Content knowledge vs pedagogy in Teaching

A fascinating abstract from Roland Fryer. In many school systems you have a single teacher for most subjects in primary school, but increasingly specialised different teachers for each subject in secondary school. This RCT tried out having subject specialist teachers in primary, finding that this worsened outcomes, in theory because at least at primary level it is more important that the teacher knows the kids’ and their ability and is therefore better able to target their teaching, than that they have more specialised knowledge of the subject matter.

Starting in the 2013-2014 school year, I conducted a randomized field experiment in fifty traditional public elementary schools in Houston, Texas designed to test the potential productivity benefits of teacher specialization in schools. Treatment schools altered their schedules to have teachers specialize in a subset of subjects in which they have demonstrated relative strength (based on value-add measures and principal observations). The average impact of teacher specialization on student achievement is -0.042 standard deviations in math and -0.034 standard deviations in reading, per year. Students enrolled in special education and those with younger teachers demonstrated marked negative results. I argue that the results are consistent with a model in which the benefits of specialization driven by sorting teachers into a subset of subjects based on comparative advantage is outweighed by inefficient pedagogy due to having fewer interactions with each student. Consistent with this, specialized teachers report providing less attention to individual students (relative to non-specialized teachers), though other mechanisms are possible.

— The 'Pupil' Factory: Specialization and the Production of Human Capital in Schools, Roland G. Fryer, Jr

Does “the Economist” know what a “market failure” is?

Apparently not. "Do British housing markets suffer from market failure”? The answer is no.

Here’s a quick refresher - a market failure is when the market - left alone - doesn’t produce an efficient or pareto optimal solution. Good examples are externalities such as pollution or congestion, or public goods such as new vaccines. The London housing market is not a good example of a market failure, where poor outcomes are the result of clumsy government regulation restricting supply. The fact that the market is responding to insane restrictions on new supply by focusing what little building they are allowed to do on expensive rather than affordable houses is not a market failure. Yes it is a market, and yes it is producing poor outcomes, but it is failing because of over-regulation. That is a government failure not a failure of the market mechanism.

It’s one thing when ordinary people use economic jargon in a colloquial sense with a totally different meaning to the economic term, but you expect better from a magazine called the Economist.

A rare non-ideological argument against for-profit schools

To [Samuel] Abrams, the problem with for-profit operation of schools is not that businessmen are making money off the provision of a public service such as education. Textbook publishers, software developers, and bus operators all make money from schools and should, he said, but they are all providing a discrete good or service that can be easily evaluated. “School management, on the other hand, is a complex service that does not afford the transparency necessary for proper contract enforcement,” he said. “Without such transparency, there’s client distrust: parents, taxpayers, and legislators can never be sure the provider is doing what was promised; and the child as the immediate consumer cannot be in a position to judge the quality of service. Regular testing has been promoted as a check on quality. But teachers can teach to the test. And worse, as we know from cheating scandals in Atlanta and many other cities, teachers can change wrong answers to right answers on bubble sheets once students are done.”

From the International Education News blog at Teacher’s College, Columbia.

The trouble with the argument is that it rests on the empirical question of whether student test-based accountability systems for schools can work, and though the question is not conclusively settled, my reading is that the evidence seems to be leaning in the direction of roughly “yes".

Top 10 Must-Read Articles on Education & Development

What should you read first if you’re a new policy advisor in a Ministry of Education? Here is my response to a couple of recent emails along these lines on the CGD blog.

Does it help to be African to study Africa?

For sure there is tacit local knowledge, but how you define “local” matters. Ken Opalo writes:

"As a social scientist, my knowledge of Kenya is largely informed by my experience as a Nairobian. Over the years I have had to learn a lot about the rest of Kenya, in much the same way an Australian would. In doing so I incurred a lower cost than a hypothetical Australian would, for sure, but the cost was not zero. And who is to say that I would necessarily be able to articulate a research agenda on whatever subject in Malawi better than a Southern Californian? What proportion of Kenyans can locate Bangui on a map?"

