Here is a great music video about the clash of ideas concerning the causes of the recent downturn and two economists that represent different ideas about how to deal with it: Keynes and Hayek.
Check it out and let me know which is more convincing to you.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Monday, April 25, 2011
Freedom
Mercedes and I have had numerous discussions comparing the health care systems of the United States and Canada. Our most recent conversation on the matter eventually turned to the nature of freedom. Mercedes pointed out that many people in the US don't really have the freedom to choose what kind of health care they get because they are limited by finances or by the terms of their insurance agreement. In Canada, people can choose from any doctor and the government will pay for it. So who has more freedom?
Let us assume for a moment that the United States has fewer governmental restrictions on the exchange of health care services. The lack of restrictions can be termed negative freedom. For the sake of argument, let us further assume that the average person in Canada has more health care options that are realistically available. We can call this positive freedom. So what do we value more, negative freedom or positive freedom? I think one of the distinctions between the political left and right is that those on the left tend to value positive freedom and those on the right tend to value negative freedom.
Positive freedom is a great thing, obviously, but it a government can't just summon it out of a vacuum. In order to ensure that some people have positive freedom, restrictions must be imposed on others. In highly redistributive economies, taxes are levied on the rich (and in the case of health care, strict limitations are placed on health care providers) in order to give less fortunate members of society options they wouldn't otherwise have. Those who support redistribution argue that taking money from a rich person and providing health care options for someone who is relatively poor increases the total freedom experienced by society as a whole. A dollar, they say, means more to a poor person than to a rich person.
If we assume that we can weigh one persons freedom against another's (or add up different peoples freedom to get a sum total for society), it is almost certainly true that some forms of redistribution increase positive freedom at the cost of reducing negative freedom. It also probably has a negative effect on economic growth, since it involves taking wealth from those who have enough to invest and giving it to those who need it to increase consumption.
I don't really believe there is an absolute political morality that dictates whether positive freedom is more or less important than negative freedom. I personally tend to favor negative freedom, but I have not come across the killer argument that would allow me to convince Mercedes (and others who favor redistribution) that their preference for positive freedom is entirely unreasonable. A pragmatist might suggest seeking policies that maximize positive freedom with the least possible loss of negative freedom. But if a policy disagreement between two well informed parties finds its basis in real value differences, no pragmatic solution is ever going to please everyone.
Let us assume for a moment that the United States has fewer governmental restrictions on the exchange of health care services. The lack of restrictions can be termed negative freedom. For the sake of argument, let us further assume that the average person in Canada has more health care options that are realistically available. We can call this positive freedom. So what do we value more, negative freedom or positive freedom? I think one of the distinctions between the political left and right is that those on the left tend to value positive freedom and those on the right tend to value negative freedom.
Positive freedom is a great thing, obviously, but it a government can't just summon it out of a vacuum. In order to ensure that some people have positive freedom, restrictions must be imposed on others. In highly redistributive economies, taxes are levied on the rich (and in the case of health care, strict limitations are placed on health care providers) in order to give less fortunate members of society options they wouldn't otherwise have. Those who support redistribution argue that taking money from a rich person and providing health care options for someone who is relatively poor increases the total freedom experienced by society as a whole. A dollar, they say, means more to a poor person than to a rich person.
If we assume that we can weigh one persons freedom against another's (or add up different peoples freedom to get a sum total for society), it is almost certainly true that some forms of redistribution increase positive freedom at the cost of reducing negative freedom. It also probably has a negative effect on economic growth, since it involves taking wealth from those who have enough to invest and giving it to those who need it to increase consumption.
I don't really believe there is an absolute political morality that dictates whether positive freedom is more or less important than negative freedom. I personally tend to favor negative freedom, but I have not come across the killer argument that would allow me to convince Mercedes (and others who favor redistribution) that their preference for positive freedom is entirely unreasonable. A pragmatist might suggest seeking policies that maximize positive freedom with the least possible loss of negative freedom. But if a policy disagreement between two well informed parties finds its basis in real value differences, no pragmatic solution is ever going to please everyone.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Education Standards
The other day I had a conversation with an educational consultant from Jordan School District. She was describing how that district had made a big push to get teachers to teach the core curriculum and the effort resulted in higher test scores. I applaud the effort, but it raised a question for which I have not found a satisfactory answer: how do we decide what we want students to learn in the first place?
