By Ajay Shah, on February 7th, 2012
The JEE used to serve India well
Many years ago, high school education in India worked in a twin track system: There were those who studied for the IIT JEE and there was everyone else who didn’t. The former studied good books (e.g. Resnick/Halliday (which is a college level book elsewhere in the world), solved physics problems from Irodov, etc.
In contrast, studying for the 12th standard (”board examination”) tended to emphasise rote memorisation, focusing on trivial questions where you had to plug numbers into a formula, emphasised accuracy of calculation and good handwriting. I vividly remember a textbook for 11th class physics used in Maharashtra, which said that Newton’s second law did not apply for living things and powered vehicles. The thoughtful author must have wondered how a stationary cat started walking without the action of an external unbalanced force, and resolved the problem by limiting the footprint of Newton’s second law. The less time that kids spend in studying for board examinations, the better.
I used to be optimistic that the footprint of the enhanced curriculum, and complexity of examination questions, lay far beyond the tiny number of people who entered IIT. Even if only 2,000 kids entered IIT, if 40,000 of them studied for the JEE, it gave them world class capabilities at high school. In each cohort, we got 40,000 people who were very good by world standards. In a country with pervasively low capabilities, it was very useful having this slice of high inequality of knowledge, for it gave a group of people who were able to learn modern technology, connect to globalisation, and create firms which generate a lot of high-paying jobs. It is fashionable to complain about inequality of knowledge, but given that you are in a LDC with a very low mean, would you really rather have very low variance??
With this old configuration, we also got a nice tool for inter-generational class mobility. The middle class got their kids into IIT, and almost all these graduated into upper class by the time they were 30.
More generally, a lot of countries have found that high stakes examinations are a good thing. High stakes examinations push the work ethic, grow the ability of young people to work hard in a sustained manner with high concentration, ensure foundations of mathematics and science, and encourage a meritocracy. They create a self-selected elite of young people who are not immersed in and defined by mass culture. All these are good things.
Problems of the JEE
I used to think like this for a long time. I have reluctantly been persuaded, over recent years, that the JEE isn’t working so well.
Too many young people are studying for the examination and not the subject. The obsessive focus upon coaching classes is producing a one-dimensional personality which isn’t so well suited to entering college. In the 1980s, the most interesting students in IIT were thinking people who read books, knew a lot about the world, and could also solve monkeys on pulleys. With brutal competition, and the coaching classes phenomenon, too often, all that’s left today is the monkeys on pulleys. There is a certain kind of parent who is willing to have a child go live in Kota at age 15. This screened out many families from the race.
Economists know about this phenomenon in agency theory. High-powered incentives are a problem because the agent only focuses on the incentive and tends to cut corners (or worse) on everything that’s not mentioned in the incentive contract. Andrade and Castro bring this generic idea in agency theory into the question of examinations, and find similar effects.
In the 1980s, there was substantial diversity of background, experiences and class amongst the students. This was a good thing, since students would then pick up the culture of people unlike them. In recent years, it appears that there is much greater homogeneity of background, experiences and class. The extent to which the person gets transformed in the four years has, as a consequence, gone down. When very few children of the elite go to IIT, this reduces access to the knowledge and networks of the elite for everyone who goes to IIT. This has reduced the ability of IIT to generate inter-generational class mobility.
Jishnu Das and Tristan Zajonc have found a nice bump in the upper tail of the distribution of skills in India. The pessimist sees this as being about class or caste: certain families bring up kids who know more. The optimist in me used to think this was the bunch studying for the IIT entrance. Also see Geniuses and economic development on the importance of the upper tail of the skills distribution.
It is increasingly difficult to be optimistic about how this is going. Narendra Karmarkar graduated from IITB in 1978, and went on to do truly important work in 1984. My optimism about the IITs peaked in 1984. This should have scaled up manifold in the following years. It has not. In the 1980s, I used to think that by 2010, we’d have atleast one Nobel laureate from the IITs. That has not happened. This tells us that the IITs are not delivering on their early promise; things haven’t worked out well in the following years. I think the JEE is a part of the problem.
One of the most disappointing features of the recent OECD PISA evidence was the absence of this bump in the upper tail. This new evidence shows a scary world of low inequality of skill, of a country with a terrible mean and no upper tail of an elite that can power the country out of mass poverty. I would conjecture two potential explanations for what has been found. One, it could be the case that this testing was done at age 15, at which time not much of the IIT JEE studying has as yet taken place. Alternatively, it could be the case that studying for the IIT JEE is not producing good knowledge.
But the solution being offered doesn’t seem to be the right one
There are two views on how these problems can be solved. The first alternative is to shift away from admissions based on a high stakes examination. Universities in the US screen applicants on many parameters, so this is generally thought to be better. But when we look back in history, universities in the US used to focus primarily on academic performance only, until a glut of Jews showed up in Harvard. The shift to asking for `well rounded personalities’ was a tool by the dominant anti-semetic elite to screen out Jewish kids who did not play football. So we should be cautious in respecting the undergraduate admissions process in the US. It is also important to remember that the quality of kids starting college in the US is quite weak by world standards. There are other countries (e.g. Japan) where large scale high-stakes examinations are used for university admissions, with much success.