The right to education is a right to learning

Kishore Singh, the "UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education” is totally freaking out that apparently the government of Liberia is planning to outsource all of its primary schooling to Bridge International Academies.

“education is an essential public service and instead of supporting business in education, governments should increase the money they spend on public educational services to make them better.”

Kishore is of course commiting Mike Munger’s unicorn fallacy. The public primary school system in Liberia was frankly pretty rubbish, even before the Ebola crisis hit, and there is no evidence that just spending more money is likely to improve things.

RTI did a baseline for their early grade reading intervention project in 2008. They found that children in Grade 3 in Liberia could read 28 words per minute. To put this in perspective, in the US children are considered to be at risk if they can read fewer than 70 words per minute at the end of Grade 2. Clearly there is nothing inherently wrong with Liberian children, the schools just aren’t working (I should also be clear that I’m not beating on Liberian teachers either, it is the system that is not functioning - don’t hate the player, hate the game). The children attending free public primary schools in Liberia might be exercising a right to schooling, but they certainly aren’t exercising a right to learning or any meaningful definition of the word education.

It should be in this context that we note that AllAfrica reports that "The deal will see the Government of Liberia paying over $65 million over a five-year period.” That is $13 million per year then, to cover a full population aged 5-14 of 920,000, or roughly $14 per student per year. That’s an absolute bargain. That’s an absolute bargain, even if Bridge are only actually covering a small fraction of that full population (Normally Liberia spends around 2.5% of GDP on education, which is around $47.5 million).

Clearly the jury is still officially out on whether independent estimates will show better learning outcomes from Bridge schools, but there is a hell of a lot of research which backs up elements of their theory of change, from how teacher qualifications and experience matter so much less than the type of contract a teacher is on, to the importance of feedback for teachers on student learning.

Meanwhile over at Kishore Singh’s website, he highlights 8 key priorities, none of which include the global learning crisis, in which there are 250 million children without basic skills, the majority of whom have already sat through 4 years of school. I’m frankly baffled by the inordinate amount of hostility shown by campaigners to social entrepreneurs who are still educating absolutely tiny proportions of the global poor, and how little attention is paid to the totally failing free public systems of schooling that millions of children are enduring.

Tom Kane on Education RCTs

"If our goal is to change behaviour and drive policies towards more effective solutions, what we have done so far is a complete failure. People who are running the What Works Clearing House don’t even have a theory [of how evidence would affect policy], or to the extent that they have a theory, its been proven wrong. … We’re just deluding ourselves if we think the 5 year, $15 million studies are having any impact whatsoever."

That’s Tom Kane (somewhat echoing Lant) on the Education Next podcast. His preferred alternative to the RCT+systematic review approach though has nothing to do with crawling on any design spaces. Rather it’s doing much more quick turn-around quasi-experimental research using the multitudes of outcomes data now being collected in the US for teacher and school accountability purposes. All that’s apparently really missing is data on the actual inputs - there is amazingly rich longitudinal data on student test scores, but no record which could be matched of what textbooks are being used in different schools, or what training courses different teachers are going on. Sounds pretty sensible to me.

What’s the single biggest growth opportunity that no-one really tried?

Paul Collier and Astrid Haas just wrote an IGC blogpost “Why Kampala holds the single biggest growth opportunity for Uganda.” Single biggest? Well indeed, the first rule of blogging is HYPERBOLE, but then the first rule of reading blogs should be a heavy dose of scepticism. Second, I’m reminded of Michael Clemens’ presentation on The Biggest Idea in Development That No One Really Tried. Might migration (the kind that Paul apparently thinks is harmful for poor countries) hold a bigger growth opportunity for Uganda than better urban planning in Kampala?

