Ping Pong Balls and Children's Fates

Thomas Friedman weighs in with this op-ed today about a lottery to enroll in a charter boarding school in Baltimore. Friedman's wife is on the board of the SEED Foundation, which runs charter boarding schools in multiple cities, and is opening the new one in Baltimore. The one in D.C. has, apparently, been quite successful, and the new school had 300 applicants for the 80 spots. Friedman attended the lottery through which enrollees were selected and argues that it's sad to see childrens' fates determined by ping pong balls - and that it shouldn't be this way (not in the sense that charter school enrollment shouldn't be determined by lottery, but in the sense that everybody should have access to a high-quality school).

I have a number of thoughts about the article:

1.) Boarding school. Interesting. Evidence seems to indicate that a lot of things about the home-life of inner-city students hold them back, so I guess this is one way to potentially overcome that. By my calculation, a student who attends 180 7-hour days of school spends about 14% of their time in school over the course of a year -- about 22% of their waking hours if they sleep 8 hours/night. A boarding school could potentially oversee kids for a majority of their time. I'd like to know more about how they use the extra time they have with the kids as a result of this set-up.

2.) Friedman reports that SEED schools are funded by both public and private funds. I know in most places that charter schools receive less funding per-pupil than other public schools, but I wonder how much money some of these schools raise from private sources and how their total funding (private + public) compares to other public schools in the district. If anybody has seen these figures anywhere, please let me know.

3.) I wonder how the parents of the children who applied to the lottery compare to others in Baltimore. Are parents who want to send their kids to a boarding school more concerned about their education, more eager to get rid of their kids, or no different from others?

4.) I agree that children's fate shouldn't be determined by a ping pong ball, but what's the solution? Obviously, high-quality schools for all; but is the SEED Foundation moving us toward this goal? We'll assume for the moment without further investigation that their schools are, in fact, wonderful places. Given this, are they replicable? Do we have the personnel and finances to replicate these schools for every student in Baltimore and other cities? I'm guessing not, but I'd also guess that not every student in Baltimore wants to attend a boarding school. In that case, can SEED schools be part of a system that provides excellent options for all? I don't see why not.

More on School Expenditures Over Time

This is a follow-up to my last post where I posted a graph that surprised me. As a percentage of GDP, per-pupil expenditures have remained flat over time -- other than during WWII a little under a dollar per billion dollars of GDP per student. The first comment (by the author of the post that prompted my post) asked why we should expect to spending on education to rise over time compared to GDP. I gave a terse response in my follow-up comment, but I'd like to take more time to flesh that out.

To oversimplify economic theory, many goods can be counted as either necessities or luxuries and people (and countries) are expected to increase their spending on luxury items as income increases while simultaneously decreasing their spending on necessities relative to their income. So, for example, somebody making a million dollars per year is expected to spend a smaller portion of their budget on food and shelter than is somebody making twenty thousand dollars per year. At the same time, the wealthier person is expected to spend a greater share of their budget on wine or boats or vacation homes. They're able to do this because they have more "discretionary income" -- money beyond what's needed to pay for the bare necessities of life.

Countries work in a similar fashion. There are certain things that even the poorest country must spend money on (e.g. a basic system of defense or a basic network of roads) and some things that wealthy countries can afford to devote a larger share of income towards as their discretionary income increases (e.g. science research or museums).

So, whether you believe that education spending should increase, decrease, or remain the same relative to GDP depends on how you view education spending. If you think that it's a bare necessity, then you would expect it to decrease over time as we gain more money. If you view it as more of a luxury good, then you'd expect spending to increase over time as discretionary income increases. If you view it as somewhere in between, then you might expect spending to stay relatively flat over time.

I said at the beginning of the post that I was surprised when I saw that it was flat. I was surprised because I was under the distinct impression that countries tended to spend a larger share of GDP on education as they become wealthier. I guess further investigation is needed to find out whether I was wrong or if the US is an outlier.

Has Education Spending Really Skyrocketed?

I just read a post at D-Ed Reckoning about the astronomical increases in per-pupil education spending over the past century. Though expenditures rose in terms of real dollars, I wondered how they compared to the GDP of the U.S. So I found data on the GDP of the U.S. since 1940 (here) and combined the two. The results are above. As a percentage of GDP, per-pupil expenditures (other than a drop during WWII) have stayed almost exactly flat over the past 65 years. The chart is a bit small, but if you click on it then you can see a larger version.

