Other School Analogies: Day Jail?

School isn't just about learning; it's also about signaling that you've learned, of course. Beyond that, it's about making society work, in such a way that parents can do what they need to do all day. Arnold Kling, in The Dark View of Schooling, notes

Bryan Caplan thinks that schooling is not about education. He thinks instead it is about signaling.
Bryan’s view is benign compared with John Holt.

society demands of schools, among other things, that they be a place where, for many hours of the day, many days of the year, children or young people can be shut up and so got out of everyone else’s way. ... That is an important part of what schools are for. They are a kind of day jail for kids.

I do believe that technological improvements can make signaling a lot easier, in K-12 as much as in How testing could transform higher education:

having a well-calibrated measurement would put a lot more focus on learning the material and much less on how you learned it. No one will care too much which book you read, which online class you took, or what exercises you did. Those are all just ways to learn. Second, this would truly democratize education—the self taught Bangladeshi is on equal footing with the legacy Harvard admittee.

If you want to know if a kid has grasped 10th grade math, start him on the Khan Academy 11th grade sequence and see how quickly he reaches "mastery". Of course you probably need humans to rate English composition, if not reading comprehension, but you can go a long ways without adult humans involved -- let ten kids write short essays to summarize some information, each of them answers ten sets of multiple-choice questions, and they get comprehension scores based on how well they answered, but composition scores based on how well their readers answered. (Is this a bad idea? Probably; I just thought of it. There are lots of possibilities.) The testing tools for this probably won't come very quickly, and they won't come at the same pace in all subject/skill areas, but they're coming. I'm less confident that we'll get a substitute for the "day jail for kids." Many parents will want to know that their kids are somewhere being supervised -- the sort of "off in the woods, probably building a dam" that went over well enough in the late 50s (when I went along with my elder siblings) is probably gone forever.

Or on the other hand, maybe not.

Family v. School

From back in October, a note on the obvious (or is it?)Parenting more important than schools to academic achievement, study finds

Oct. 10, 2012 — New research from North Carolina State University, Brigham Young University and the University of California, Irvine finds that parental involvement is a more significant factor in a child's academic performance than the qualities of the school itself.
"Our study shows that parents need to be aware of how important they are, and invest time in their children -- checking homework, attending school events and letting kids know school is important," says Dr. Toby Parcel, a professor of sociology at NC State and co-author of a paper on the work. "That's where the payoff is."

Of course it's possible that the connection of family to school performance comes from other pathways as well. But it may well be that the biggest influence a school can have on kids is actually through the parents. And then again we have Judith Harris...and it's possible that the biggest influence a parent can have is through the peer group.
Or then again, maybe not.

Human Capital?

Following 2300 students over four years, we find that Study: Many college students not learning to think critically | McClatchy

Forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college, according to the study. After four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called "higher order" thinking skills.

Note that this is not "compared to a control group who didn't go to college"; this is simply lack of improvement. In a control group, some would have developed the critical thinking skills being tested here, and some would not. To continue:

The study marks one of the first times a cohort of undergraduates has been followed over four years to examine whether they're learning specific skills. It provides a portrait of the complex set of factors, from the quality of secondary school preparation to the academic demands on campus, which determine learning. It comes amid President Barack Obama's call for more college graduates by 2020 and is likely to shine a spotlight on the quality of the education they receive.

Arum concluded that while students at highly selective schools made more gains than those at less selective schools, there are even greater disparities within institutions.
Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.
Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the least gains in learning. However, the authors note that their findings don't preclude the possibility that such students "are developing subject-specific or occupationally relevant skills."

Hmm.....education students at the bottom. However you interpret it, that's not good news for future K-12 students. Those are tomorrow's teachers.
Or then again, maybe not.

Focus

A professorial note on MOOCs develops a view of their limits, which is a familiar view but I'm not sure it's correct. The Year of the MOOC? — Crooked Timber

MOOC’s have to be the new frontier of social networking. Some kind of peer-to-peer bootstrapping, with lots of students helping each other help themselves, because there’s no way one instructor (or just a few) can individually help every student, once you scale up past a certain point. But this still requires the students to be mature and self-motivated, as learners, to start with.