At present, around 1% of Ugandans live and work overseas (roughly 400,000 of a population of 37.6 million). This 1% of the population send home 4% of Uganda’s GDP in remittances. According to a Gallup poll, around 35% of Ugandans would permanently move to another country if they were allowed to. If they all could, and sent back as much as current Ugandans abroad do, that would be a one-off 140% increase in Uganda’s economy. Or if Uganda had the same level of emigration as the UK does (8%, 5.2 million of a population of 64.1 million Brits live and work overseas), that would be a 28% increase in Uganda’s economy. And that’s totally ignoring the increase in income for the actual migrants themselves. Median income in Uganda is $2.5 per day (in PPP), so even a job on UK (“relative-") poverty pay levels of around $23 per day would be a NINE-FOLD increase for them. Needless to say, the main reason that more Ugandans don’t work in high-wage economies, is that the governments of high-wage countries impose restrictions on the entry of people, particularly those from poorer countries.

Brain drain I hear you say? Michael Clemens killed that one too (ethically it is pretty unreasonable to restrict individual's freedom to such an extreme extent, even if there were any real evidence that emigration of highly-skilled people hurt an economy, which there isn't anyway).

So yes, clearly planning Kampala’s urban development is important for growth. But does it really have more “potential” than something that could double the country’s economy overnight?

The reductive seduction of OPP (Other people’s problems)

Courtney Martin has an interesting post at the Development Set about the “reductive seduction” of other people’s problems. Problems we know something about (gun control in America as her example for the Americans) seem complex, political, and intractable, whereas problems we know less about (rural hunger or girl’s secondary education or homophobia in Uganda) seem more straightforward.

Which reminds me a little of the difference between statements from leaders on education in their own country and in other people’s countries.

Here’s Julia Gillard on education in Australia:

"We need a commitment to transparency and accountability. It's my strong view that lack of transparency both hides failure and helps us ignore it. It feeds a culture where all the adults involved – the teachers, the principals, the community leaders and the members of parliament – avoid accountability. And lack of transparency prevents us from identifying where greater effort and investment are needed. Importantly, transparency and accountability are overwhelmingly supported by parents."

And Julia Gillard on education in developing countries:

"More money.

Constantly improving ways of working.

An even greater embrace of the power of partnership."

Gordon Brown on education in the UK

"we will focus on classroom standards, ensure that we monitor exam standards rigorously, reform the qualifications system … World class education, we know, achieves high standards for 100% of the children when there are systems of accountability, funding and pupil tracking that leave no child behind and personalised learning is tailored to the unique potential of every child with one-to-one tutoring and support. That world class education depends on a systematic intolerance of failure and a preparedness of public authorities to intervene and to innovate to eradicate failure"

And Gordon Brown on education in developing countries

"The biggest obstacle to what would be a spectacular achievement – as is so often the case – is a shortage of money."

Applying behavioural insights to impair life chances

David Halpern, Chief Exec at the Behavioural Insights Team (aka “Nudge Unit”) has a new blog up about how behavioural science can be used to improve people’s life chances.

"Why is it that a Kenyan market seller spends half her profit on money lenders rather than saving a tiny sum each day to escape such debt? Or why does a low income family in the UK or USA spend twice as much on a stove (cooker), bought on expensive hire purchase, than a middle class family?"

The thing is, as we know from Branko Milanovic, the country that you are born in matters more for your life chances than everything else combined. "A proper analysis of global inequality today requires an empirical and mental shift from concerns with class to concerns with location,"

So what does the BIT have to say about the movement of people? As Matt points out, the Home Office is currently paying the BIT to find ways to convince illegal migrants to voluntarily leave the UK. That is, to support the Home Office in its agenda of shutting down the single best way that exists of improving someone’s life chances. Perhaps someone could instead work on a clever “nudge” to make people less scared of foreigners?

The Political Economy of Education in Uganda

This post was first published on the CGD Views from the Center Blog

Uganda goes to the polls in 30 days to elect its next president, but there is little sign so far in the public debate on education of the need to shift focus from inputs and enrolment to actual learning outcomes.

I was in Kampala last week piloting a survey on school management (more on that later), and spotted in the Daily Monitor a feature on the candidate’s campaign promises on education, reading as follows:

Yoweri Museveni

• One primary school per parish (to reduce average walking distances)
• Continue to increase the budget allocation for text books

Kizza Besigye

• Introduce compulsory universal primary education
• Increase remuneration for primary school teachers

Amama Mbabazi

• Recruit and train new teachers with the aim of reducing the teacher-student ratio
• Build more schools and classrooms

That’s zero mention of actual student learning outcomes from any of the leading candidates, and a complete focus on spending more money and providing more of the inputs that have been showntime and again to bear little relationship with improved learning outcomes.