The question remains over what the most relevant comparison is over time. The fact that per-pupil spending relative to GDP has remained the same over time indicates that we're putting forth about the same financial effort relative to our capacity to spend, but if our capacity to spend has increased then we might still expect larger gains in achievement over that time. On the other hand, increased spending capacity should also increase the country's discretionary income -- apparently we've chosen to spend that on items other than education.

Update: More on this in a follow-up post

The Costs and Benefits of Schooling

The first session I attended at AERA was an overview of a recent book, The Price We Pay. The book was published by a team of noted economists as an attempt to quantify the benefits of schooling to society and conduct a cost-benefit analysis of some education reforms with proven track records.

They concluded that a person who drops out of high school pays about $100,000 less in taxes (in today's dollars) over the course of their lifetime than does a person who completes high school (only high school, not college) and that, overall, each high school dropout costs the country about $209,000 in lost taxes, welfare, court costs, etc.

Given this figure, they look at how much various interventions cost per additional student that graduates from high school and find that most cost about 1/3 of the amount that society benefits from their graduation. I didn't read the book -- I only heard a 90 minute summary of it -- so I'm not sure exactly what they take into account, but two things that would bias these estimates jumped into my head.

1.) They only look at the additional benefits from the students who graduate from high school that otherwise would not have. What about the students who attended college or graduated from college that otherwise would not have? Taking this into account might mean that their estimates were biased downward -- that there are more benefits than they thought to the interventions.

2.) A shift of a couple percentage points probably wouldn't affect the benefits of a high school education much, but a large increase likely would. If, say, half as many students dropped out each year then it's likely that the benefits of graduating from high school would be smaller. This would mean that their estimates were biased upward -- that the benefits of the interventions were not as large as they thought.

Henry Levin assured a questioner who raised a similar issue that they had taken a lot of things into account and that their estimates were very complex, so it's quite likely that these concerns are addressed in the book. Especially without having read the book I hesitate to believe that these estimates can possibly be very precise, but I think there is some value to them nonetheless. I think a financial analysis of the costs and benefits of school interventions is valuable information to have before making a decision. That said, Henry Levin made sure to emphasize at the very beginning that the primary reason for helping the poorest children is a moral one rather than a financial one.

Also: perhaps the most notable tidbit I gathered from the session was the projection that in 2020 the workforce will be less educated than the workforce in 2000. I had always assumed that the number of people attending college was and will continue to steadily increase, but I had noticed in previous research that the % of 25-29 year olds with a bachelor's degree in 2006 is actually lower than it was in 2000. Given the changing demographics of the country, Marta Tienda concludes that this trend will continue into the future.

The Irony of Business Intervention in Education

One of the most noticeable trends in education over the past 5-10 years or so has been the increasing role of business-think in schools. People from the business world have become involved in schools and education policy in a myriad of ways: from businessman superintendents (e.g. in NYC and Pittsburgh) to for-profit schools to supplemental educational services to accountability to performance pay, school choice, and many others. As with any trend in governance, the business perspective has brought both good and bad to education.

As a crass generalization, people who argue that schools should be run more like businesses tend to also argue that schools are wasteful and inefficient, that the market should play a larger role in education, and that success and failure can be measured.

The irony is that if schools were run just like the private sector, the changes would infuriate many proponents of business-think. More specifically, think about spending patterns.

Think of the differences between walking into, say, a law firm vs. walking into a typical public school. Which one has a ridiculously expensive conference table? Which one pays for employees to stay in upscale hotels and eat fancy meals? Which one gives employees expense accounts?

It's widely expected that schools (and pretty much all public organizations, for that matter) are supposed to forgo luxury items, make do with second-hand goods, and generally sacrifice and cut corners at every turn. And that's fine in a lot of ways, but it's something that businesspeople tend to forget. If schools were run more like businesses, I find it hard to believe they'd be any more thrifty. If schools were truly run like businesses I think a lot of current critics would be red-faced with anger over their wasted tax dollars. In short: be careful what you wish for.