Will Dobbie and Roland G. Fryar write,
In this paper, we estimate the impact of charter schools on early-life labor market outcomes using administrative data from Texas. We find that, at the mean, charter schools have no impact on test scores and a negative impact on earnings. No Excuses charter schools increase test scores and four-year college enrollment, but have a small and statistically insignificant impact on earnings, while regular charter schools decrease test scores, four-year college enrollment, and earnings. Using school-level estimates, we find that charter schools that decrease test scores also tend to decrease earnings, while charter schools that increase test scores have no discernible impact on earnings.
The authors seem to think that their findings are precise and require some logical explanation. My guess is that their findings are random variations around the null hypothesis.
What is the null hypothesis?
That after correcting for family endowments, variances in educational experiences, approaches, expenditures, and ‘quality” of teachers and facilities are not correlated with variances in long term measurable life outcomes.
It is a common contemporary article of faith that “more and better education is the answer” to all sorts of social problems. The null hypothesis says no it’s not, and beyond a certain minimal threshold, it’s probably a big waste of resources.
On April 17, 2013, Arnold posted:
In education, the null hypothesis is that nothing makes a long-term, scalable, replicable difference. That is:
1. Take any pedagogical innovation or educational intervention.
2. Subject it to a controlled experiment.
3. Evaluate the experiment’s outcome several years later.
4. If the experiment works, attempt to replicate the experiment in more situations.
By the time you reach step 4, if not sooner, you will be unable to show that the innovation makes any difference in outcomes. What this suggests to me is that in the long run it is the characteristics of the students that determine outcomes, at least on average. Think of an individual student as “predestined” to reach a certain outcome. An educational intervention can disturb their path to the predestined outcome but will not change the outcome. I do not literally believe this model, but it is a null hypothesis that is difficult to disprove.
So the null hypothesis is charter schools don’t have any impact on wages and test scores. And the study did not disprove that hypothesis. The authors might be missing variables and other aspects for the state of Texas but it does not prove charter schools are working any differently than public schools.
I’ll just note that “early-life labor market outcomes” is probably an extremely noisy measurement as a proxy for what most people are really going to understand. Early life earning can be turbulent and it takes time for the dust to settle in many people’s lives and to land closer to a more stable (‘laminar’) position where their compensation correlates better with their marginal productivity.
I went to a charter school for high school and taught in a charter school during that same period. Here are my thoughts.
1) The charter school I went to was specifically geared towards the highly intelligent, average SAT score in the top 1%, and it was an incredible school. It changed my life. There is no equivalent out there. Probably the biggest failing of our education system is that its focused entirely on trying to make dumb people smart (can’t be done) and ignores trying to bring out the full potential of actual smart people. I think my life would have been very different without my charter school, and it seems to have had a very positive impact on lots of people I went to school with.
As a side note, the deplorable tactics the democrats in my school district took to try and shut down that school taught me a lot about how evil the left is. I’ll never forgive what they did to my fiends and my mother. It was also my first experience with race being used as a weapon (as you can imagine, with admissions requirements of being in the top 1% of test scores it was nothing but Asians and Jews, not enough “diversity”).
2) This charter school was an exception though. Most charter schools seem to target minority kids to try and make dumb kids smart. This is part of the whole blank slate view of human intelligence. I taught math part time in one of these schools in high school.
I’m not surprise that long term earnings aren’t changed by these schools, because they can’t change IQ. What they can change, at least a little, is behavioral habits. You’ll note that the “No Excuses” schools seem to have some effect on academics. The school I taught was like this. What it mainly teaches is discipline and habit. It can’t give people abilities they don’t have, but it may make them a more conscientiousness and well behaved citizen. At least relative to the genetic baseline. That’s probably the only thing schools are really capable of achieving.
Right. ‘Charters’ is not some monolithic, homogeneous category to be assessed in an overaggregayed way. Details matter a lot, but the Devil’s in those details.
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/malkus-charters-tps-poverty.png
AEI notes that most charter schools set up shop in poor neighborhoods and have high poverty rates.
If charter schools perform as well as conventional schools, isn’t that an argument in charter schools’ favor? Especially if they cost less.
Responses to results like this are like Rorschach tests for political orientation. For the left, they prove there is no justification for charter schools, because there is no boost in results. For the right, cost savings and/or competition, variety, and freedom of choice provide all the justification they need.
The elephant in the room is that charters are often allowed to expel problem kids the public schools can’t get rid of. That subject tends to inflame passiona and is hard to discuss in a sensible manner.
Isn’t what needs to be assessed is whether the empirical methodology is capable of weeding out false-positives?
Couple of statisticians point out the problems with schools that emphasize test taking.
http://www.vox.com/2016/8/16/12482748/success-academy-schools-standardized-tests-metrics-charter
No school will make dumb kids smart. (Dumb being below average IQ)
The US military has been the single most minority empowering organization based on making dumb kids have discipline and experience success, usually team success.
Most dumb people, after being trained as plumbers (or tailors or wood workers, etc), are able to be careful and produce at a much higher level in their trained field than even highly intelligent untrained people.
There SHOULD be some special schools available for the top 1%/ top 10% of students, based on test scores and willingness to behave. This will help those students and help society. The lack of black students with high test scores is a reality truth that is racist, but should be honestly discussed and accepted / adjusted for.
Charles Murray has said that it is “unconscionable” for unions to block access to charter schools. According to the null hypothesis, it doesn’t really matter, which Murray should know. The neocons sad descent into censorious moralizing continues.
Outcomes measurable by statistics are not the only thing that matters (maybe a parent just hates their neighborhood school). What can’t be counted also counts. Always err on side of choice.
As a parent, I’m more worried about the content of the curriculum. I already buy into the null hypothesis.* But I think E.D. Hirsch is correct that there are just a bunch of things that you should know in order to be a fully functioning citizen of the U.S. (and I’m worried that progressives are actively attempting to degrade the curriculum in order to not teach kids a lot of these things). This is the reason that school choice is important: so that parents can opt out of having their kids indoctrinated by the government schools.
*No one thinks they can turn a 5’8″ kid with a 12″ vertical leap into an NBA player, yet people think they can turn a kid with an 85 IQ into an astrophysicist. Hard to believe the cognitive dissonance that goes on with respect to education policy.