Evidence on Charter Schools: 'Getting Beneath the Veil of Effective Schools: Evidence from New York City' by Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer

A good paper to read about charter schools is “Getting Beneath the Veil of Effective Schools: Evidence from New York City” by Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer (shown above). They use this key fact: “New York law dictates that over-subscribed charter schools allocate enrollment offers via a random lottery.”

Here is Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer’s summary of some of the previous evidence about charter schools:

The results reported in this paper contribute to a growing body of evidence using admissions lottery records to document the effectiveness of certain charter schools. Students attending an over- subscribed Boston-area charter school score approximately 0.4σ higher per year in math and 0.2σ higher per year in reading (Abdulkadiroglu et al. 2011), with similar gains reported for students attending the Promise Academy charter school in the Harlem Children’s Zone (Dobbie and Fryer 2011), the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) schools (Angrist et al. 2010, Tuttle et al. 2010), and the SEED urban boarding school in Washington D.C. (Curto and Fryer forthcoming). Dobbie and Fryer (2012) find that students attending the Promise Academy charter school also do better on a variety of medium-term outcomes such as college enrollment and risky behaviors.

They focus on which among the charter schools are most effective. Their list of factors that seem to add to effectiveness is:

  • frequent teacher feedback

  • data driven instruction

  • tutoring (a lot of it)

  • a longer school day and longer school year

  • a relentless focus on academic achievement

(In “Magic Ingredient 1: More K-12 School” I focused especially on the benefits of a longer school day and a longer school year.)

Here is Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer’s description of these factors and how they matter:

… an index of five policies suggested by forty years of qualitative case-studies – frequent teacher feedback, data driven instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and a relentless focus on academic achievement – explains roughly half of the variation in school effectiveness. Using observational estimates of school effectiveness, we find that a one standard deviation (σ) increase in the index is associated with a 0.053σ (0.010) increase in annual math gains and a 0.039σ (0.008) increase in annual ELA gains. Moreover, four out of the five school policies in our index make a statistically significant contribution controlling for an index of the other four, suggesting that each policy conveys some relevant information. Controlling for the other four inputs, schools that give formal or informal feedback ten or more times per semester have annual math gains that are 0.048σ (0.023) higher and annual ELA gains that are 0.044σ (0.014) higher than other schools. Schools that tutor students at least four days a week in groups of six or less have annual ELA gains that are 0.040σ (0.020) higher. Schools that add 25 percent or more instructional time have annual gains that are 0.050σ (0.013) higher in math. Schools that have high academic and behavioral expectations have annual math gains that are 0.044σ (0.023) higher and ELA gains that are 0.030σ (0.015) higher.

They caution that there may be some factors all or almost all of the charter schools in their sample share that contribute to their effectiveness. This list of factors is about differences between charter schools.

In “Injecting Charter School Best Practices into Traditional Public Schools: Evidence from Field Experiments” (shown below) Roland Fryer argues that these practices also help non-charter schools do better. Notice how helpful charter schools have been in providing evidence about what works. And charter schools have shown a lot of success in implementing good practices.


The Supposed Health Benefits of Moderate Drinking are a Crock

It is clear from the analysis I discuss in “Data on Asian Genes that Discourage Alcohol Consumption Explode the Myth that a Little Alcohol is Good for your Health” that even moderate drinking is bad for heart health. Researchers always suspected that other lifestyle factors created the false correlational illusion that moderate drinking is good for your health. The study described at the link above nails that story as an actuality a little better.

For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see “Miles Kimball on Diet and Health: A Reader's Guide.”

Although the United States is Not Woke Enough, Its Universities are Now Too Woke

In “The Right Amount of Wokeness,” I write:

Anyone who has been paying attention lately and tried to get a historical perspective should realize that the horrors from too little wokeness are still truly awful. The horrors from too much wokeness are still not at the same level. So from where we are now, increasing the average level of wokeness (while retaining the same standard deviation of the normal distribution) would be a good thing. It will cause some horrible things to happen from the highest extremes of wokeness, but it will prevent many other horrible things from happening from the lowest extremes of wokeness.

