Results for “india schools” 62 found
Indian call centers promote school enrollment
Emily Oster and Bryce Millett report:
Over the last two decades in India there have been large increases in outsourced jobs and large increases in schooling rates, particularly in English. Existing evidence suggests the trends are broadly related. In this paper we explore how localized these impacts are; this has implications for understanding how quickly information about these jobs diffuses. We use panel data on school enrollment from a comprehensive school-level administrative dataset. This is merged with detailed data on Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) center location and founding dates. Using school fixed effects, we estimate the impact of introducing a new ITES center in the vicinity of the school on enrollment. We find that introducing a new ITES center results in a 5.7% increase in number of children enrolled; these effects are extremely localized. We argue this result is not driven by pre-trends in enrollment or endogenous center placement, and is not a result of ITES-center induced changes in population or increases in income. The effect is driven entirely by English-language schools, consistent with the claim that the impacts are driven by changes in returns to schooling.
Teacher Performance Pay: Experimental Evidence from India
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.
Private Education in India
Sebastian Mallaby has a good column on the explosion in private schooling in India and the implications for theories of development:
More than four out of five Indian engineering students attend
private colleges, whose potential growth seems limitless. …Something similar is happening to the Indian
school system…Since the early 1990s the percentage of 6-to-14-year-olds
attending private school has jumped from less than a tenth to roughly a
quarter of the total in that cohort, according to India’s National
Council of Applied Economic Research. And this number may be on the low
side. James Tooley of the University of Newcastle in Britain has found
that in some Indian slums about two-thirds of the children attend
private schools, many of which are not officially recognized and so may
escape the attention of nationwide surveys.The causes of this
private-school explosion shed interesting light on debates about
development, not just in India but throughout the poor world. The
standard assumption among anti-poverty campaigners is that education
leads to development…the recent private-education boom in India shows how causality can also
flow the other way…Since India embraced the
market in the early 1990s, parents have acquired a reason to invest in
education; they have seen the salaries in the go-go private sector, and
they want their children to have a shot at earning them… Once parents understand that education buys their kids into the new
India, they demand it so avidly that public money for schoolrooms
becomes almost superfluous.… Apparently unconnected development policies —
cuts in tariffs and oppressive business regulation, or projects to
build roads and power grids — can sometimes stimulate new educational
enrollment at least as much as direct investments in colleges or
schools.
See my earlier post for some more references.
I know that we have a number of readers in and from India so comments are open if you have further information.
More on Private Schooling in India
The Centre for British Teachers has an interesting report by James Tooley and Pauline Dixon on private schools in India. See also my earlier post on this subject and Tooley’s chapter in The Voluntary City.
Private Schooling in India
The NYTimes reports on “an educational revolution” in India where the government schools are so bad that private schooling is exploding among the very poorest of the poor. Already over 17 percent of all kindergarten, primary and secondary schools are in the private sector and in the big cities the proportion is much higher. Jean Dreze, an economist who helped write a national assessment predicts “within 10 to 15 years, government schools will be almost wiped out.”
A description of a public and private school next door to one another explains why a farmer earning $22 a month will spend nearly a fifth of his income ($4) sending his child to a private school.
In the government school, only two of the three teachers assigned for 273 students were present on a recent day. Around 50 children sat on the floor in a gloomy classroom, while 40 more sat on the grass outside, as their classroom had been under repair since August. One teacher did paperwork, while the other floated between the two groups, not actually teaching either.
At the private school next door, where the teacher-student ratio is 1 to 25, a group of smartly uniformed children stood outside counting loudly in English under their teacher’s watchful eye. They then marched in orderly single file into a classroom with blackboard and benches.
The children next door wrestled, and watched.
Amartya Sen complains that “no developed” country educates itself using private schools. Yet, the private schools of India have much in common with the private schools of nineteenth century England, Wales and America. Contrary to common belief, attendance and literacy rates in England and Wales, for example, were 90 percent or above before any major state involvment in schools. James Mill (father of John Stuart) illustrated the parallel with modern India when he wrote in 1813, “We have met with families in which, for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school. (Quoted in E.G. West’s classic Education and the State).