I feel that the core problem that we have in India is just too few seats, which has generated a ridiculous extent of competition and distorted behaviour on the part of the kids. The solution lies in solving the policy problems in higher education, so that a large number of kids are taken into world class institutions every year. E.g. adding undergraduate programs at I I Sc, with recruitment through the JEE, was a move in the right direction. We need to grow the size of the entrant class in universities in India, that figure in the Times Higher Education Supplement ranking, by 10-fold. At present, we have only one university in that list – IIT Bombay. Kapil Sibal is offering neither of the two solutions above: we are not being offered a modified admissions process based on looking at a fuller picture of the child, and we are not being offered a Japanese scale world of high stakes examinations with a lot of seats in world class universities. What we’re being offered is a scaling down of the role of the IIT JEE. A greater role for the 12th standard examination is just a recipe to emphasise rote memorisation, focusing on trivial questions where you had to plug numbers into a formula, emphasising accuracy of calculation and good handwriting. This seems wrong to me.
 
By Ajay Shah, on January 26th, 2012
The debate
Roughly one decade ago, there was a strong debate in India about how we should tackle the problem of education. There were two
views:
- Intensification
- On one side were those who felt that nothing was fundamentally wrong; all that was needed was more money. So we should just continue building more government schools and hiring more civil servants to act as school teachers, and we’ll be fine.
- Reform
- On the other side were the reformers, who argued that the basic incentives in Indian education were wrong. Putting more money down a dysfunctional system was pointless.
The Intensifiers won this debate. An informal coalition of educationists (i.e. the incumbent education system) and leftists came
together, supported by the World Bank, which pushed for mere enlargement of Indian education, without questioning the foundations.
All of us are involved in this story at many levels. At the simplest, we are the customers of the education establishment. We pay income tax and VAT and a few other taxes. On top of this, we pay the 2% education cess. In return for this, we get certain educational
services. These influence our kids, and they influence all the young people that we encounter in this young country. Trillions of rupees have been spent, and more than a decade has gone by. It is time to assess the performance of this strategy.
Three blocks of evidence are now visible, which tell us that the Intensifiers were wrong. The old strategy, which was invigorated by a
vast rise in spending, was the wrong one.
Evidence #1: OECD PISA results for India
This story is well told in a recent blog post by Lant Pritchett. Bottom line: The first internationally comparable measurement of what children learn has been done. The sample correctly includes urban and rural children; it correctly includes children going to private or public schools; there are no first order mistakes in what was done. It tells us that Indian education policy has failed miserably: the results have come out at the bottom of the world.
Evidence #2: ASER 2011 results
Pratham has been running surveys which measure characteristics of children and schools in rural India (only). Their latest survey results, for 2011 show the following facts.First, rural kids learn less at public school. Here’s a simple example of what the evidence shows. Surveyors ask kids in class III to recognise numbers upto 100. Here are the numbers, for the proportion of kids in class III who cannot recognise numbers upto 100:
In 2008, the failure rate with private schools was roughly 17 per cent. Government schools were much worse at over 30 per cent. A short three years later, conditions had deteriorated sharply in government schools. The failure rate had gone up to 40 per cent. Private schools had also worsened slightly, to a failure rate of 20 per cent. By 2011, a big gap had opened up between the two: private schools are failing to teach 20 per cent of the kids while government schools are failing with a full 40 per cent of their kids.
Parents in India face the choice between sending their children to a government school, which is free and serves a mid-day meal, versus sending them to a private school where they pay fees. Yet, an increasing fraction of parents choose to send their children to a private school, paying tuition fees from their own pockets, while government schools are free. The relationship between a parent and a private school is a transaction between consenting adults. The relationship between a parent and a government school involves all of us, because we are paying for it.
Given the low income of parents in India, their use of private schools is a striking indictment of what the Intensifiers have wrought:
At class II, the fraction of rural children in private school went up from 19 per cent (2007) to 23 per cent (2011). At class VII, this
rose more slowly to levels slightly above 20 per cent.
Evidence #3: CMIE household survey
CMIE has data for the year ended March 2011 about the behaviour of 169,492 households, about their expenditure on school/college fees and tuition fees. Here’s the picture for the quarter ended September 2011; all values as percent of overall expenditure:
| Income class |
School/college fees |
Private tuition fees |
| Rich – I |
4.79 |
0.66 |
| Rich – II |
3.79 |
0.51 |
| High Middle Income – I |
3.54 |
0.63 |
| High Middle Income – II |
3.12 |
0.65 |
| High Middle Income – III |
2.44 |
0.68 |
| Middle Income – I |
1.93 |
0.59 |
| Middle Income – II |
1.62 |
0.45 |
| Lower Middle Income – I |
1.38 |
0.49 |
| Lower Middle Income – II |
1.05 |
0.60 |
| Poor – I |
0.76 |
0.58 |
| Poor – II |
1.13 |
0.28 |
| Overall |
2.10 |
0.57 |
If parents chose to stay within public sector schools, their expenditure on fees would have been zero. The table shows that across
all income groups of India, there is movement towards private provision of education, both by paying fees at schools and by paying
for private tuition classes. These two elements add up to 2.67 per cent of overall expenses of households. (The CMIE household survey separately measures expenses on books, journals, stationary, additional professional education, education overseas, hobby classes and other education expenses. This helps us gain confidence in the extent to which the two fields in the table above narrowly pin down the feature of interest).