When I began student teaching, one of the things I found most surprising was the freedom that teachers had to choose what to teach and what level of mastery to expect of the teachers. We write our own tests based on what we think the students ought to know. This freedom is not really compatible with my view that society pays teachers to make sure students learn a given set of knowledge and skills. During my conversation with the consultant, I pointed out that the core curriculum is quite vague, and that they educational expectations cannot be separated from the measurement of those standards. That is, the core doesn't mean much without some way of testing whether or not it has been learned.
Turns out we (by which I mean society, the state) do have a way of measuring what has been learned. It is called the CRT (criterion referenced exam). My class will be taking the Geometry CRT pretty soon, which will give the state a way to measure whether or not they learned what they were supposed to learn throughout the year. There are two problems with the CRT as I see it. First, it is not the best way to measure mastery of the stated core curriculum. It is designed by a private company (presumably after consulting with the Utah State Office of Education) that uses its own standards for deciding what level of mastery to measure. Also, it is multiple choice, which makes measuring some concepts rather difficult. The ability to do geometric proofs is clearly a part of the current Utah Geometry curriculum, but I don't think it is on the CRT. That brings me to the second problem. I don't know what is on the CRT. The company who makes the test can save money if it doesn't have to change the questions very often. It is easier to reuse questions if they don't have to provide sample questions to educators.
Unfortunately, as I said earlier, the curriculum by itself cannot be taken as a complete standard. We have to know how it is tested to really understand what level of mastery is expected. If we don't have access to the test, or a reasonable number of practice problems, we can't really know the curriculum expectations. So while I appreciate efforts like those of Jordan School District to get teachers on the same page, I think it is not possible at the moment to really align our teaching with the expectations of the state.
This discussion raises another questions that is even more fundamental. How should the state decide what students need to learn? Obviously you can get a bunch of educators and politicians in a room and have them hammer out a curriculum. This is how we got where we are now. But how do we know if the things we have chosen are the things that society actually benefits from having students learn? And how do we prioritize them? The problem is that education is not a free market. There is no balance of supply and demand that helps determine the equilibrium amount of trigonometry. The whole system is based on the opinion of experts, and I tend to be very skeptical of this kind of arrangement.
Of course, in any given classroom the expert opinions, as represented by the CRT and the core, are often replaced by the individual teacher's expectations. So we have a system of expectations with no reasonable mechanism for determining whether they are the "right" ones. They are fleshed out by a test that is not made available to teachers, who then proceed to replace them with their own idea of what's best.
When I began student teaching, one of the things I found most surprising was the freedom that teachers had to choose what to teach and what level of mastery to expect of the teachers. We write our own tests based on what we think the students ought to know. This freedom is not really compatible with my view that society pays teachers to make sure students learn a given set of knowledge and skills. During my conversation with the consultant, I pointed out that the core curriculum is quite vague, and that they educational expectations cannot be separated from the measurement of those standards. That is, the core doesn't mean much without some way of testing whether or not it has been learned.
Turns out we (by which I mean society, the state) do have a way of measuring what has been learned. It is called the CRT (criterion referenced exam). My class will be taking the Geometry CRT pretty soon, which will give the state a way to measure whether or not they learned what they were supposed to learn throughout the year. There are two problems with the CRT as I see it. First, it is not the best way to measure mastery of the stated core curriculum. It is designed by a private company (presumably after consulting with the Utah State Office of Education) that uses its own standards for deciding what level of mastery to measure. Also, it is multiple choice, which makes measuring some concepts rather difficult. The ability to do geometric proofs is clearly a part of the current Utah Geometry curriculum, but I don't think it is on the CRT. That brings me to the second problem. I don't know what is on the CRT. The company who makes the test can save money if it doesn't have to change the questions very often. It is easier to reuse questions if they don't have to provide sample questions to educators.
Unfortunately, as I said earlier, the curriculum by itself cannot be taken as a complete standard. We have to know how it is tested to really understand what level of mastery is expected. If we don't have access to the test, or a reasonable number of practice problems, we can't really know the curriculum expectations. So while I appreciate efforts like those of Jordan School District to get teachers on the same page, I think it is not possible at the moment to really align our teaching with the expectations of the state.
This discussion raises another questions that is even more fundamental. How should the state decide what students need to learn? Obviously you can get a bunch of educators and politicians in a room and have them hammer out a curriculum. This is how we got where we are now. But how do we know if the things we have chosen are the things that society actually benefits from having students learn? And how do we prioritize them? The problem is that education is not a free market. There is no balance of supply and demand that helps determine the equilibrium amount of trigonometry. The whole system is based on the opinion of experts, and I tend to be very skeptical of this kind of arrangement.