Furthermore, India is not alone in relying on private schools in the wake of the failure of government. Private schools are even more common in Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia and elsewhere.
For more see James Tooley’s chapter, from which I have drawn, in The Voluntary City (I am one of the editors.)
Friday assorted links
2. Sweden is near the top for wealth inequality (ho hum).
3. School vouchers in Arizona and elsewhere (NYT).
4. State opens commercial fishing on the Kuskokwim River to one person.
5. Prenda and the evolution of home schooling.
6. What do the vexillologists have to say? (NYT) Most of all, about Utah.
7. Una galleta pequeña de Argentina (with subtitles).
8. More on India and female labor force participation (WSJ).
The importance of cognitive endurance
Schooling may build human capital not only by teaching academic skills, but by expanding the capacity for cognition itself. We focus specifically on cognitive endurance: the ability to sustain effortful mental activity over a continuous stretch of time. As motivation, we document that globally and in the US, the poor exhibit cognitive fatigue more quickly than the rich across field settings; they also attend schools that offer fewer opportunities to practice thinking for continuous stretches. Using a field experiment with 1,600 Indian primary school students, we randomly increase the amount of time students spend in sustained cognitive activity during the school day—using either math problems (mimicking good schooling) or non-academic games (providing a pure test of our mechanism). Each approach markedly improves cognitive endurance: students show 22% less decline in performance over time when engaged in intellectual activities—listening comprehension, academic problems, or IQ tests. They also exhibit increased attentiveness in the classroom and score higher on psychological measures of sustained attention. Moreover, each treatment improves students’ school performance by 0.09 standard deviations. This indicates that the experience of effortful thinking itself—even when devoid of any subject content—increases the ability to accumulate traditional human capital. Finally, we complement these results with quasi-experimental variation indicating that an additional year of schooling improves cognitive endurance, but only in higher-quality schools. Our findings suggest that schooling disparities may further disadvantage poor children by hampering the development of a core mental capacity.
Here is the full paper by Christina Brown, Supreet Kaur, Geeta Kingdon, and Heather Schofield, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
I should note that I view this as one of the areas where I feel I have trained myself best. I recall last year having serious airport travel problems, and a trip that should have taken two hours ended up being almost twelve hours, with uncertainty along the way and two different last-minute improvised airport stops and no lounges. But I still was able to read, concentrate, and work for the entire period without feeling any major drain. As for this paper, it is yet another way that schooling teaches the median student something, even though he/she cannot regurgitate any particular lesson on demand.
How might AI impact developing economies?
Cheap, tailored expertise
Many of the poor have little access to experts, on topics ranging from physical and mental health, agriculture, and entrepreneurship. Hiring experts can be transformative: Bloom et al (2013) found that management consultants substantially improved production at textile factories in India. Many envisioned that the internet would level access to expertise, allowing entrepreneurs in Delhi and farmers in Western Kenya equal access to the world’s best knowledge. But, as anyone who owns a dusty textbook knows, raw information is not enough to lead to action. Most of the world’s knowledge is not written for the world’s poor. Much is written in English, some uses technical jargon, and has metaphors and references that make sense to people in Los Angeles but not in Lagos. AI can unlock the insight in this information for broader audiences. The newest generation of AI chatbots can not only translate between languages, but also change reading levels, remove jargon, and rewrite knowledge to use local customs and metaphors. These chatbots also allow you to have a conversation about the topic, allowing you to ask for clarification for specific parts, or specify that your needs differ from what the system had assumed. While these systems sometimes make mistakes, their quality, and ability to translate is improving quickly. And they allow almost zero cost access to the tailored expertise that would otherwise require hiring experts that would be prohibitively costly for the poor. This tailored expertise might improve business processes across developing economies for motivated people. Some startups are already developing targeted advisors for specific tasks, like choosing between schools (ConsiliumBots). Similar advisors could also help deliver medical advice to rural populations.