These decisions of well intentioned parents are the strongest indictment of education policy in India. The product being given out
by the Intensifiers is such a terrible one, the parents of India are walking away from it even though it is free and the alternative is
not and the parents are poor.
Implications
For more than a decade, the Intensifiers have controlled Indian education policy. They have said: Leave education to the education
establishment, do nothing radical, just give us more money, we will deliver results. Now we know that they were wrong. They took the money, but failed to deliver the results.
Kapil Sibal has said that his ministry should not be held responsible for the stream of bad news that is coming out. This seems to me to be dodging accountability. His ministry is responsible for Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, for the Right To Education Act, for blocking OECD PISA from being done in India, etc. The bureaucratic consensus of his ministry represents the education establishment.
This brings us to accountability. If a contractor took money from you, and failed to deliver on building your house, you would sack
him. (You would also take him to court, to recover the money that was paid to him, for services not delivered). In similar fashion,
education is too important to be left to the educationists. We need to start over.
What is to be done
- We need to start over in the field of education, with a fresh management team, one that is not a part of the status quo, one that is rooted in the worlds of incentives, public policy and public administration.
- The flow of public money into the status quo needs to go down sharply. There is no reason to put money into something that fails to deliver the goods. First we must prove that a mechanism delivers results, and only after that should we put money into
it. This is the common sense that a housewife would apply. She would not spent gigabucks on promises from people who have failed to deliver.
- OECD PISA measurement needs to take place every year at every district.
- The education cess was always a mistake and needs to go. Public expenditures on education should always have come out of general tax revenues; there is no need to have a cess.
- Civil servant teachers, who have tenured (permanent) have no incentive to teach well, regardless of their qualifications or high income. We can’t sack them, but what we need to do on a massive scale is to stop recruiting them. The existing stock can be reallocated to other civil servant functions where staff is in short supply. Through this, it would become possible to whittle away at the accumulated stock over the coming 20 years.
By Simon Grey, on January 25th, 2012
Parlier earns about $13 an hour. She’d like to become one of the better-paid workers in the plant, but, in today’s factories, that requires an enormous leap in skills. It feels cruel, Davidson writes, to mention all the things Parlier would have to learn to move up. She doesn’t know the computer language that runs the machines. “She doesn’t know trigonometry or calculus, and she’s never studied the properties of cutting tools or metals. She doesn’t know how to maintain a tolerance of 0.25 microns, or what tolerance means in this context, or what a micron is.”
A good attitude and hustle have taken Parlier as far as they can. It’s hard, given her situation, to acquire the skills she needs to realize the American dream.
But skills aren’t always necessary. A dumbed-down UI can serve as a substitute for knowledge, particularly if a firm can hire a technician to know the technical aspects of the technology in use so other workers don’t have to. In fact, the trend of technology has generally been to serve as a substitute for knowledge and ability. Why learn Trig if you can run a fairly simple program on a computer?
Anyhow, this story is evidence of my claim of a technology gap. If labor were allowed to compete freely in a deregulated economy, technological growth would be slower and technological innovations implemented less frequently. This in turn ensures that labor is not stagnant or regressive, and also gives less intelligent laborers a chance to remain on the market longer as technology remains relatively expensive. In order to make technology more appealing, then, technological innovators will find it useful to dumb down the UI to make the device more readily accessible by lower-intelligence labor.
The point in all this, then, is that the government has basically set policies in place that pulls demand for technology forward, leaving less-intelligent laborers in the lurch. And since less-intelligent laborers tend to also be poor, it can be said that the government hates poor people.
By Simon Grey, on January 23rd, 2012
The students’ proposal fits right in. Instead of paying tuition – currently at $12,192, not including mandatory fees, room, board or books – the “UC Student Investment Proposal” would require that students commit to paying 5 percent of their annual income for 20 years after graduating.
…
Students who pay $2,500 a year – 5 percent of $50,000 – for 20 years, would end up paying $50,000 for their education, slightly more than the $48,768 they would pay over four years if UC tuition were frozen at its current level.
On the other hand, students earning $100,000 would pay $5,000 a year, or $100,000 for their education over two decades.
This is basically no different than the student loan scam, except in that it may possibly be cheaper for students. It functions the same way as student loans—you basically have to work for someone else for an extended period of time, making you essentially an indentured servant. This will thus be the its downfall: it’s too direct about enslavement.
