“What’s most exciting about the new standards is the ‘nationalness’ of this work—we are all in it together, talking the same language and working toward the same goal, …

That in response to the unveiling of new centrally planned math standards for our inmates K12 students.

Can you think of any other market where the buyers of a product are trying to tell the sellers how to efficiently produce it?

Great quote. I’d say that higher education gets close particularly if we take a generous view of what “buyer” means.

We can also cut across party and ideological lines by temporarily agreeing to disagree on what the proper scale (not scope) of government involvement in ensuring that these things are achieved for our children. Let’s agree that democratic political institutions are responsible to make sure our children achieve some agreed upon level of advancement in these areas. And let’s not debate what this level would be and what is appropriate. Shouldn’t we see a heck of a lot more experimentation and diversity in how we achieve these goals? Is it not utterly startling that virtually every one of the 311 million or so Americans has or will attend government run schools (and if not government run, heavily influenced by them and the graduate programs in education)? Perhaps more astonishing is that most kids go to school with kids the same age, take the same kind of math, reading, science, english, and so on at precisely the same times and in almost the same sequence and in the same settings, and using the same tools. Is it really reasonable to think that all kids learn best this way? Shouldn’t my daughter sometimes be learning with older kids? With younger kids? Does she need to wait until 7th grade to learn biology? Should she start art in Kindergarten? And so on.

The point being is that the way we structure elementary education today is the ultimate form of an input standard. An analogy would be appropriate. Suppose that we are worried that too much coal is being burned by residents of a city which results in unhealthy smog. The goal is to reduce the emissions of harmful particulates into the air. The most extreme version of an “input standard” – or a standard where the authorities decide exactly what is to be done to achieve the goal, would be to ban or mandate reductions in coal use. Why is this undesirable? Because it will possibly achieve the goal of fewer emissions, but it will come at a much higher economic cost than other ways of regulating and also because it drastically reduces the freedom of people to make their own choices – which ought to count for something. Instead of telling everyone to burn 50% less coal, for example, a better regulatory policy would be to set emissions standards for coal users, and penalize users for going beyond such standards. This would be an output standard. The regulators would have control over how much particulate matter is emitted, but it would allow the heterogeneous population to adjust to the standard in ways that are most beneficial to them. Some folks would indeed use less energy. Other folks would take measures to filter their emissions. Perhaps others would switch to other fuels. In any event, the goal would be achieved from the regulatory side, and the costs would be lower while preserving individual sovereignty.

Our current method of education is akin to an input standard. With the goal of having kids become “educated” we simply tell every single one of them how to be educated (and assume it works too). If you were seriously interested in improving the lives of our children and if you were truly serious about doing it cost effectively and respecting the diversity of human capabilities and interests, wouldn’t we see our government take a more “output standard” type of approach to education? Wouldn’t there be myriad ways of getting educational outcomes outside of funding and running government schools as we do? We could simply mandate each family have their children reach a particular standard. We could provide money to other institutions to use freely toward achieving their educational vision. I don’t want to go into particular reform ideas here, just to suggest that hundreds are out there. Any one of those would be preferable to the current situation because it allows for the current system to operate if it was indeed the most preferred – just as under a particulate output standard a choice for individuals would always be to use less coal, just as the input standard recommends.

I can imagine a major objection being that if the desired educational outcomes are not achieved (assuming they are agreed upon and measurable, which are big ifs, a point which I’ll raise in the future – I am not sure we even need to have an objective) then what recourse is there? Suppose a family was given $8,000 per year to ensure their kid met some standard, and when the kid turns 16 those standards are not met, do we want to put families in prison? Do we want to financially penalize them? Not only would the unintended consequences of those policies be awful, the administration of such programs would be prohibitively costly. This objection is hollow however. The current system, particularly for urban minorities, goes beyond failing – it is closer to a national tragedy, and a tragedy that is no closer to being dealt with today than when I was a kid 30 years ago. What are the consequences of failing today? The teachers unions are stronger. The school boards are stronger. The Ed Schools still maintain a tight grip on the accreditation process. The taxpayers don’t get a refund – indeed they end up spending more when poorly educated students end up in poor health, in poor economic circumstances or even in prison. Yikes.