Here is more from Daniel Bjorkegren, an economist at Brown University. Here is his paper on nostalgic demand.
Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital
A favorite topic of mine:
Schooling may build human capital not only by teaching academic skills, but by expanding the capacity for cognition itself. We focus specifically on cognitive endurance: the ability to sustain effortful mental activity over a continuous stretch of time. As motivation, we document that globally and in the US, the poor exhibit cognitive fatigue more quickly than the rich across field settings; they also attend schools that offer fewer opportunities to practice thinking for continuous stretches. Using a field experiment with 1,600 Indian primary school students, we randomly increase the amount of time students spend in sustained cognitive activity during the school day—using either math problems (mimicking good schooling) or non-academic games (providing a pure test of our mechanism). Each approach markedly improves cognitive endurance: students show 22% less decline in performance over time when engaged in intellectual activities—listening comprehension, academic problems, or IQ tests. They also exhibit increased attentiveness in the classroom and score higher on psychological measures of sustained attention. Moreover, each treatment improves students’ school performance by 0.09 standard deviations. This indicates that the experience of effortful thinking itself—even when devoid of any subject content—increases the ability to accumulate traditional human capital. Finally, we complement these results with quasi-experimental variation indicating that an additional year of schooling improves cognitive endurance, but only in higher-quality schools. Our findings suggest that schooling disparities may further disadvantage poor children by hampering the development of a core mental capacity.
Here is the full paper by Christina L. Brown, Supreet Kaur, Geeta Kingdon & Heather Schofield. What are you doing to improve your cognitive durability?
And don’t forget that the Candidates’ Match starts today!
David Theroux, RIP
I was saddened to hear of the sudden passing of David Theroux, the President of the Independent Institute. I was a professor of economics at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana when David approached me to be the research director (later Vice-President) of II. I had great colleagues at Ball State but was never happy about living in Muncie. Nevertheless, leaving academia was a big leap. My career at the time, however, was in the doldrums and when things aren’t happening it’s good to throw some variance into the mix…so I leapt. David and his wife Mary made my wife and I feel very welcome in Oakland. I remember fondly my young children playing in their garden in their beautiful house in the Oakland hills.
David was a great intellectual entrepreneur. He was the founding Vice President for the Cato Institute and the founding President of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. He started the Independent Institute on a shoestring budget in 1986, building it into a major institute that produced many important books and research articles.
Among the highlights of Independent’s extraordinary publications are Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government by Robert Higgs (1986, with a 25th anniversary edition in 2012); Antitrust and Monopoly, by Dominick Armentano (1990); Beyond Politics: The Roots of Government Failure, by Randy Simmons (updated edition 2011); Out of Work, by Lowell E. Gallaway and Richard Vedder (1997); Entrepreneurial Economics, by Alexander Tabarrok (2002); The Empire Has No Clothes, by Ivan Eland (2004); Making Poor Nations Rich, edited by Benjamin Powell (2007); The Enterprise of Law, by Bruce Benson (2011); Living Economics, by Peter J. Boettke (2012); Liberty in Peril, by Randall Holcombe (2019); and many more.
All told, Independent Institute books produced under David’s direction received more than 50 prestigious book awards, including three Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prizes, the Templeton Freedom Award, two Mencken Awards for Best Book, eight Sir Antony Fisher International Memorial Awards for Best Book, three Benjamin Franklin Awards, ten Independent Publisher Book Awards, the Peter Shaw Memorial Award, and three Choice Magazine Awards for Outstanding Book.
David spotted talent in other people, encouraged them, and made things happen. He was a prime mover in launching Bruce Benson’s important work on the law merchant and a big supporter of the great Robert Higgs (who started The Independent Review).