I stand by that assessment. Of course, we should do more than just steer the mean of wokeness to its optimum. We should also try to reduce the variance of wokeness to avoid the horrors from both extremes, as I discuss in “Getting the Best from Wokeness by Having the Right Mean, Reducing the Variance and Mitigating the Losses from Extreme Values.”

One part of reducing the variance of wokeness is to restrain the excesses of wokeness that I now see happening on university campuses. Fortunately, the University of Colorado Boulder where I now am is quite far from being the worst offender, and I am proud that at the Univeristy of Colorado Boulder, political views define protected classes along with race, gender, disability, religion etc. At the University of Colorado Boulder I do worry about the enforced ideological orthodoxy danger from asking for statements from potential hires and in annual reporting from current professors about how they contribute to diversity, equity and inclusion. There are certainly some definitions of “diversity, equity and inclusion” for which this would be innocent; but “diversity, equity and inclusion” is often being interpreted from a particular ideological perspective. What would it look like to interpret it from a non-ideological perspective? At a minimum, it would require respect (along with respect for other views) for the view that the best way to advance racial harmony is by trying to act as race-blind as possible—and respect for the idea that the idea that the main fight against structural racism is in institutions that are part of people’s life course before they get to college and that remedies should be sought there, with universities contributing to figuring that out.

As an emeritus University of Michigan professor, I still get many emails about what is going on there, and have many friends there. It seems to me that the University of Michigan is beginning to go mad-woke. For example, I consider trying to reduce the use of standardized tests not only for undergraduate admission but even for admission to graduate programs to be a big mistake. I also have a strong sense that everyone is supposed to be talking in a particular way about certain issues.

Members of the College of Science and Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Boston have nicely articulated some of the issues with wokeness in universities in an open letter directed to their administration and a key committee. My favorite paragraph from this open letters is this:

Under no circumstances can political or ideological activism be the primary purpose of a public university. This is not to say students, faculty, and staff cannot be activists. Quite the contrary: individual people are the agents of social change, and as such they should be encouraged to organize and fight for a better society. Moreover, the public university can play an active role in educating students on pressing issues of social injustice as well as effective methods of activism. However, in this regard the role of the university is to empower people to take action themselves - not to coerce students, faculty, or institutional units to do so.

If you look at the proposed mission statements and vision statements themselves, these would be fine under some possible interpretations of the words on the page. The problem is that many of these words and phrases have gained technical meanings in woke discourse, and it is very often these technical meanings that are operative for university policy. So the details matter. But even my limited understanding of the technical meanings of these words suggests trouble, not just for UMass Boston but for many other universities with similar statements in their bylaws. As just one example, I have very gradually come to the realization that “equity,” which has many lovely meanings in its dictionary definition is often these days being used as a technical term for “equality of outcome.” One of the most basic measures to try to restrain excesses of wokeness is to try to clarify for each other and for the general public the technical meanings of terms used in woke discourse, so we can see clearly if we agree or disagree with what is being said or proposed.

More Evidence for the Use It or Lose It Hypothesis for Dementia Prevention: Better Vision Seems to Help Ward Off Dementia

The Federalist Papers #51 A: Checks and Balance, or ‘Who Guards the Guardians?'

Juvenal’s question of “Who guards the guardians” is a very difficult design question that appears in many social domains and at many levels.

In the economic realm, supervisors and bosses and CEOs are guardians an important piece of the social structure. The free market only works well at all because of a set of rules that block the most obvious ways to get rich: stealing, lying, and extortion by threats of violence. And the free market in the 21st century will only work really well if we go through the design process of figuring out all the other ways that people—especially those with a great deal of economic reach—can only get rich by doing something commensurately valuable for other people, after netting out any harm done. (An adequate design process would probably come to a different set of rules for different sectors of the economy; possible ways to get rich without doing something commensurately valuable for other people differ by sector.)

In the political economy realm, the difficult design problem, essential for economic growth, is to create a government that can and will stop people from stealing, lying, extorting by threats of violence—or getting rich by some other means that does not serve other people—without that government itself being so strong and wanton that it steals, lies, intimidates and actively perpetrates injustice itself.

Democracy with reasonably free and fair elections (and reasonably peaceful transfers of power) cuts off the worst bad governments in the tail. But even genuine democracy is not enough to prevent moderately serious governmental malfeasance. The framers of the US Constitution had these problems in mind.