By Simon Grey, on January 20th, 2012
If you want to feel like the smartest person in the room, often a good way to accomplish this is to be the only economist. Frequently, the one economist will say things that make a lot of sense that no one else would ever come up with. When I am that one economist, I sometimes feel like a genius. Until a second economist enters the room, that is. Because when the second economist shows up, he or she often says all the smart things I was going to say, before I can say them. It turns out, it is not the economist who is brilliant, but rather the training we get as economists which leads us to think differently from non-economists, that sometimes makes us seem smart.
It is true that economists generally think more deeply than most people. They are used to considering tradeoffs and long-term effects of a given policy or decision, which is something that eludes most people.
However, the mindset espoused by Steven Levitt is quite dangerous, and speaks to a tendency towards arrogance that is often seen among economists. Because they are generally wiser and smarter than other people, many economists begin to think that they are absolutely smart and wise. This in turn leads them to rely too much on their own perceived genius, which is why economists generally don’t have an issue with some form of central planning: they really think that they are smart enough to plan an economy.
They are wrong, of course, because they lack one essential ingredient: knowledge. While economists may be pretty smart, and even wise, they simply do not know enough to manage an economy properly. And so, they get so caught up in their brilliance that they never realize they are astonishingly ignorant.
By Ajay Shah, on January 19th, 2012
I was shocked by Lant Pritchett’s note on the appalling performance of India’s best two states on the international PISA assessment. Actually, I was not really shocked; I didn’t expect anything else as I’ve been listening to Lant for years now. By the same token, I agree with Jishnu Das that we really don’t know much about what works in education (other than that good teaching makes a difference) and that our bean-counting of inputs into education may be completely wrong headed. From conversations with him (also over years) I surmise that the only thing we really know about what leads to more learning is that it is correlated with how many years children stay in school. What that suggests, though, is that attention be directed towards the choice of parents and students to stay in school.
In my opinion people choose to do things if it is worth it to them. This is a common assumption for economists. While challengeable in some circumstances, does it make any sense to think that people send their children to school if they don’t think it’s worth it? If it is
compulsory: sure. With compulsion, attention of policy makers and carefully watchful observers such as Pratham should be to make sure school is worth the year of children’s attendance since people would not be able to decide for themselves. Until we see compulsory schooling enforced, though, years of education remain a family’s choice and we have to understand how and why people make that choice.
Unless we think parents are utterly clueless about the value of education and totally incapable of telling if teachers are doing anything or their children are learning anything, the effectiveness of teaching and the amount of knowledge imparted must be a major factor in their decision as to whether school is worth it. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met dozens of educators and education officials in India who believe parents are, indeed, clueless and such decisions should be out of their hands. But they are the very people who gave us the PISA ratings and are indeed throwbacks to the License Raj where only bureaucrats were assumed to know anything. Further, with the explosion of private schools, even in rural areas, it is laughable to think that there are so many parents who value education so little. They are willing to forego free public education in order to pay for something more worthwhile.
Which brings us to accountability.
What could parents be looking at, that makes them think school is worth it? It must be based on performance: parents don’t really see
the inputs, they mostly just see their children learn. Or not learn as is the case. So how can they translate their concern for learning into actual learning? They have to be free to pick the educational context that they see is working for them or their neighbors. That’s where accountability comes in.
A provider of any good or service is likely to be most accountable when their livelihood depends upon attracting customers. If what they provide is worth it, people will take the service, and the provider can make a living. If not, parents won’t pay and teachers won’t get paid. As of now, there is no mechanism to allow families to make that choice. There is no such compulsion for teachers to provide a service worth paying for. No doubt there are many teachers (probably most) who are doing the best they can regardless of how they are paid. But with over 24% absenteeism, large numbers of teachers observed to be doing anything but teaching, and many sub-contracting their position to under-qualified replacements at a fraction of government salaries, there is substantial room for improvement.
Further, if we are going to get more students (and, hence, teachers) into classrooms, the dedicated teachers may be the ones who are already on the job. People induced to enter the profession may not be as dedicated and, hence, need some other way to hold them accountable than internally felt professional ethics.I am an educator (of sorts) but have no opinion about what the bottleneck in children’s learning really is. Jishnu says the most successful headmasters all say different things (after good teachers – but then, don’t we judge the goodness of teachers by whether their students actually learn? It’s an output based judgment, too.) I know little of pedagogical theory. But I know just as little about the inner workings of most complex things I use — computers and the Internet, water systems, bicycles. I can tell when they work and when they don’t, though. Similarly, I know that my sons learned to read and
write, become responsible citizens and to develop and exercise critical intellectual capacities (sometimes way too critical for my
taste) even though I have no idea how they learned them. I did know that their teachers were in school almost every day and doing things that sounded like teaching to me. I did not have to be an expert on pedagogy to hold the schools completely accountable for my children’s education.
I was also fortunate enough to be able to take (or threaten to take) them out of government schools if I thought otherwise. Funding
for government schools (in the U.S.) follows enrollment, if not so directly and obviously as for private schools. So my threats about
shifting my children out of government school directly mattered to their teachers.