I learned a lot from David, especially about militarism and libertarian foreign policy, the marketing of ideas, and also about what it means to be an entrepreneur. I recall two instances in particular. The first was during the Microsoft trial when we had published the excellent book Winners, Losers & Microsoft: Competition and Antitrust in High Technology by Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis. II opposed the antitrust case against Microsoft, seeing it as waste of resources in a rivalrous industry (in retrospect, yup we got that one right). Larry Ellison at Oracle (a Microsoft competitor) didn’t like our work and hired detectives to buy the Independent Institute’s garbage and sift through it (yes, really!) to try to discredit us. The story become a page one headline in the New York Times (Independent Institute not really Independent!). I was worried about the impact on the Institute but David always saw the positive even in “bad news.” At the time I found this frustrating as this seemed to me like a failure to see reality but David had the entrepreneur’s faith that vision, a positive attitude, and hard work can make reality. He kept calm and steered us through the difficulties to further strengths. I was wrong. David was right. He made it happen. The second time was when II was launching its scholarships for low-income children to attend private schools in Oakland. I sketched out a careful, well-thought out plan to get us ready to go in a year. David said no, “I want it ready in six weeks!”. I thought this was insane. But we did it! No surprise that David was an entrepreneur and I was an academic. Ultimately, of course, I returned to academia by moving to GMU but not before learning many valuable lessons from David and my years at the Independent Institute.
He will be missed.
Friday assorted links
1. Krugman on inflation (NYT).
2. Adam Gopnik on Get Back (New Yorker).
3. Where Chile stands (FT).
4. “…the median age of Canada’s fifteen largest public companies is 122 years.”
5. Why is cryonics not more popular?
6. “We theorize that East Asians (e.g., ethnic Chinese)—but not South Asians (e.g., ethnic Indians)—are less likely than other ethnicities to emerge as leaders in multiethnic environments partly because East Asians socialize more with ethnic ingroup members (other East Asians). Analyzing a survey of 54,620 Juris Doctor (JD) students from 124 U.S. law schools, Study 1 revealed that East Asians had the highest ethnic homophily of all ethnicities.” Link here.
Why the New Pollution Literature is Credible
My recent post, Air Pollution Reduces Health and Wealth drew some pushback in the comments, some justified, some not, on whether the results of these studies are not subject to p-hacking, forking gardens and the replication crisis. Sure, of course, some of them are. Andrew Gelman, for example, has some justified doubt about the air filters and classroom study. Nevertheless, I don’t think that skepticism about the general thrust of the results is justified. Why not?
First, go back to my post Why Most Published Research Findings are False and note the list of credibility checks. For example, my rule is trust literatures not papers and the new pollution literature is showing consistent and significant negative effects of pollution on health and wealth. Some might respond that the entire literature is biased for reasons of political correctness or some such and sure, maybe. But then what evidence would be convincing? Is skepticism then justified or merely mood affiliation? And when it comes to action should we regard someone’s prior convictions (how were those formed?) as more accurate then a large, well-published scientific literature?
It’s not just that the literature is large, however, it’s that the literature is consistent in a way that many studies in say social psychology were not. In social psychology, for example, there were many tests of entirely different hypotheses–power posing, priming, stereotype threat–and most of these failed to replicate. But in the pollution literature we have many tests of the same hypotheses. We have, for example, studies showing that pollution reduces the quality of chess moves in high-stakes matches, that it reduces worker productivity in Chinese call-centers, and that it reduces test scores in American and in British schools. Note that these studies are from different researchers studying different times and places using different methods but they are all testing the same hypothesis, namely that pollution reduces cognitive ability. Thus, each of these studies is a kind of replication–like showing price controls led to shortages in many different times and places.
Another feature in favor of the air pollution literature is that the hypothesis that pollution can have negative effects on health and cognition wasn’t invented yesterday along with the test (we came up with a new theory and tested it and guess what, it works!). The Romans, for example, noted the negative effect of air pollution on health. There’s a reason why people with lung disease move to the countryside and always have.
