Needs an RCT: Study Hall Edition

Jay Mathew's surveys student and teacher opinions on the 45-minute free periods given at some local high schools.

Bonus: The suggestion of a later start to the school day has been at the top of my "Needs an RCT in education" list.

Do movies suck these days?

This guy thinks so. I stopped reading shortly after he used the phrase "high concept." The irony was too much.

I'm going to gather some data and see if there is evidence that the quality of movies has declined over the years.

Why is college so expensive?

Tyler Cowen with some insightful comments.

Also: The interview that spawned those comments. I like the last few sentences and the comments on the HOPE scholarship. Another point: when we means-test food stamps it's so that we can direct the aid to the poor. Means-testing college scholarships, however, doesn't do much to shift aid to the poor. It all ends up in the hands of the (soon to be) upper middle-class.

Do educated people need to read Shakespeare?

I like Shakespeare, but I don't think you should have to read it to understand a newspaper. Writers shouldn't expect a reader to understand a sentence like this:

Being awestruck at "Halo" does not entail awe any more than "grieving" for Cordelia entails grief. 

The review is otherwise interesting throughout. But I have a hard time getting over the obscure Shakespeare reference and the implication the writer is a snob.

Is TFA scalable?

TIME with five TFA myths. Note: The writer is clearly biased by his friends and co-worker's ties to the organization. He only admits this late in the article.

I agree that four of them are myths. TFA teachers are, on average, better than the alternative (mostly full-time substitutes or uncertified teachers). TFA math teacher are better than average teachers too. That is the most important one.

But number four, that TFA isn't scalable, may well be a myth. The writer even seems to grant this at the end of his discussion. I did a calculation once, however, that suggested TFA was effect despite its out of control costs. Here's how:

Let's say we want to scale TFA so that it's teaches can teach the 20% of American students who live in poverty. We have 3 million teachers so we'd need to train 3*0.2 = 0.6 million = 600,000 teachers. Say each teacher teaches for 20 years on average (a mix of short-term busts and long-term commits). That means we have to train 600,000/20 = 30,000 new teacher each year to keep a steady supply of teachers.

At 30,000 teachers * $20,000 / year in training costs * 3 years of training = $1.8 billion. That's less than half of what Race to the Top cost. But it wouldn't come close to erasing the achievement gap. TFA teachers only increase scores by (I think) 3 percentile points. The gap is about 35 percentiles. So TFA would have to become vastly more effective before it even makes sense to talk about erasing the achievement gap. That said, if they could do it at the cost by unit of achievement gap that they are doing now, it would cost just 4% of the defense budget or $21 billion per year.

TFA is scalable in the sense that it is not unreasonably expensive and there are probably enough quality teachers to fill the ranks. It isn't a scalable in the sense that it can erase the achievement gap just by expanding.

Study's result shouldn't surprise us

Conservatives attacked Clegg for backing “quotas” and “social engineering,” and said admissions decisions should be based strictly on “academic merit.” But backers of the plan suggest that it is more meritocratic to consider economic disadvantages alongside grades and test scores rather than raw scores in isolation. As I noted in a recent blog post, the argument is supported by new British research which finds that public school students with lower entrance exam grades performed as well in college as private school students with higher entrance exam grades.

(HT: CCAP)

The article is here.

Two reasons this should no shock anyone. First, private school students can afford tuition so they can probably afford test prep. No student has shown test prep works but it would shock everyone if it didn't. In the U.S. elite schools also tailor their curriculum to tests, or the tests align with elite school curriculum. Either way, that could be a factor in England.

Second, and more importantly, we can think of "education production" as a function of resources, effort, and innate ability. Private school students have more resources in high school, so they have higher standardized test scores, all else equal. When a private and a public school student attend the same college, however, the resource gap closes. If the scores used to be equal then the public school student's output is now going to be higher than the private school student's. Private school students also tend to have better parents, who force them to put in more effort. A public school student with worse parents will put in less effort, on average, which means they must have more innate ability to achieve the same test scores. The resource gap leads me to strongly back school-based affirmative action. The effort gap makes me a little cautious about a strong policy since it incentives a shift toward lazy parenting.

Degree for < $2,500 a year

CCAP with a good post on "$10,000 college degrees." Disclaimer: I don't agree with a lot of things they write, but they make some good points from time to time.