If people really cared about “the children” wouldn’t we see a very aggressive popular movement toward educational experimentation? What is particularly annoying is that edutochracy preaches diversity, creativity, difference and respect for everything except the very product they are responsible for producing. Odd, isn’t it? Either it ain’t about the children, or the edutochracy is too dumb to experiment, or the edutochracy is a hotbed of experimentation and they have concluded that they have it right.

1. Government mergers of hospitals in England do not produce better outcomes. (Same is true for privates, we knew this and the government went ahead anyway).
2. High quality grammar school teachers have an impact that lasts a lifetime.  A huge study of over 2 million students with different quality grade 3 through 8 teachers finds that students assigned to better teachers are more likely to go to college (I don’t find this a benefit, but if it does correlate with other good things than great), more likely to go to better colleges, earn higher salaries, live in nicer neighborhoods, and save more for retirement. And confirming the work of Hanushek, they find that if you replace a terrible teacher (lowest 5% of teacher quality distribution per the way they measure it) with an average teacher increases lifetime income by $250,000 for an average classroom. My three points:
   1. These gains are enormous. These are per classroom for each year for having a better teacher. So if we have a classroom get better teachers from 3rd through 8th grade, we’re talking $1.5 million of benefits per cohort of 25 or so students. Multiply that by the number of classrooms with bad teachers and we may have a startlingly large number on our hands.
   2. We’re not talking about putting the greatest teachers in every classroom, just an average one. Considering that the state education and federal education departments are wholly owned subsidiaries of the teachers unions it is hard to imagine we’ll ever see reform this way, it should be extremely maddening that we are being told that “any good policy is on the table” yet these now increasingly important results continue to be fought. By the way, increasing teacher quality may simply be as easy as eliminating state teacher licensing requirements. Remember the average quality of students enrolling in ED schools is at the bottom of the academic quality distribution.
   3. Jonah Rockoff was a classmate of mine at Amherst (and a very good soccer player).
3. Increasing politicians’ salaries in Europe increases their willingness to run for reelection and does not stop shirking and lowers the quality of elected officials viz education levels. By the way, I am increasingly in favor of having a lottery to determine who our elected officials will be. I will post more on this shortly.
4. Shocking! Local governments use zoning to keep “undesirables” out of local public school districts.
5. Lower crop yields encourage people to move. This paper screams for a general equilibrium treatment. It also reminds us that should climate change produce bad outcomes, we don’t just sit there and take ‘em.

Are there lessons here? That’s certainly where the parallels end (I think).

At the same time as our university installed the Solar-Dok, it broke ground on a new student dormitory. This time the stakes are a little bit higher – the dorm is slated to cost $17 million. How is this relevant, don’t we need to build dorms to house students? Yes, but we’ve decided that this building would be built to LEED “Gold” standards – i.e. it’s going to be a “green” building. To make a building certifiably green requires two major expenses – planning and production. The planning costs include the increased costs to design, commission, documentation and energy modeling to meet LEED requirements. Estimates of these costs are evasive – this source indicates that they range from 1.5 percent to three percent of the costs of construction. For example, a Natural Capital center in Portland that is a third larger than our building is estimated to have cost $322,000 in planning alone (3.2 percent of its $10 million in construction costs). Building green also requires a change in the way buildings are constructed and a change in the materials used. The need to label a building green implies that building green is not cheap. The physical expenses include more work at the site itself to prepare it, different HVAC systems, different lighting systems, different roofing systems, different materials, and different places to secure materials from as compared to building conventionally. Estimates of added construction costs are in the three percent to eight percent range.  For example the construction of a Steelcase furniture manufacturing plant in Michigan to LEED Silver standards is estimated to have added three percent to its construction costs. More complex facilities build to higher standards would likely cost more.

Taking a moderate range from the two cost estimates (6 percent of total costs) then building our new dorm to LEED Gold standards is probably going to add about $1 million to the costs of the dorm. Let me ask some reasonable questions.

(1) Is spending an extra million dollars to construct the building going to deliver energy and water and maintenance savings? If so, how much?

(2) Is spending an extra million dollars to construct the building going to deliver the promised environmental benefits? At what cost?

How many of you think I would get clear answers to these questions if asked? How many of you think that someone actually did these calculations? I am sure someone did. Right? After all, we’re talking $1 million. We’re talking valuable resources, someone else’s resources. It’s all just harmless symbolism, right?

Is there any way to address these issues and still be invited to a New Year’s Eve party?