Of course, in any given classroom the expert opinions, as represented by the CRT and the core, are often replaced by the individual teacher's expectations. So we have a system of expectations with no reasonable mechanism for determining whether they are the "right" ones. They are fleshed out by a test that is not made available to teachers, who then proceed to replace them with their own idea of what's best.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Teacher Inequality
One of the reasons I occasionally feel pessimistic about education reform is that it may cost too much money. Why? As I mentioned in my last post, teachers don't get paid very much, and there is not a lot of opportunity for advancement other than periodic salary steps based on seniority. In order to attract the best and brightest into the career, salaries might have to be doubled. But there are 6 million teachers in the US, and we can't really afford to double all of their salaries.
One approach that addresses this reality is to pay some teachers more than others. There are a number of ways to offer increased opportunities to the best teaches that could maximize their impact. Two that I have been thinking about are 1) to pay teachers based on the number of students in their class, and put more students in classes with the best teachers, and 2) give some teachers the additional responsibility of helping to improve the coordination and teaching quality within their departments.
Lets begin with #1. The main justification behind giving the best teachers more students is that more students will have a good teacher. Schools can compensate them accordingly. Two problems with the plan are that teachers may not want bigger classes, and many classrooms don't have room for that many more students. The obvious response to the first concern is that no one would be forced to teach an unusually large class (say, 50-100 students). They would be offered as an option for the best teachers, with the incentive of additional pay. Accommodations could be made to ease the burden of grading papers and giving students individual attention. As for the second issue, most schools have auditoriums, gymnasiums, music rooms, and large classrooms that could be utilized for these unusually large classes. The structure of the classes would have to match the available space, but I believe most schools could make it work.
As for the second option, schools typically already have some positions like "department chair", but they don't always offer many advantages. The other day I went to a faculty meeting of the math department and one item on the agenda was to decide who would be department chair for the next year. Before the meeting my mentor stated that he thought it might be his turn to shoulder the responsibility, but he wasn't excited. The department chair position didn't come with any additional pay or prep time. It didn't come with much authority either. It mostly meant more paperwork and responsibility for organizing a few meetings. What if the responsibility of being department chair came with a $10,000/year bonus and the teachers were expected to assume some responsibility for the quality of teaching within the department? Then the best teachers would have incentive to seek the position and use it to improve teaching practices at the school. Of course, it could also become a useless form of patronage that the principal doles out based on seniority or friendship.
These aren't the only ways to create incentives for ambitious people to go into the teaching profession, but they represent a concept: even if we can't ensure that all of our teachers come from the top 1/3 of their college class, we can try to ensure that a reasonable number of our teachers are highly qualified and intelligent and create ways for them to have a disproportionate impact.
One approach that addresses this reality is to pay some teachers more than others. There are a number of ways to offer increased opportunities to the best teaches that could maximize their impact. Two that I have been thinking about are 1) to pay teachers based on the number of students in their class, and put more students in classes with the best teachers, and 2) give some teachers the additional responsibility of helping to improve the coordination and teaching quality within their departments.
Lets begin with #1. The main justification behind giving the best teachers more students is that more students will have a good teacher. Schools can compensate them accordingly. Two problems with the plan are that teachers may not want bigger classes, and many classrooms don't have room for that many more students. The obvious response to the first concern is that no one would be forced to teach an unusually large class (say, 50-100 students). They would be offered as an option for the best teachers, with the incentive of additional pay. Accommodations could be made to ease the burden of grading papers and giving students individual attention. As for the second issue, most schools have auditoriums, gymnasiums, music rooms, and large classrooms that could be utilized for these unusually large classes. The structure of the classes would have to match the available space, but I believe most schools could make it work.
As for the second option, schools typically already have some positions like "department chair", but they don't always offer many advantages. The other day I went to a faculty meeting of the math department and one item on the agenda was to decide who would be department chair for the next year. Before the meeting my mentor stated that he thought it might be his turn to shoulder the responsibility, but he wasn't excited. The department chair position didn't come with any additional pay or prep time. It didn't come with much authority either. It mostly meant more paperwork and responsibility for organizing a few meetings. What if the responsibility of being department chair came with a $10,000/year bonus and the teachers were expected to assume some responsibility for the quality of teaching within the department? Then the best teachers would have incentive to seek the position and use it to improve teaching practices at the school. Of course, it could also become a useless form of patronage that the principal doles out based on seniority or friendship.
These aren't the only ways to create incentives for ambitious people to go into the teaching profession, but they represent a concept: even if we can't ensure that all of our teachers come from the top 1/3 of their college class, we can try to ensure that a reasonable number of our teachers are highly qualified and intelligent and create ways for them to have a disproportionate impact.
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