NYU Professor David Stasavage published a paper in 2005 exploring how the introduction of elections in Uganda in 1996 helped lead to the removal of school fees in 1997. He also published a follow-up in 2013 noting how elections focus politicians on those things that are easily visible to voters. Fees for tuition at public schools are very visible to voters, and so one of the first things democratic politicians address. School quality is much less visible to the average voter, leading to much less focus on teaching and learning by politicians.

All of this suggests that one way to improve student learning is to get citizens and politicians more focused on learning by better measurement and spreading of the insight that despite high enrolment, student skills are very poor. This is a key part of the theory of change behind the global ASER/Uwezo/PAL-Network movement of citizen-led student reading assessments. What sadly seems clear from Uganda is that this message has not yet got through. We’ve known since Uwezo’s 2010 assessment that children in Uganda are way behind where there should be (only 2 percent of grade 3 children could read and understand a grade 2 story).

My tip for anyone with the opportunity to grill the candidates on education policy would be to borrow Paul Atherton’s mantra:   “But can the kids read?”

Are good teachers ‘born’ or ‘made’?

There’s a strong argument for “made” from Elizabeth Green.

"Russ: But there is a view out there, and you talk about it at some length in the book, that some people believe great teachers are just born and not made. And that there is a certain 'it' quality that teachers have that make them more effective in the classroom in all kinds of dimensions. What do you think of that argument, and why is it an important argument in the debate? 

Guest: I think that that argument is embedded in the way we talk about education policy, teacher policy. We say, there are good teachers and then there are bad teachers, and then what we need to do is either find more of the good teachers, people who are destined to become good, by doing a better job of recruiting good teachers. Or, we need to incentivize good teachers to stay, or we need to create better, easier, more effective ways to remove bad teachers from the classroom. And I think that what that construct is built on is, as you say, this assumption that teaching quality is something that's natural born in people--that it's about personality traits or character traits. But in fact every research study that's tried to connect character traits and personality traits to who becomes an effective teacher fails to find that any of them make any difference. So, an extrovert or an introvert doesn't matter for how effective you'll be in the classroom. So, I think that what instead is more convincing to me for what matters is what teachers do, and what they know. And that's very different from a natural born trait, something that you need to learn. 

Russ: So, we're going to talk about Doug Lemov, who was a guest here on EconTalk. He plays a large role in your book. But one of the things he emphasizes, of course, is practice. So, one view says the reason we don't have better teachers is they don't practice. What do you think of that argument? 

Guest: Yeah. So, Doug is obviously, for people who listen to your show, they know that he's a former teacher who became the leader of a group of schools called the Uncommon Schools network. And he encountered the same realization, that what he called the 'Build it, Buy it' problem. So, at first, early on, he tried to improve the quality of teaching in schools by buying teachers who are already good. But over time that became unsustainable, and he realized he had to help build good teachers from all of--any person that he could recruit. So, he couldn't just recruit his way to excellence; he had to build it"

Finding my religion

A lifelong atheist, I went to church again last Sunday, for about the fourth or fifth time, which I think is enough times that I’ll probably stick with it (and enough that I feel confident talking about it in public without worrying that I’ve accidentally joined a cult).

So despite not believing, I’ve always been curious about religion. Clearly most human beings do believe in something supernatural, which is interesting and worthy of some thought. I was struck a few years ago by Alain de Botton’s book “The Consolations of Philosophy” how my modern liberal ethics and values are not in fact rootless, but deeply rooted in centuries of philosophy, and how us modern liberals are missing something that the church provides - people who’s job it is to be a kind of very practical applied philosopher, translating all this history and helping people to live better and cope with difficulty (Alain then made this argument himself explicitly in a follow-up book “Religion for Atheists”). I’ve also been struck by the economics research on happiness, which finds that people who practice religion tend to be on average happier, and that this is probably partly due simply to turning up to the same place every week with the same group of people, and partly something to do with the actual content - the consolation of the philosophy.