I also noted in Why Most Published Research Findings are False that multiple sources and types of evidence are desirable. The pollution literature satisfies this desideratum. Aside from multiple empirical studies, the pollution hypothesis is also consistent with plausible mechanisms and it is consistent with the empirical and experimental literature on pollution and plants and pollution and animals. See also OpenPhilanthropy’s careful summary.
Moreover, there is a clear dose-response effect–so much so that when it comes to “extreme” pollution few people doubt the hypothesis. Does anyone doubt, for example, that an infant born in Delhi, India–one of the most polluted cities in the world–is more likely to die young than if the same infant grew up (all else equal) in Wellington, New Zealand–one of the least polluted cities in the world? People accept that “extreme” pollution creates debilitating effects but they take extreme to mean ‘more than what I am used to’. That’s not scientific. In the future, people will think that the levels of pollution we experience today are extreme, just as we wonder how people could put up with London Fog.
What is new about the new pollution literature is more credible methods and bigger data and what the literature shows is that the effects of pollution are larger than we thought at lower levels than we thought. But we should expect to find smaller effects with better methods and bigger data. (Note that this isn’t guaranteed, there could be positive effects of pollution at lower levels, but it isn’t surprising that what we are seeing so far is negative effects at levels previously considered acceptable.)
Thus, while I have no doubt that some of the papers in the new pollution literature are in error, I also think that the large number of high quality papers from different times and places which are broadly consistent with one another and also consistent with what we know about human physiology and particulate matter and also consistent with the literature on the effects of pollution on animals and plants and also consistent with a dose-response relationship suggest that we take this literature and its conclusion that air pollution has significant negative effects on health and wealth very seriously.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Mike Makowsky good career advice for those economists (and others?) coming out of non-elite schools.
2. Bryan Caplan on his home schooling experience.
3. BBC covers EV India winner and his fight against air pollution.
4. Why young Koreans are doing so well in classical music.
5. Art Blakey and Lee Morgan in concert.
6. Guardian Fall books preview. And Vulture Fall books preview.
Sunday assorted links
Jiaolong, China’s Private City
Shruti Rajagopalan and I wrote about India’s private cities, Guragaon and Jamshedpur in Lessons from Gurgaon, India’s Private City. One thing we discovered was that transaction costs prevented private developers from coordinating on infrastructure such as sewage and electricity even though that was clearly the efficient solution and there was plenty of time to bargain. We suggested larger purchases–such as at Disneyland–were necessary to internalize the externalities.
In The Contractual Nature of the City, Qian Lu looks at Jiaolong, an unusual private city in China. Jiaolong is small, about 4.3 square km and a population of 100,000 but all the infrastructure including electricity, sewage, roads, apartments, shopping malls, aquarium, office buildings, and hotels have been built privately. The firm in charge, Jiaolong Co., has planning rights and crucially it collects 25% of all property tax which means it internalizes part of the increase in value generated by its investments.
Jiaolong is a city built and operated by a business corporation. This is rare in China because in most cases the local city government is in charge of urbanization. In almost all cities, government makes land and city planning, takes farmers’ land, builds city infrastructure, sells land to housing developers and manufacturers, operates police stations, hospitals, schools and universities. By holding the monopoly power of coercion, the government is able to pool together resources by fiat and hold transaction costs low.
… The urbanization of Jiaolong is not based on coercive power, but by a series of contracts with Shuangliu government, firms, farmers, residents and other relevant parties. As the central contractor, Jiaolong Co. is able to simplify the contractual web and reduce coordination cost. The essential contracts are the investment contract with the county government to transfer planning rights, and a series of contracts with the government and firms to share tax. Tax sharing contracts define the income rights for Jiaolong so that Jiaolong could share the surplus of urban development and infrastructure construction. Sharing contracts also motivate Shuangliu government to provide public services including protection of property rights. A series of contracts transfer planning rights, land use rights, and income rights to Jiaolong Co., and thereby endogenize the externality of infrastructure building and urban development. From the perspective of institutional change, Jiaolong offers a case of contract-based rather than coercion-based urbanization, the latter being the typical approach in China.