Category: Education

Coastal Elite, a loyal MR requester, requests:

Why is there more "pedigree bias" for hiring of Economics faculty than
in other disciplines? For example, at any top 30 school, 95% of the
faculty will have their PhD from a top 10 school. In other fields, this
will not be the case. Some other disciplines have a much stronger
tendency to co-author than Economics, which should decrease the signal
to noise ratio on a CV. This should imply that pedigree bias should be
even stronger in disciplines with more co-authoring, but anecdotally
this does not seem to be true.

And very often it is the top six rather than the top ten.  I don't myself see the factor of co-authoring as the path to an answer here.  The default answer is to invoke a relatively high importance for IQ, in economics, combined with the relative absence of prodigies, compared to say math.  When prodigies and autodidacts are possible, top performers can come from anywhere.  But smarts and training and networking are all required.  The combination of those barriers give a big advantage, justified or not, to the very top schools.  It is usually believed that a candidate from a lesser school is lacking in at least one of these yet all are required for a big career success.  So maybe a "multiplicative model" of achievement in economics plays a big role in pedigree bias.

On top of that, economics is a relatively unified field with relatively homogeneous metrics of quality.  A school ranked #23 can "play it safe" by hiring a lesser MIT grad, rather than the best student coming out of Emory, and more or less know what they are getting and agree on that.  This tendency in the market is probably inefficient, relative to a first-best with a higher degree of intellectual innovation and less concentration of rewards across the top graduate programs.

Also, the top programs are good at doing admissions — surprisingly good in my view — and pre-selecting the kind of talent the rest of the profession is looking for.

Which other fields have a comparable "pedigree bias"?

There are excellent writers and there are excellent economists and in that intersection there are none better than Bob Higgs:

Until more people come to a more realistic, fact-based understanding of the government and the economy, little hope exists of tearing them away from their quasi-religious attachment to a government they view with misplaced reverence and unrealistic hopes. Lacking a true religious faith yet craving one, many Americans have turned to the state as a substitute god, endowed with the divine omnipotence required to shower the public with something for nothing in every department – free health care, free retirement security, free protection from hazardous consumer products and workplace accidents, free protection from the Islamic maniacs the U.S. government stirs up with its misadventures in the Muslim world, and so forth. If you take the government to be Santa Claus, you naturally want every day to be Christmas; and the bigger the Santa, the bigger his sack of goodies.

• Predictions markets fail to win the gold.  Blame it on Rio.

• "Inside the Wayne County morgue in midtown Detroit, 67 bodies are piled up, unclaimed, in the freezing temperatures. Neither the families nor the county can afford to bury the corpses. So they stack up inside the freezer…You can smell the plight of Detroit."

• A very good video profile of Tyler, who was honored yesterday at GMU for his many contributions to scholarship.

In an impressive new paper, Karthik Muralidharan and Venkatesh Sundararaman provide evidence on the power of teacher incentives to increase learning.  The paper is impressive for three reasons:

1) Evidence comes from a very large sample, 500 schools covering approximately 55,000 students, and treatment regimes and controls are randomly assigned to schools in a careful, stratified design. 

2) An individual-incentive plan and a group-incentive plan are compared to a control group and to two types of unconditional extra-spending treatments (a block grant and hiring an extra teacher).  Thus the authors can test not only whether an incentive plan works relative to no plan but also whether an incentive plan works relative to spending a similar amount of money on "improving schools."

3)  The authors understand incentive design and they test for whether their incentive plan reduces learning on non-performance pay margins.

The results are as follows:

We find that the teacher performance pay program was highly effective in improving student
learning. At the end of two years of the program, students in incentive schools performed
significantly better than those in comparison schools by 0.28 and 0.16 standard deviations (SD)
in math and language tests respectively….

We find no evidence of any adverse consequences as a result of the incentive programs.
Incentive schools do significantly better on both mechanical components of the test (designed to
reflect rote learning) and conceptual components of the test (designed to capture deeper
understanding of the material),suggesting that the gains in test scores represent an actual
increase in learning outcomes. Students in incentive schools do significantly better not only in
math and language (for which there were incentives), but also in science and social studies (for
which there were no incentives), suggesting positive spillover effects….

School-level group incentives and teacher-level individual incentives perform equally well in
the first year of the program, but the individual incentive schools significantly outperformed the
group incentive schools in the second year….

We find that performance-based bonus payments to teachers were a significantly more cost
effective way of increasing student test scores compared to spending a similar amount of money
unconditionally on additional schooling inputs.

Surprisingly, since absent teachers are a big problem in India, reduced teacher absenteeism per se does not appear to be the primary mechanism by which incentives improve learning.  Instead the primary mechanism appears to be more intensive teaching, including more homework and classwork and better attention to weaker students, this greatly increases the relevance of these results to teaching in the developed world.

Addendum: See also Karthik's comments on the comments at 26.

Yesterday I looked at teacher absence in the developing world, highlighting India where a quarter of teachers may be absent on a given day.  Teacher absence isn't that high in the United States but it is still shockingly high.  On a typical school day, 5-6% of teachers are absent, i.e. equivalent to an absence once every 20 days!

Bearing in mind that the typical school year is 180 days, add absences to all the school holidays, teacher workdays, staff development days (btw, ever seen a Walmart shutdown for a staff development day?), and other non-teaching days (e.g. in Fairfax, Mondays are half-days) and the number of days of true teachng greatly diminishes.   

Teachers probably do get sick more often than other workers but teacher absence rates are three times higher than for managers and professional employees in the private sector.  Moreover, are you surprised to learn that teacher absences are most frequent on Mondays and Fridays or that teacher absences are of a duration just short of that requiring medical certification of illness?

Finally, teacher absences reduce student achievement both in the United States and in the developing world. 

In South Africa the problem of teacher absence is so bad that frustrated students rioted when teachers repeatedly failed to show up for class. But the problem is not limited to South Africa, teachers are absent throughout the developing world.  Spot checks by the World Bank, for example, indicate that on a typical day 11% of teachers are absent in Peru, 16% are absent in Bangladesh, 27% in Uganda and 25% in India.

Even when teachers are present they are often not teaching.  In India, where a quarter of the teachers are absent on any particular day, only about half of those present are actually teaching.  (These are national averages, in some states the problem is worse.)

The problem is not low salaries.  Salaries for public school teachers in India are above the norm for that country.  Indeed, if anything, absenteeism increases with salary (and it is higher in public schools than in private schools, despite lower wages in the latter).  The problem is political power, teacher unions, and poor incentives. 

Teachers are literate and they vote so they are a powerful political force especially where teacher unions are strong.  As if this were not enough, in India, the teachers have historically had a guarantee of representation in the state Legislative Councils so political power has often flowed to teachers far in excess of their numbers.  As a result, it's virtually impossible to fire a teacher for absenteeism.

The situation in South Africa is not that different than in India.  The NYTimes article on South Africa has this to say:

“We have the highest level of teacher unionization in the world, but their focus is on rights, not responsibilities,” Mamphela Ramphele, former vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town, said in a recent speech.

Some reforms are planned in South Africa, including greater monitoring of teacher attendance but this offhand remark suggests the difficulties:

“We must ask ourselves to what extent teachers in many historically disadvantaged schools unwittingly perpetuate the wishes of Hendrik Verwoerd,” [President Zuma] recently told a gathering of principals, implicitly challenging the powerful South African Democratic Teachers’ Union, which is part of the governing alliance (!).  (Emphasis added, AT.)