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rePost: Top Teachers Ineffective

This hit home because my sister was telling me of the recent moves to abolish the BS Education as a recognized course in the Philippines, meaning that people who want to become teachers of Preschool/Elementary/Highschool must have an Education degree and pass a National Certification Exam known as (LET – Licensure Exam for Teachers).

It seems that recent research has shown that people with degrees in the subjects they will teach are more effective teachers than Education Majors studying those subjects as minor subject in college.

In the Philippines , almost all colleges/universities (Excepting UP) have different classes for Education (insert subject here ) majors and (Subject majors). I was told that Classes for Education Math Majors were for easier than Math majors (except in UP where people take the same classes ).

Getting back to the excerpted blog post below, Are the researches cited by those wanting to abolish the Education degree in the Philippines even valid?? If Top Teachers are ineffective are teachers even effective??

I think the post was a little misleading because :

  • What if the reason some teachers do not get a license is not that they are not good, rather they perform well enough to not need a license to signify capability?
  • What if the lack of a license acts as a motivator or a threat against employment status that people work or try to educate students as well if not better than licensed colleagues.

I don’t know haven’t made up my mind yet.!

from the Overcoming Bias blog here , a personal must read blog for me.

Top Teachers Ineffective

from Overcoming Bias by Robin Hanson
Yesterday I reported that top med school docs are no healthier for patients.  Today I report that even at private schools, teachers who are fully certified do not help students perform any better on math and science tests:

Data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988 (NELS:88) were used to investigate the effect of teacher licensure status on private school students’ 12th grade math and science test scores. This data includes schooling and family background information on students that can be linked to employment information on teachers. We find that, contrary to conventional wisdom, private school students of fully certified 12th grade math and science teachers do not appear to outperform students of private school teachers who are not fully certified.

My urban econ text says:

Studies have consistently shown that graduate coursework (e.g., a Master’s degree) does not affect teacher productivity.

I expect patients are willing to pay more for top med school docs, and parents are willing to pay more for educated and certified teachers.  And I expect that this would continue even if patients and parents knew the above results.  I suspect most of the demand for teachers, doctors, and many other professionals comes from folks wanting to affiliate with certified-as-impressive people.  And merely making patients healthier or making students perform better doesn’t count much toward impressiveness, relative to academia-certified impressiveness.
But folks don’t like to admit this directly; they’d rather pretend they care more than they do about other outputs.  Which is why folks don’t want to hear about the above results.  The media will oblige them, and so they will continue in their preferred delusions.  Bet on it.

Added: James Hubbard points us to a related critique of MBA training.

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Quote Of The Day

Reads like part two to yesterday’s quote of the day!
from TechCrunch  here :
MC: Ill tell you what I learned from Bobby Knight: everybody’s got the will to win but when it comes time to doing something, it’s always about someone else. Not many people have the will to prepare. You got to be willing to know your product and environment better than anybody. No matter what you do there is someone out there trying to kick your ass. You got to be the smartest guy in the room about your product. Then you need to have a revenue source. You need a company with a revenue to make money. Concept, competition, and where the money is — plus something you love doing. I’ve never had a day of work. When I die I want to come back as me.

from Jason Calcanis’ interview of Mark Cuban at TC50

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Quote Of The Day

You Create Your Own Stage, The Audience is Waiting!
+written on a fortune cookie found by Stephen Eley

I wish people take this to heart,
Start your Blog,
Start your Band,
Start your Novel,
Start you Startup,
Start just Start,
Your Audience is Waiting!

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PodCasts

Got the quote of th day from an escape pod pod cast. Since I walk to college and generally think while walking (truth be told I do a lot of my thinking during my walks to school) and since starting work, doing my thinking during my daily commute podcast was not really an option for me since if I had my headphones on and my normal absent mindedness while walking I was bound to die early.
I started getting addicted to podcast because of TED talks, and the various pod casts that the Bayesian Heresy blog links to. I must say that I find it hard concentrating on one task alone, I usually can concentrate when I am ignoring another task.
Enter podcast, since last week I’ve been working in a no internet access mac mini and doing lots of work, my only source of distraction is the podcast. The pod cast acts as the thing I am ignoring and its done wonders to my productivity. That said It’s not that I am not able to listen while working rather i seem to like thinking of two things at once, a light thinking task (listening to podcast) and a heavy thinking task (work/studying stuff). I suspect that this is the reason that I am not a good exam taker, except when they allow you to bring an mp3 player, or you can sing to yourself while taking the exam.
That said , specially for people who do not have full internet access at their terminals podcast may give you enough information to give you a sense of learning some things beyond what you are doing. Helps you develop orthogonal skills that may be useful in another future situation.
I’d even burn you a cd of some of the podcast in my machine if you ask me.