There is no reason why Indian parents can’t do the same. They, on average, may not have my education but after talking to hundreds of families in rural areas, tribal villages, urban slums and SC hamlets, I hear no less concern for their children’s future than I have for
mine and no less ability to tell if a teacher appears to be doing his job. They may be more capable than me since they are more likely to see the teachers themselves — I needed to ask my children.
In many rich countries, the issue of vouchers to pay for schools is emotionally charged. Historically, free compulsory public education was a result of fights between church and State (even in Japan where `church’ doesn’t quite fit — but religion and State does). Children were already attending school in high percentages and there was a fight for their hearts and minds. In rich countries currently, suggestions to provide vouchers instead of State-run schools re-kindle this old antagonism against religious instruction.
India never had this fight nor this evolution of public provision. Our view of schooling here in India was imposed based on the final result of universal free education seen in rich countries without the history from which that final result evolved.
India needn’t go through the phase of fighting over who gets to teach students who are already highly motivated to learn and have seen learning take place. If India wants to see all children educated, she can certainly pay for the cost of education (in fact, the job can be done for much less per student is presently spent) so that families don’t have to. But the government doesn’t have to provide it directly (though government schools should be free to compete for this money if it can). The fight is the State against society (families), not against the church.
What the State can do is make as much information known to parents as possible. What should children know after how many years of school?
How do you know if your child is keeping up? How do you know what you’re paying for is worth it? As of now, this information is
certainly not given to parents. Maybe State run schools don’t want parents to know (and, unfortunately, most Indian parents will not know about PISA). And as of now, there is nothing parents (particularly poor parents) can do about it anyway.
By Simon Grey, on January 19th, 2012
Statistics are often thrown around in the media, showing that people with college degrees earn higher average salaries than people without them. But such statistics lump together apples and oranges — and lemons.
A decade after graduation, people whose degrees were in a hard field like engineering earned twice as much as people whose degrees were in the ultimate soft field, education. Nor is a degree from a prestigious institution a guarantee of a big pay-off, especially not for those who failed to specialize in subjects that would give them skills valued in the real world.
But that is not even half the story. In countries around the world, people with credentials but no marketable skills have been a major source of political turmoil, social polarization and ideologically driven violence, sometimes escalating into civil war.
People with degrees in soft subjects, which impart neither skills nor a realistic understanding of the world, have been the driving forces behind many extremist movements with disastrous consequences.
These include what a noted historian called the “well-educated but underemployed” Czech young men who promoted ethnic identity politics in the 19th century, which led ultimately to historic tragedies for both Czechs and Germans in 20th century Czechoslovakia. It was much the same story of soft-subject “educated” but unsuccessful young men who promoted pro-fascist and anti-Semitic movements in Romania in the 1930s.
The targets have been different in different countries but the basic story has been much the same. Those who cannot compete in the marketplace, despite their degrees, not only resent those who have succeeded where they have failed, but push demands for preferential treatment, in order to negate the “unfair” advantages that others have.
The government, by continually pushing college education, has sown the seeds for its own collapse. And this collapse will come at the hands of those who have fully committed themselves to the government’s own propaganda. How fitting.
By Simon Grey, on January 9th, 2012
Direct and indirect federal subsidy is often offered as the primary reason for the occurrence of the current college bubble. Most effects of the college bubble are traced back to federal funding, in the forms of student grants and subsidized loans, not to mention research grants as well as general academic funding and diversity grants (wherein a college or university receives federal funding for certain campus offerings, mostly related to making women and minorities feel good about themselves). Basically, federal money is the cause of the college bubble.
This view is not altogether incorrect, but it seems to ignore the role of federal regulation and the role of shifting cultural/societal views regarding student self-esteem. The two generally go hand-in-hand and feed off each other, and so trying to delink the two is impossible. At any rate, what’s neglected in the discussion of the college bubble is the concept of grade inflation.
Grade inflation has occurred primarily for two reasons. First, as mentioned before, the relatively recent self-esteem movement has encouraged the dumbing down of the general curriculum in order to make subpar students feel good about themselves. The history of this movement is dodgy, relative to political intervention. There is no doubt that the government has latched on to the self-esteem movement, but it is not clear if the government was the first mover. Even if it weren’t, private desire and public policy has basically become a self-reinforcing feedback loop, so the point is basically moot. At any rate, the effects of the self-esteem movement are clear, in that students perform moderately well, relative to the world (see Steve Sailer’s take on PISA scores, eg.), while being told that they are highly intelligent. Fortunately, the self-esteem movement does not have as much momentum as it once did, at least from my perspective.