So my very rational calculating mind has turned further and further away from my earlier extremist Dawkins-ist atheism-ism (I don’t like religion because too many religious teachings are homophobic) towards greater curiosity with things like de Botton's "School of Life”, "the Sunday Assembly”, and modern Stoicism. My granddad actually even had a “humanist” funeral (I knew he was not religious but had no idea that he was so actively committed to non-religion), so this strain of thinking clearly runs in the family.

Then one day a couple of months ago I walked past the sign outside the church on Newington Green near where I live, proclaiming itself “The Birthplace of Feminism”, and remembered to look it up when I got home. And so as it turns out, this is the church that Mary Wollstonecraft attended in 1792 when she published “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, one of the first works of feminist philosophy, well over a century before the Suffragettes campaigned for votes for women. Pretty cool. And then it turns out, the current Minister of the church, Andy Pakula, is an atheist. An atheist with a PhD in biology from MIT who loves science. He writes: "As a scientist, I would not entertain any ideas that could not be proven in a well-designed, objective experiment.” This is a church that stopped carrying out marriages in 2008 on principle until all couples had equal marriage rights.

And so, living 5 minutes walk away, I really had no excuse not to go. And it’s great, a place of “radical inclusivity”, where you are "welcome whether you are female, male, or other”, or anything else, and people come together to sing and listen to readings and share personal struggles and sit in silence.

This last Sunday before Christmas we had a very appropriately themed set of nativity stories (about weary travellers being told that there’s no room at the inn), seamlessly mixed with a heavy dose of amazing current stories, from a member of the congregation who just got back from spending a week helping and welcoming refugees landing on a Greek island, and from the church's charity of the month, which is a social club named Akwaaba (Twi for “welcome") in Hackey, for refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants. We’ve actually got loads of room at the inn (in fact the inn is facing a massive aging population crisis such that we need millions of working aged people to come live in the inn if we’re going to have any hope of paying for all those pensions), so it’s nice to be around people who appreciate that too.

So to conclude; research suggests that participating in an organised religion makes you happier, and if you’re a woolly secular liberal like me, then there are churches out there that are secular, actively pro- gay rights, pro- migrant rights, and radically inclusive.

Happy Christmas.

If you fancy taking a look, New Unity has a blog, a livestream on Sunday mornings, and a Youtube channel, but obviously none of these compare to being there in person, and there’s also a whole worldwide Unitarian/Universalist church movement (though it’s possible that not all the other churches will have atheist and MIT-trained scientist Ministers).

Do Books “Work”?

It might seem obvious to some of you reading this that it might be possible to learn something from a book. But as a recent review for RISE by Paul Glewwe and Karthik Muralidharan found, researchers have actually so far failed to show rigorously that there is any improvement in test scores in developing countries after handing out textbooks to schools. There have now been four different Randomized Controlled Trials showing no improvement (and for four different reasons).

So when might books “work”? A new paper from the World Bank proclaims to answer just this question: “When Do In-service Teacher Training and Books Improve Student Achievement? Experimental Evidence from Mongolia.”

Their answer, somewhat disappointingly, seems to be “when it happens in Mongolia”. More constructively, though books alone seem to work, they work better when combined with teacher training, reinforcing Glewwe and Muralidharan’s conclusion about the importance of complementarities.

But that “there are complementarities” isn’t a very satisfying conclusion by itself. The more comprehensive hypothesis being developed for RISE by Lant Pritchett is: “when there is an accountability framework which is coherent for learning” – that is, when all of the relevant actors are held accountable for common goals through clear delegation of those goals, and have the resources to accomplish them. We’re hoping that this accountability coherency system diagnostic can be a useful tool for thinking through systematically what it is about specific contexts that mean that interventions work in some places and not others. What is it about Mongolia which means that providing books alone can be enough, in contrast to those other studies in Kenya and Sierra Leone? It just might be a coherent accountability system.

This post was first published on the RISE blog