I used to joke that “boys day” resulted in an anarchic state like Lord of the Flies, with the only exception being that we didn’t kill Piggy.  But looking back on it, I see that summer camp was probably the closest thing to true liberty that our kids had experienced.  It was certainly more conducive to liberty than school, which gave almost exclusive emphasis to obedience to authority.  School was where kids were trained to obey the state and become cogs in a giant corporate machine.  Camp was where they learned to be free.

Yes, camp has rules.  Yes, camp has authority figures to enforce those rules.  But the rules are quite minimal compared to what we find in schools.  At camp, kids are given remarkable freedom to explore their interests and develop their individual personalities.  They literally can choose to fish in the morning and write poetry in the afternoon.

How is camp able to accommodate so much individual freedom while school seems determined to squash it?  A big part of the answer is that camps are generally organized around clear and strong missions, such as religion, sports, music, dance etc…   Because people usually choose their camps based on their agreement with the camp’s mission, the leaders of the camp do not have to regulate camper life so tightly to ensure that the organization’s mission is advanced.  Schools generally have weaker and less focused missions and so have to create a more oppressive environment to produce compliance.  Similarly, freely chosen governments have greater legitimacy and so do not have to use as much force on their subjects.

I’ve argued before that schools might have a lot to learn from camps.  They are both engaged in the activity of trying to prepare young people for adult life.  But I think camps are much more effective at preparing young people to be free adults.  I even think camps are remarkably effective at conveying traditional academic content.  And they do so at much lower cost. 

As the summer ends and school begins, think about why life has to change so dramatically for kids.  And next time someone starts talking about the benefits of year-round schooling, think about what would be lost if we further crowded-out liberty-loving camp for more oppressive schooling.  Yes, I know disadvantaged kids tend to have less enriching experiences over the summer, but we could address that with expanded camp opportunities — maybe even camp vouchers — rather than expanding the school year.  Let’s not forget the advantages of camp.