Second, the government has certainly played a role in grade inflation due to the increasing federalization of public schools. The federal government loves uniformity, particularly of outcome, and school outcomes are no exception. As my recent book review pointed out, in brief, the increased bureaucratization of public education has led to a situation where students perform better on an admittedly arbitrary class at the expense of learning things that aren’t on said test. NCLB, in particular, is responsible for this recent effect, and it is part of a larger trend. This trend has led to the inflation of grades in two ways. First, the decreased role of non-test subjects has led to less classroom time dedicated to them, which means that grades in these subjects are based on a smaller sample size of work, and teachers are likely to cut kids slack when grading (at least in my own experience). Second, teachers have cheated on the tests in order to make sure that the kids do well, which sometimes makes students seem smarter than they would otherwise.
Primary and secondary education simultaneously suffered from dumbed-down curriculum and grade inflation, shortchanging intelligent children. They needed some way to fight back and prove their higher intelligence and cognitive abilities, which is where college comes in. While direct federal subsidy of post-secondary education is blamed for the current college bubble—and rightfully so, I might add—this is not the whole picture. The dumbing down of public education has also contributed to the need for college because it now provides the surest means for intelligent students to finally get ahead.
If education is viewed as a way to signal work fitness, then a high school degree has become essentially meaningless. Graduating from high school is no longer a guarantee that one is proficient in math and can speak and write in plain, understandable English. Many colleges tacitly admit this fact with their offering of basic remedial courses. Thus, having a high school education no longer signals that one can be counted on to be a reliable employee.
Thus, intelligent students have two options: drop out of or avoid high school, or go to college. The former is not a good signal for future employment prospects, and thus should be avoided by all but the most entrepreneurial of intelligent students. The latter option—going to college—is the most viable option to demonstrate employment fitness. Thus, intelligent students can no longer simply graduate with good grades at the top of their high school class, they must also get a post-secondary education of some sort as well.
Therefore, while the current increases in college enrollment are undoubtedly the consequence of direct and indirect federal subsidy, it is both foolish and dangerous to ignore the effect of the self-esteem movement and federal regulation, and how both have distorted the signal of secondary education. As such, popping the college bubble won’t be as simple as ending federal regulation. Popping the bubble will also require federal deregulation, and a more appropriate view of the role of self-esteem in a child’s educational development.
By Ajay Shah, on January 5th, 2012
The PISA 2009+ results are the end of the beginning. For the last decade there has been a debate. Some argued the levels of learning inside Indian elementary schools (primary and upper primary) are a national scandal and a threat to the future of India’s society, polity, and economy. Others appeared to believe that the main, if not only, problem with Indian schools was that not enough children attend them and that with more money and more of the same, all would be well. The last five years saw a relentless accumulation of evidence about the crisis of learning. The establishment has tried to deny, deflect, and dismiss the evidence on learning. Eventually the Government of India agreed to participate in the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) – but only for two states, Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh – and both sides agreed PISA was the litmus test. The PISA 2009+ results, which are both official and are beyond gain-saying are unspeakably bad. They confirm the worst of what anyone has been saying about the levels of learning in India elementary education.
- In reading of the 74 regions participating in PISA 2009 or 2009+ these two states beat out only Kyrgyzstan.
- In mathematics of the 74 regions participating the two states finished again, second and third to last, again beating only Kyrgyzstan.
- In science the results were even worse, Himachal Pradesh came in dead last, behind Kyrgyzstan, while Tamil Nadu inched ahead to finish 72nd of 74.
But just coming in last (if we can dismiss as a relevant comparator for India a tiny Central Asian state) does not convey the enormity of how bad these results were, as not only was India last, it was far, far, behind its aspirations, both at the bottom and at the top levels of performance.
PISA expresses the levels of performance in two ways, an overall index number and the fraction of students achieving various “levels” of achievement. The PISA index numbers for each subject are scaled so that the typical OECD student is at 500 and the standard deviation across OECD students is 100. The testing of thousands of students allows the results to present not only the average but also the worst (5th percentile) and best (95th percentile) students do in each country/region. PISA also classifies student performance into “levels” that represent different degrees of mastery of the material.
Table 1 compares India’s performance to three groups of countries. The economic superstars have successfully completed the transition from poor to rich economies in just two generations – Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea (China’s only results are just for the city of Shanghai, which are the highest scores of any region tested, but this is too a typical to really be comparable) and India aspires to their sustained success economically. The current super powers are represented by the USA and the OECD average reflects India’s aspirations as a superpower. The rising powers are represented by the BRIC countries of Russia and Brazil which reflect the rise of the emerging markets.
Compared to the economic superstars India is almost unfathomably far behind. The TN/HP average 15 year old is over 200 points behind. If a typical grade gain is 40 points a year Indian eighth graders are at the level of Korea third graders in their mathematics mastery. In fact the average TN/HP child is 40 to 50 points behind the worst students in the economic superstars. Equally worrisome is that the best performers in TN/HP – the top 5 percent who India will need in science and technology to complete globally – were almost 100 points behind the average child in Singapore and 83 points behind the average Korean – and a staggering 250 points behind the best in the best.
As the current superpowers are behind the East Asian economic superstars in learning performance the distance to India is not quite as far, but still the average TN/HP child is right at the level of the worst OECD or American students (only 1.5 or 7.5 points ahead). Indians often deride America’s schools but the average child placed in an American school would be among the weakest students. Indians might have believed, with President Obama, that American schools were under threat from India but the best TN/HP students are 24 points behind the average American 15 year old.