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LifeStyle Changes

NOTE: This was what I was thinking of writing before my previous post turned into another musings post.
Just got a raise, Its not big but in the high inflationary environment we are in coupled with the growing pains of adulthood I’ll take what I can.
I’ve been very vocal with my urging of friends to not change lifestyles after a pay raise and the like. I still remember last saturday when Rain and I somewhat ganged up on Jizelle for her “lifestyle changes”.
Well dishing out advice is one thing following it is totally different.
I got a pay raise and the first thing I did was splurge on food, 2 DVDs, a book , and a few trinkets. I think I have this feeling that I deserve to spend because I’ve felt I’ve deprived myself lately.
There is nothing wrong with this, almost everything in moderations is not wrong, somethings in excess is not wrong, it is the everything or somethings in excess all of the time that is the problem.
My way of handling this is incorporating things with my life in such a way as I barely think of these things.
Hmm another way of saying this is that we create rules of thumb and this helps us making quick decisions that are rational. The operative terms here are QUICK and RATIONAL.
Remember that most salesmen, people who want to take/borrow money from you, this ranges from events , experiences to things like cameras, computers, and others want to tap a less ratioanal more primal part of you. Just read the marketing guides of consumer goods companies and they essentially try to make you think that need and want are the same thing.  If we do not have good defenses against these things we end up getting suckered into trading our time for these things.
The thing is that we should always try to live by our own rules, not the expectations of society, not the lives other people want to live through us (I’m a little guilty of this counseling a friend to try for an Ivy League institution because this was a secret desire that may or may not come to fruition for me and at least ….. ). Our lifestyle must reflect this, this is why salary increases or decreases should not be the main determinant of our lifestyle. Personally I value simplicity and the life of the mind but that’s just my cup of coffee, If yours is the fast life of glitz and glamor then good for you.  Always try to simplify and integrate the life you want to live with the person you are. This reduces friction and increases happiness.
I still have a few thoughts on related subjects for another post:

  • Creating Rules Of Thumb
  • Basic Decision Making
  • Time For Money Trade
  • Dirty Secret of Working People
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Learned Today 2008 09 08

sad to say this is quite revealing, (of how little I know)
from mark thoma here:

September 07, 2008

On Dividend Taxes…

Greg Mankiw says that if your goal is to keep dividend taxes low, you should vote for Obama:

On Dividend Taxes, It’s a Post-Partisan Race, by N, Gregory Mankiw, Economic View, NY Times: …Before 2003, when a person received dividends from his stock holdings, this income was taxed at ordinary income tax rates. That is, a dollar of dividends generated the same individual income tax liability as did a dollar of wages.
But many economists have long argued against taxing dividends this way. Dividends are a stockholder’s payment from corporate profits, and these profits have already been subject to the corporate income tax. Any tax on dividends represents a second tax on essentially the same income.
One can question whether this double taxation of income from corporate capital is fair. But fairness aside, there is also the problem of incentives. Taxing dividends twice substantially raises the overall tax burden … and distorts various decisions. Whenever taxes, rather than true costs and benefits, drive the allocation of resources, the economy shrinks below its potential. …
Policy wonks like me have long hoped for changes in the tax code that would eliminate, or at least mitigate, these problems. In 2003, President Bush proposed that all dividends paid out of income that had already been taxed at the corporate level should be exempt from tax at the personal level. …
Although Congress did not give the president exactly what he sought, it gave him a large chunk of it. The top tax rate for dividends was cut to 15 percent, less than half the top rate for ordinary income. The adverse incentives of the tax … became much smaller. …
Senator Obama … has not been coy about wanting to use the tax code to redistribute income… But for dividend income, Senator Obama has proposed only a modest increase in the top tax rate, to 20 percent from 15 percent. …
In light of Senator Obama’s stand, the politics of dividend taxation may take some surprising twists. Senator John McCain wants to maintain the current tax rate of 15 percent on dividends…, but it is a good bet that if Senator McCain is elected president, while Congress remains Democratic, Congress won’t give the Republican president what he wants. They would instead let the Bush tax cuts expire, returning the dividend tax for high-income taxpayers to about 40 percent.
By contrast, if Mr. Obama is elected, Congressional Democrats will be less likely to balk at his proposed 20 percent dividend tax rate… On the issue of dividend taxation, Barack Obama may be the candidate with the best chance of preserving George Bush’s legacy.