This is such a huge number of people – especially globally – that it’s great news, all in all. But it leaves a lot of people behind...(Poor kid, he has to go to Harvard because he’s not ready for Coursera!) College is for students who can’t yet help themselves, don’t know how to study, don’t know enough to know what they want, or what they should want, to learn. They need to be more or less locked into an environment where they will be induced to learn how to learn. Which is, after all, what college is supposed to teach.

That's what (some say) college is supposed to teach...but does it? Take a bunch of kids with comparable SAT scores, high school grades, socio-economic background and so forth as well as comparable "grit" and most of all, comparable ability-to-learn. Now put some of them randomly into college, some into the military, some into jobs. Five years later, six years later...test their ability-to-learn again. Will the ones who went to college stand out, as having learned how to learn? Will they be more mature? More self-motivated? I have no confidence in this claim. I would want to see some data before taking it seriously.

Actually, I'm not at all sure what ability-to-learn is, though I believe it involves being "mature and self-motivated, as learners" just as stated above; I just think that definition's probably pretty much circular. If you focus on what's in front of you then you're going to be described as mature and self-motivated and as having developed the ability to learn (although you might be very slow at it.) Of course learning-how-to-learn also involves the mechanics of taking notes and looking stuff up and trying things out, i.e. experimentation, but that ought to come in elementary school, and if elementary school comes to involve MOOCs then maybe that's all that's required... Your first grade class, or more likely pre-Kindergarten, puts you in a couple of actual physical play-groups with physical friends (some of whom are animals, and some are robots?) and also a couple of virtual groups where you do Google Hangouts (or the equivalent) with virtual friends, some of whom are cartoons and others are kids that you might meet someday. Later you take notes (to send to each other) and you look stuff up (with Google, and Wikipedia!) and you experiment (with a hammer, but preferably not Maxwell's. ) And a situation in which the "bright" kids and the "slow" kids are not waiting for each other, in which each kid has the habit of making progress at his or her own pace...hmmm. It might do.

A large part of self-motivation is habit. Indeed, a large part of maturity is habit. Hey, you know what? Almost everything is habit. William James on Habit

"Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night."

"The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists."

"We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can."

"Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain."

"Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state."

Or then again, maybe they wouldn't at all, not nohow. And anyway it's much much much too late for me.

The Value of School; Actual Data

This morning I see two kinds of data on the aforementioned "human capital" (vs signalling and ability bias and whatever else there may be) theories of the value of school. First, an international study, examining the failure of schooling to boost national income in various low-income countries. Why Is the National Return to Education So Low?

For human capital extremists, schooling increases income - national and private - by teaching useful skills. So if low-quality schooling fails to boost national income, it should also fail to boost private income.
This prediction is the opposite of the truth. In low-income countries, the private return to education is unusually high.

And obviously that tends to count against the idea that schooling, the specific extra schooling in the specific countries being examined, increases income by teaching useful skills such as "how to think" or whatever. Instead, we have reinforcement for signalling and/or ability bias.

Another kind of data comes from a proposal that I've heard many times over the years: year-round schooling. After all, we don't need the kids out in the fields with the crops any more, so they can learn an extra 30% more or thereabouts in the same number of years. Indeed, if you spend the summer forgetting part of what you knew, your schooling is less effective in teaching useful skills -- so 30% ought to be an underestimate. Is it? Does (constant #days) year-round schooling matter?

This paper presents a human capital model to illustrate the conditions under which these calendars might affect achievement. We then exploit the natural experiment to evaluate the impact of year-round schooling on student achievement using a multi-level fixed effects model. Results suggest that year-round schooling has essentially no impact on academic achievement of the average student.

Again, that counts against the human capital theory and in favor of ability bias and/or signalling. Sigh.
Or then again, maybe I'm missing something.