Even among other “developing” nations that make up the BRICs India lags – from Russia by almost as much as the USA and only for Brazil, which like the rest of Latin America is infamous for lagging education performance does India even come close – and then not even that close.
To put these results in perspective, in the USA there has been huge and continuous concern that has caused seismic shifts in the discourse about education driven, in part, by the fact that the USA is lagging the economic superstars like Korea. But the average US 15 year old is 59 points behind Koreans. TN/HP students are 41.5 points behind Brazil, and twice as far behind Russia (123.5 points) as the US is Korea, and almost four times further behind Singapore (217.5 vs 59) that the US is behind Korea. Yet so far this disastrous performance has yet to occasion a ripple in the education establishment.
| Table 1: Comparing Indian (Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh) students mastery of mathematics to economic superstars, current superpowers, and rising superpowers |
| Country/Region |
5th |
mean |
95th |
HP+TN average to comparator average |
HP+TN average to comparator 5th percentile |
HP+TN best (95th) to comparator’s average |
HP+TN best (95th) to comparator’s 95th |
| Points TN/HP is behind (-)/ahead(+) |
| Economic Superstars |
| Singapore |
383 |
562 |
725 |
-217.5 |
-38.5 |
-99 |
-262 |
| Hong Kong |
390 |
555 |
703 |
-210.5 |
-45.5 |
-92 |
-240 |
| Korea |
397 |
546 |
689 |
-201.5 |
-52.5 |
-83 |
-226 |
| Current Superpower |
| OECD avg. |
343 |
496 |
643 |
-151.5 |
1.5 |
-33 |
-180 |
| USA |
337 |
487 |
637 |
-142.5 |
7.5 |
-24 |
-174 |
| Rising Superpowers |
| Russia |
329 |
468 |
609 |
-123.5 |
15.5 |
-5 |
-146 |
| Brazil |
261 |
386 |
531 |
-41.5 |
83.5 |
77 |
-68 |
| Indian States |
| Tamil Nadu |
241 |
351 |
468 |
| Himachal Pradesh |
223 |
338 |
458 |
| Average of TN and HP |
232 |
344.5 |
463 |
| Source: PISA 2009 Plus Results, Table B.3.1 for first three columns and author’s calculations. |
I have emphasised Mathematics because many believed math was an Indian strong suit. The results for reading and science are similarly bad. Table 2 shows science results in a different format, which shows the proportion of children in various categories of performance. There are three points:
- “Below level 1″ doesn’t even have a description as it implies that so little proficiency is demonstrated it is impossible to
distinguish from not knowing anything at all. In the USA, even with its socio-economic and racial inequalities and language inequalities and its failing inner city schools, only 4.2 percent are in this category. In HP 57.9 percent of 15 year olds in school cannot be distinguished from not having learned any science at all and in TN 43.6 percent all in this category – ten times as many as the USA.
- PISA considers “level 2″ as the minimum level that provides the science competencies that will enable them to participate actively in life situations related to science and technology. Since more than 80 percent of students in both HP and TN
are level 1 or below this most students in these states have reached age 15 ill-equipped for the century they will face.
- While a thin elite that competes for the few highly selective technical institutes are globally competitive, this is a tiny fraction of the population. The estimate of the fraction of TN or HP students at level 6 in science proficiency was zero. Their estimate of the fraction at level 5: also zero. Of course this does not mean there are not such students in these states, of course there are, just that from the samples available in the study the best estimate was so small as to be indistinguishable from zero.
Table 2: Comparison of science proficiency in Tamil Nadu
and Himachal Pradesh to India’s aspirations |
| Country/Region |
Below level 1 |
Level 1 1 |
Level 5 5 |
Level 6 6 |
| Singapore |
2.8 |
8.7 |
15.3 |
4.6 |
| Hong Kong |
1.4 |
5.2 |
14.2 |
2 |
| Korea |
1.1 |
5.2 |
10.5 |
1.1 |
| OECD avg. |
5 |
13 |
7.4 |
1.2 |
| USA |
4.2 |
13.9 |
7.9 |
1.3 |
| Russia |
5.5 |
16.5 |
3.9 |
0.4 |
| Brazil |
19.7 |
34.5 |
0.6 |
0 |
| Tamil Nadu |
43.6 |
40.9 |
0a |
0a |
| Himachal Pradesh |
57.9 |
30.9 |
0a |
0a |
| Source: PISA 2009 Plus Results. Description of levels Table 3.2, percentages Table B.3.4.
1) At Level 1, students have such a limited scientific knowledge that it can only be applied to a few, familiar situations. They can present scientific explanations that are obvious and follow explicitly from given evidence.
5) At Level 5, students can identify the scientific components of many complex life situations, apply both scientific concepts and knowledge about science to these situations, and can compare, select and evaluate appropriate scientific evidence for responding to life situations. Students at this level can use well-developed inquiry abilities, link knowledge appropriately and bring critical insights to situations. They can construct explanations based on evidence and arguments based on their critical analysis.