The checks and balances between different components of government was the best solution they could come up with. The first half of the Federalist Papers #51, written by either Alexander Hamilton or James Madison, details some of the checks and balances they hoped would help ward off bad outcomes. That the author of the Federalist Papers #51 had the difficulty of the design problem in view is clear from these passage:

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

Here are some of the key ideas in the first half of the Federalist Papers #51 (bullets added to separate passages):

  • … each department should have a will of its own; and consequently should be so constituted that the members of each should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the others. Were this principle rigorously adhered to, it would require that all the appointments for the supreme executive, legislative, and judiciary magistracies should be drawn from the same fountain of authority, the people, through channels having no communication whatever with one another.

  • Some deviations, therefore, from the principle must be admitted. In the constitution of the judiciary department in particular, it might be inexpedient to insist rigorously on the principle: first, because peculiar qualifications being essential in the members, the primary consideration ought to be to select that mode of choice which best secures these qualifications; secondly, because the permanent tenure by which the appointments are held in that department, must soon destroy all sense of dependence on the authority conferring them.

  • … the members of each department should be as little dependent as possible on those of the others, for the emoluments annexed to their offices.

  • Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.

  • It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

  • This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public.

  • … the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State.

  • In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit.

  • … the weakness of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be fortified. An absolute negative on the legislature appears, at first view, to be the natural defense with which the executive magistrate should be armed. But perhaps it would be neither altogether safe nor alone sufficient. On ordinary occasions it might not be exerted with the requisite firmness, and on extraordinary occasions it might be perfidiously abused. May not this defect of an absolute negative be supplied by some qualified connection between this weaker department and the weaker branch of the stronger department, by which the latter may be led to support the constitutional rights of the former, without being too much detached from the rights of its own department?

  • In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.

There is genius in the design the US Constitution. And the problem of “Who guards the guardians?” still causes trouble. As always, things are bad, but they could be much, much worse. That they are not worse owes partly to the structure of the US Constitution, but even more importantly to the virtue of many in a wide variety of positions who uphold it.

Below is the full text of the first half of the Federalist Papers #51.

FEDERALIST NO. 51

The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments

From the New York Packet
Friday, February 8, 1788.

Author: Alexander Hamilton or James Madison

To the People of the State of New York:

TO WHAT expedient, then, shall we finally resort, for maintaining in practice the necessary partition of power among the several departments, as laid down in the Constitution? The only answer that can be given is, that as all these exterior provisions are found to be inadequate, the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places. Without presuming to undertake a full development of this important idea, I will hazard a few general observations, which may perhaps place it in a clearer light, and enable us to form a more correct judgment of the principles and structure of the government planned by the convention. In order to lay a due foundation for that separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government, which to a certain extent is admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty, it is evident that each department should have a will of its own; and consequently should be so constituted that the members of each should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the others. Were this principle rigorously adhered to, it would require that all the appointments for the supreme executive, legislative, and judiciary magistracies should be drawn from the same fountain of authority, the people, through channels having no communication whatever with one another. Perhaps such a plan of constructing the several departments would be less difficult in practice than it may in contemplation appear. Some difficulties, however, and some additional expense would attend the execution of it. Some deviations, therefore, from the principle must be admitted. In the constitution of the judiciary department in particular, it might be inexpedient to insist rigorously on the principle: first, because peculiar qualifications being essential in the members, the primary consideration ought to be to select that mode of choice which best secures these qualifications; secondly, because the permanent tenure by which the appointments are held in that department, must soon destroy all sense of dependence on the authority conferring them. It is equally evident, that the members of each department should be as little dependent as possible on those of the others, for the emoluments annexed to their offices. Were the executive magistrate, or the judges, not independent of the legislature in this particular, their independence in every other would be merely nominal. But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State. But it is not possible to give to each department an equal power of self-defense. In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit. It may even be necessary to guard against dangerous encroachments by still further precautions. As the weight of the legislative authority requires that it should be thus divided, the weakness of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be fortified. An absolute negative on the legislature appears, at first view, to be the natural defense with which the executive magistrate should be armed. But perhaps it would be neither altogether safe nor alone sufficient. On ordinary occasions it might not be exerted with the requisite firmness, and on extraordinary occasions it might be perfidiously abused. May not this defect of an absolute negative be supplied by some qualified connection between this weaker department and the weaker branch of the stronger department, by which the latter may be led to support the constitutional rights of the former, without being too much detached from the rights of its own department? If the principles on which these observations are founded be just, as I persuade myself they are, and they be applied as a criterion to the several State constitutions, and to the federal Constitution it will be found that if the latter does not perfectly correspond with them, the former are infinitely less able to bear such a test. There are, moreover, two considerations particularly applicable to the federal system of America, which place that system in a very interesting point of view. First. In a single republic, all the power surrendered by the people is submitted to the administration of a single government; and the usurpations are guarded against by a division of the government into distinct and separate departments. In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.