The Value of School

There's an unexamined assumption in the previous post, an assumption that the point of school is at least partly to add to economic growth, i.e. to add economic value to the country and perhaps the world. I think that's true--"at least partly". Education ought to add to your ability to plan at least your personal economic future. Of course sometimes that doesn't work; Ohio State University research suggests that

Before the financial crash of 2008, it was highly educated Americans who were most likely to pile on unmanageable levels of debt...

So maybe Simon was right to sing Kodachrome

When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school,
It's a wonder I can think at all,
And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none,
I can read the writing on the wall.

Still, it's true that education, indeed formal schooling, is strongly correlated with lifetime earnings. Does that measure the economic value of school? Well, no. There are actually three theories of that correlation; each of them is probably part of the truth. (Sez who? Sez me. Wait a minute here.)

Consider Joe and John. They both go to school and then get jobs at the local shoe factory. It happens that Joe is much smarter than John, he has a more positive outlook on life, he's taller and healthier and harder to discourage and finds it easier to get up in the morning and get somewhere on time...this was all true before they started kindergarten together (That doesn't mean it's genetic, either. Might be, might not.) Curiously, Joe does much better in French and algebra and world history ... and later he makes more money than John does, even though neither of them ever uses those courses again, and in their careers it happens that no employer ever looks at their educational records. Does this mean that those courses added human capital to both, but more to Joe? Maybe so, but it may only, or also, mean that there's an ability bias in the system: maybe Joe has more of what employers call "ability," including all the factors I mentioned and others besides -- and both educational attainment and income attainment are caused in part by "ability". Maybe. Maybe James, who has Joe's abilities but does very badly in school because he hates it, does just as well as Joe does -- and in fact going to school has no value at all, except that Joe enjoyed it.

Is ability bias part of the reason that more educated people get higher incomes? Well, some say no. I'd say, read Correcting For Ability Bias By Measuring Ability

The straightforward way to test for ability bias is to measure ability, then control for it. If this approach failed to reveal ability bias, it would be reasonable to dismiss it. In practice, though, the straightforward test finds ability bias to be not merely real, but large.

Now it happens that as Joe and John are retiring, the new shoe factory owner, whose name is George, notices the connection between their educational and vocational achievements, and finds that this is pretty common. He ignores James. He decides to hire academically bright kids like Joe right into management and pay them extra; he is going to use their educational level for signaling what value they will produce for him, and it turns out that this means he gets employees sorted out much quicker and they make more money and so does he -- even though some kids with high academics will perform poorly, and he may miss out on kids like James, so he does make mistakes. In this new world, income is even more strongly connected with education, and going to school now really is valuable to the student, but not because of anything school teaches.

What I'm talking about here is described by Bryan Caplan in Two Educational Heresies: Ability Bias vs. Signaling and then laid out as a table in Economic Models of Education: A Typology for Future Reference

Model	Effect of Education on Income	Effect of Education on Productivity	Notes
Pure Human Capital	WYSIWYG	WYSIWYG	Education may raise productivity by directly teaching job skills, but character formation, acculturation, etc. also count.
Pure Ability Bias	Zero	Zero	"Ability" includes not just pre-existing intelligence, but pre-existing character, acculturation, etc.  Pure Ability Bias is observationally equivalent to a Pure Consumption model of education.
Pure Signaling	WYSIWYG	Zero	Pure educational signaling can consist in (a) learning and retaining useless material, (b) learning but not retaining material regardless of usefulness, (c) simply wasting time in ways that less productive workers find relatively painful, leading to a positive correlation between education and productivity.
1/3 Pure Human Capital, 1/3 Pure Ability Bias, 1/3 Pure Signaling	2/3*WYSIWYG	1/3*WYSIWYG	A good starting position for agnostics.
.1 Pure Human Capital, .5 Pure Ability Bias, .4 Pure Signaling	.5*WYSIWYG	.1*WYSIWYG	My preferred point estimates.  I know they're extreme, but my book will explain my reasons and try to win you over.

 

I guess I'd better read the book.
Or then again, maybe not.