6) At Level 6, students can consistently identify, explain and apply scientific knowledge and knowledge about science in a variety of complex life situations. They can link different information sources and explanations and use evidence from those sources to justify decisions. They clearly and consistently demonstrate advanced scientific thinking and reasoning, and they demonstrate willingness to use their scientific understanding in support of solutions to unfamiliar scientific and technological situations. Students at this level can use scientific knowledge and develop arguments in support of recommendations and decisions that centre on personal, social or global situations.
a) In Table B.3.4 these are reported as blank but the estimated percentages in below 1 to level 4 sum to exactly 100 percent. Obviously this not imply that there are exactly zero students in all of these two states meeting these levels but that with the sample sizes assess students of 1616 in HP and 3210 in TN there was insufficient information to create a non-zero estimate. |
These results on PISA 2009+, while tragic for what they imply for Indian youth and perhaps shocking to newcomers to this subject, come as no surprise to those who have been working on basic education in India:
- Das and Zajonc (2008) used results from Orissa and Rajasthan to create indices on mathematics performance similar to those of TIMSS (Trends in Mathematics and Science Study) and found these states near the bottom of the global rankings.
- Educational Initiatives carried out an 18 state study using sophisticated testing instruments and found levels of performance on TIMSS comparable items that were stunningly lower. For instance on the open ended question “Write a fraction larger than 2/7″ less than 30 percent of Indian students in standard 8 could answer correctly compared to more than 70 percent internationally.
- The APRest study led by Karthik Muralidharan and Venkatesh Sundararaman in rural AP asked the same questions of students in grades 2 to 5 and found very slow rates of learning progress.
- The results year after year from the ASER [2010 2009] study supported by Pratham find that significant fractions of students in Standard 8 cannot master even Standard 2 curricular basics. In rural areas nationwide a third of children in grade 8 could not do a simple division problem and almost 20 percent could not read a level 2 text. The 2011 results, due out in a few weeks will show continued stagnation or even retrogress in learning.
- Numerous studies by MIT’s JPAL, World Bank, NCAER/University of Maryland and other researchers found levels of performance that were shockingly low compared to curricular expectations.
These PISA 2009+ results are the end of the beginning. The debate is over. No one can still deny there is a deep crisis in the ability of the existing education system to produce child learning. India’s education system is undermining India’s legitimate aspirations to be at the global forefront as a prosperous economy, as a global great power, as an emulated polity, and as a fair and just society. As the beginning ends, the question now is: what is to be done?
 
By Simon Grey, on January 2nd, 2012
Tabarrok focuses on four policy areas in which changes could yield very positive results. He kicks off the short eBook by focusing first on patent reform, noting that many areas of patent coverage (software, technical processes e.g.) have low innovation costs and, as such, are not worthy of patent protection. In fact, his recommended patent reform is basically total abolition of all patents, save for medicine and a handful of other fields. This seems rather viable given that most inventions and innovations are generally cheap and likely inevitable. He also has a few short steps that would help as well, like requiring a functioning prototype and capping terms to seven or fourteen years depending on category.
He next turns his sights on to a prize system for innovation. His proposed policies are well-intentioned but naïve. He proposes that the government fund sizeable prizes (to the tune of millions or billions of dollars per prize) with specific goals—not methods—in mind. This should work in theory, but the fundamental problem with this method is that it fails to discern how the government would go about setting the most economic goals and prizes. This process could become highly politicized, as anything involving billions of federal dollars tends to. However, venture capitalists and innovation firms should take note of this recommendation and implement it.
Tabarrok closes his short book by looking briefly at education—both public and post-secondary. Regarding the former, he recommends reform. Why this is preferable to privatization is unstated, but perhaps that is beyond the scope of the book. One curious thing about is argument is how he claims that there is a correlation between high school graduation rates and GDP growth. While statistical analysis bears this out, it is worth noting that there is no proven causal relationship between the two. It could be that GDP growth causes increases in the rate of High School graduation as families become wealthier, and better able to secure leisure time for their children, thus reducing teenagers’ need to work.
It is worth pointing out, though, that public education in the US is crap, and is entirely too test-driven, thanks in large part to No Child Left Behind. Tabarrok doesn’t dwell much on this, which seems to be a bit of an oversight.Finally, Tabarrok turns his sights on to college education, noting that there is undoubtedly a college bubble and that there should thus be fewer college students. Government reform is recommended, since that is a source of the current malinvestment. Better education as to the benefits of a post-secondary education is also recommended, though this seems largely fruitless.
In all, this short book is a rather thought-provoking read. Readers are not likely to agree with all the answers, but the questions are worth mulling over. In fact, the questions the book asks make it worth the purchase. There is a lot to consider and debate, thanks to this book, and the answers Tabarrok provides are considerably less hackneyed than what has been heretofore seen. As such, the book is a recommended read.
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