Links to my other posts on The Federalist Papers so far:

Jordan Peterson on the Downside and Upside of the Patriarchy

Seeing all sides of things is a key part of wisdom. Nowadays, the notion of a “patriarchy” focuses attention on the downsides of our culture. But there are good things about our culture as well. As a culture, we should definitely treat women better. And we can do that without tearing our culture down and starting over.

The same can be said about other groups. In general, we should look down on other people less than we do. And we can treat everyone with a more dignity without declaring the whole system to be rotten. Things are bad now, but they used to be even worse. There is hope even within the basic framework of our society handed down from our ancestors, who tried to make the world a better place for us.

Bad things happen when members of any group treat any other group badly, even in small ways, if that mistreatment happens millions of times. The motivation for ethnic strife, and even war, is often built on millions, if not billions, of small slights.

Nowadays, in the US, we are fueling strife between Democrats and Republicans, with a lot of deep disrespect on both sides. This is not good for our republic. Healing requires some effort to understand the other side’s point well enough to realize that a good person could believe that. Nowadays, that is heresy to one’s own side. But we need that kind of heresy.

There is a gigantic difference between someone being wrong, wrong, wrong about something and their being a bad person. If we don’t make that distinction, we’ll tear our society apart. You might be able to convince me that politicians are on average bad people, but I am not willing to believe, as many seem to these days, that half of the American people (those who voted for the other guy) are bad!

Don't Let Planning Take Over Your Life Experience

Jesus said,

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (Matthew 6:34, NIV)

Interpreted naively, this is a bad idea. Thinking ahead can help us avoid bad outcomes. So what did Jesus mean? In context, one of the things Jesus meant is that you should have a higher goal than the type of goals many everyday worries are about:

Ye cannot serve God and mammon. (Matthew 6:24, KJV)

“Mammon” literally means “riches,” but let me extend the meaning to include social rank, so that anything we do primarily to advance our social rank (including our professional standing), counts as “serving mammon.” In the context of academia, the choice between “God” and “mammon” can be reinterpreted for nonsupernaturalists as something like what I wrote of in “Breaking the Chains”:

For most who go into academia, the salary they will get in academia is lower than they could get outside. So most who go into academia make that choice in part out of the joy of ideas, a burning desire for self-expression, a genuine fascination with learning how the world works, or out of idealism—the hope of making the world a better place through their efforts. But by the time those who are successful make it through the long grind of graduate school, getting a job and getting tenure, many have had that joy of ideas, desire for self-expression, thirst for understanding and idealism snuffed out. For many their work life has become a checklist of duties plus the narrow quest for publications in top journals. This fading away of higher, brighter goals betrays the reasons they chose academia in the first place.  

I see one other meaning in:

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

It really is possible to run or greatly worsen our inner experience by constantly thinking about what we need to do in the future. In my own life, I think of this as a “hypertrophy of the planning function.” My goal is to activate my internal Planner enough to genuinely optimize what to do next, as best I am able, and to determine how long to spend on that before I need to do the thing after that, but then to forget about what I am going to do in the future while I do the thing that appropriately comes next. When I can manage this, my experience is much better! And now at 61 years old, it is pretty optimistic to think I have even 39 years of flesh-and-blood life left, so I want to make every moment as good an experience as possible given my other goals. And other goals only have to come into optimizing what to do next and how long to do it for. Any other intrusion of the Planner into the scarce space I have for consciousness at any moment just makes my life worse.

Posts on Positive Mental Health and Maintaining One’s Moral Compass: