School choice: You can take it or leave it.

Brookings last week released their yearly Education Choice and Competition Index. Per Brookings: "The intent of the ECCI is to create public awareness of the differences among districts in their support of school choice, provide a framework for efforts to improve choice and competition, and recognize leaders among school districts in the design and implementation of choice and competition systems."

I'm not at all convinced that more choice, on its own, leads to better education. And I'm also unconvinced that better public education necessitates or would require more "choice". It's fairly easy to imagine a reformed public education system — in the sense of better outcomes — that uses existing schools, districts, and (much of) the existing personnel. What makes choice so alluring is that it's easier to start from scratch than to change an entrenched bureaucracy. Basically, you tell people that they must change (or else public education is doomed!), they hear that you think what they're doing is terrible, therefore they are terrible people.

Of course, the existence of a broken system does not a priori mean it must have been broken by its operators. It's possible to believe that public education is a broken system, while also valuing the positive contributions of many of its operators. Systems, while obviously composed of people, also have weird idiosyncrasies and characteristics and behaviors on their own, as systems.

That systems aren't always the sum of their human parts may be a weird idea to accept at first. But take, for example, the case of the Electoral College. It's possible to criticize the system of the Electoral College without assailing the good name of every voter in America. You can believe American presidential elections are a broken way of doing democracy without also finding that every voter is somehow a broken democratic citizen because they participate in the Electoral College. In the same way, a critique of an education system is not (necessarily, but could be!) a critique of its teachers in the classroom.

Non-teacher commentators on public education are often viewed suspiciously or with scorn by practitioners. This makes sense, I understand teachers' impulse to be skeptical that someone who hasn't taught could be better positioned to reinvent teaching.

But humans can never be the most objective critics of their own behaviors — from an evolutionary view, it would be dumb if humans weren't somehow protected from the truth of their inadequacies or failures. If I knew, with a great degree of accuracy, the finite depth of my abilities, I would become depressed. I would have no incentive to strive or work to build anything. We can take risks as a species precisely because we do not know the objective, humble truth about our limited capacities. Because individuals are evolutionarialy protected from knowing their own shortcomings, we have as a species also evolved to cooperate. We can give each other feedback, and all improve in the process. A few geniuses may exist who can toil in a secluded lab or a cabin in the woods and then ship their brilliant work product back to us, but they are the exception. For most of the rest of us, we need outside guidance, at least occasionally. 

To bring it back to school choice: we need better education systems. But, because humans have egos, sometimes it's easier to make a new system than to tell teachers / administrators that they need to change their ways. And that's why "school choice" is so often trumpeted by wanna-be reformers. But everyone — teachers, administrators, legislators, and education reformers — would do well to realize that, by nature, no one is an objective critic and no one knows everything. There is room to improve classroom teaching, and teachers should be rewarded when they are curious about pedagogy, not punished for not following one universal teaching script. And anyone wishing to reform education should accept that, though their outsider status does confer some benefits of objectivity, they don't know everything.

You don't have to believe Hobbes on the specifics of what a state of nature would look like ("during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man"). Yet, it's fairly easy to agree that human cooperation and civil society are an improvement on a state of nature. Civil society is a cooperative exercise; better public education should be one too.

Microfinance and education.

An NBER working paper asks, among other things, whether increasing access to capital could have negative effects on education between generations. The abstract, with relevant bit underlined:

We use an RCT to analyze the impact of microcredit on poverty reduction, child and teenage labour supply, and education. The study population consists of loan applicants to a major MFI in Bosnia who would have been rejected through regular screening. Access to credit allowed borrowers to start and expand small-scale businesses. Households that already had a business and where the borrower had more education, ran down savings, presumably to complement the loan and achieve the minimum investment amount. However, in less-educated households consumption went down. A key new finding is a substantial increase in the labor supply of children aged 16-19 year old together with a reduction in their school attendance, raising important questions about the unintended intergenerational consequences of relaxing liquidity constraints for self-employment and business creation or expansion.

Microfinance is one of those ideas that, if it were to work perfectly, could have tons of positive outcomes. But in practice, the populations who would be the target recipients of loan aid are otherwise disadvantaged in ways other than capital stock that it makes microfinance a very dangerous tool. 

From the paper: 

Beyond these results we break new ground by showing that the loans led to a large decline in school participation and an increase in labor supply of children aged 16 to 19. However, the labor supply and schooling of children below 16 was not affected. The increased labor supply of the 16-19 year olds may at first sound surprising if one believes that the loan would have alleviated a liquidity constraint, allowing children to increase schooling. However, the other force at play is the new opportunity to start or expand a business. Without enough liquidity the household will have to muster resources from elsewhere if the loan brings the business opportunity within reach. The children can wait for their pay until liquidity permits or can be paid more easily in kind. Internal labor may also be cheaper than hiring someone from the outside market either because of regulatory or supervisory costs. So there is both a price and a liquidity effect pushing in favor of internal labor and a reduction in schooling. The inefficiency can be magnified if the parents, who are the funding source for education, care more about their utility than their child’s and thus undervalue the future benefits of education relative to the value that the child would attach to it. In this case an unintended consequence of the microcredit intervention is to worsen the outcomes for children, while transferring resources to the parents. On the other hand the inefficiency is mitigated if only those children with a low return to education are pulled from school now that an employment opportunity has arisen where there was none before. However, the effect is rather large and in all likelihood one would expect future returns to education to be quite high for many of these children in an economy [Bosnia] with still very high potential for growth and catch-up with the rest of Europe.

From "Advice to a Young Friend on the Choice of his Library"

Thy Books shou'd, like thy Friends, not many be,
Yet such wherein Men may thy Judgment see.
 In Numbers ev'n of Counsellors, the Wise
Maintain, that dangerous Distraction lies.
Then aim not at a Croud, but still confine
Thy Choice to such as do the Croud out-shine.

Via the TLS blog.

Montaigne, memory, and elections.

Sometimes I get scared that yesterday never happened. That my childhood never happened, that I never had a last week or a last year. Or at least, not in the way I remember them. What if my whole life as I remember it is a fake history, a misfired neuron writing its own truth?

I've been reading too much about the corruptibility of memory and it's got me doubting my entire timeline. I'm here today and there are some things I'm sure of. I can look in the mirror and figure out that I'm in mid-20s, so I must have had a childhood. In my pocket is a receipt for Chipotle stamped Tuesday, 7:13 p.m., and that probably means I had dinner there (and haven't washed my jeans since). But, the memories in my mushy brain, lacking the heft of an invoice or a diploma, are unreliable.

Montaigne in his Essays wrote about the French: “Plato was right in calling memory a great and powerful goddess-in my country, when they want to say that a man has no sense, they say that he has no memory.” He quickly moved to disparage his own memory, claiming he had “scarcely any at all.” But of course Montaigne was no fool. Unlike his countrymen, he discerned “the difference betwixt memory and understanding.” A good memory can recall things, sure. But too good a memory, Montaigne observed, makes men stupid and lazy when, instead of thinking, they can reliably dispense other men’s opinions from the store of their memories:

“I should otherwise have been apt implicitly to have reposed my mind and judgment upon the bare report of other men, without ever setting them to work upon their own force, had the inventions and opinions of others been ever been present with me by the benefit of memory.“

The pundits handicapping the recently concluded American presidential election suffered from an affliction exactly opposite mine (and Montaigne's): instead of handling their memories with appropriate skepticism, they dug deeper into them. Conventional wisdom, aided by Wikipedia, has a robust memory. No piece of American political trivia was too obscure or irrelevant to factor into the 2012 electoral horse race. Presidential elections are always determined by the fundamentals, the pundits said. They then grabbed for their history texts and, depending on their politics, came away with their evidence: incumbents never win with a stagnant economy, challengers never unseat wartime presidents. (Electoral precedents were brilliantly lampooned by xkcd.)

By Nov. 6, commentators had culled thousands of facts from 200-plus years of American elections and the country had more theories of the election than voters at the polls. But, history heaped upon history upon fact upon figures upon the Dow Jones Industrial Average makes a history book, not a story, and certainly not the kind of narrative I want to be reading in my newspaper’s editorial pages. Pundits have their purpose (I guess), as do memories and facts, properly curated. Montaigne again:

“I have observed in several of my intimate friends, who, as their memories supply them with an entire and full view of things, begin their narrative so far back, and crowd it with so many impertinent circumstances, that though the story be good in itself, they make a shift to spoil it.”

I used to believe, back in my playground days, in the infallibility of my memory. Friends, parents, teachers and especially my sister often had it wrong, confusing the details of just who kicked whom first. Maybe it’s true what some memory researchers now suspect, that memories are altered every time they’re recalled, that memories in the brain are made up of emotions but get reconstituted in the retelling as actions or events. Our brains might — hell, probably do — deceive us and it’s probably all for the evolutionary good anyway. Recognizing that memory is imperfect, and that perfect memory makes us stupid, we’d do well to treat it less reverentially, in life, but also in political prognostication (the latter mostly because it annoys me).

The BBC asks:

Having quietly given Rwanda the benefit of the doubt, will the US, the UK and the EU finally use their collective muscle - and aid budgets - to force Kigali, and to a marginally lesser extent, Kampala, to stop their military adventures in DR Congo?

No, no they will not. 

Well, that was easy.