Update from Dean Baker:

Greg Mankiw Promotes the Myth of Double Taxation, Dean Baker: There is an old myth developed by rich people at some point in the distant past that paying taxes on dividends amounts to “double-taxation.” The argument is that profits are already taxed at the corporate level, so taxing money when it is paid out as dividends to shareholders is taxing the same profit a second time. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard University professor and former top economist in the Bush administration, pushes this line in a column in the NYT.

The trick in this argument is that it ignores the enormous benefits that the government is granting by allowing a corporation to exist as a free standing legal entity. The most important of these advantages is limited liability. If a corporation produces dangerous products or emits dangerous substances that result in thousands of deaths, shareholders in the corporation cannot be held personally responsible for the damage. The corporation can go bankrupt, but beyond that point, all the shareholders are off the hook, the victims of the damage are just out of luck.
By granting corporate status, the government has allowed investors to shift risk to society as a whole. In exchange for this and other privileges of corporate status, the corporation must pay income tax on its earnings. We know that investors consider the benefits of corporate status to be worth the price in the form of the corporate income tax, because they voluntarily choose to form corporations. If investors did not consider the benefits of corporate status to outweigh the cost of the income tax, then they are free to form partnerships which are not subject to corporate income tax. In this way, the corporate income tax is a completely voluntary tax. Anyone can avoid the tax by investing in a partnership, or alternatively, any corporation can be restructured as a partnership.
The complaint about double taxation is an effort to get the benefits of corporate status for free. It is understandable that rich people would want to get benefits from the government at no cost, just like most of us would prefer not to pay our mortgage or electric bill. But, there is no reason for government to be handing out something of great value (corporate status) for free. If rich people don’t like the corporate income tax, they have a very simple way to avoid it — don’t invest in corporations. The problem is that the rich are just a bunch of whiners.

Posted by Mark Thoma on Sunday, September 7, 2008 at 12:24 AM in Economics, Politics, Taxes

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Catching Up With Life

Scarcity is rearing its ugly head once again. It seems that to the online and the physical lives or at least mine is not that integrated and it simply a case of not wanting to make a choice. Its oktoberfest friday, WordCamp Philippines Saturday Whole Day and Alumni HomeComing Saturday Evening. I’ve got around a thousand things to read in my feed reader and about 80 tabs of very long articles that I’ve decided I wanted to learn, a couple of books to read for fun, a couple of books to learn from for fun and a couple a whole lot of friends I’d like/love to hang out with. The thing is choices are choices and if choosing life means clicking mark all read or forgoing less important events , we have to choose.

We have set our lives in such a way as to maximize our choices creating the paradox that we actually create less choices for ourselves. I often hear people almost saying I’d like to do that, I’d like to try that. Too often that those words have turned into valueless words for me, they signify nothing, I don’t know at least I haven’t given up on people, When I hear those words I still try to help people if I can to help them towards something they want. I’ve just learned to keep my emotions in check because I used to get so frustrated by the lot of humanity who complains a lot but seems to never have enough to do anything about their predicament. Truth be told I was and still am part of that sorry lot, I constantly try to remove myself but it is something that is extremely hard to wrench out of your system.

I love the Choices taht I have, I owe them to God, My Parents and my Family, My Friends, My Teachers and the Lot of people who have done so much to open doors, to enrich me, to expand my horizons, to finetune my views and all in all make me a much better person.

CAST AWAY the shackles of choice and realize that choice is FREEDOM or ENSLAVEMENT, and its all up to us. And this is the RUB “YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE FREEDOM”

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Idea For The Day 2008 09 03

Hmm, I think that maybe we can do something like this, accumulate lots of data to help people minimize visits to the doctors and the lab test. Need to study this further.
Thanks To Brad Delong , from here:

Clinical and Actuarial Judgment

Cosma Shalizi on how we are not as smart as the simple linear models our computers can estimate:

Clinical and Actuarial Judgment Compared: For something like fifty years now, psychologists have been studying the question of “clinical versus actuarial judgment”…. Say you’re interested in diagnosing heart diseases from electrocardiograms. Normally we have clinicians, i.e., expert doctors, look at a chart…. Alternately, we could ask the experts what features they look at, when making their prognosis, and then fit a statistical model to that data, trying to predict the outcome or classification based on those features…. This is the actuarial approach, since it’s just based on averages — “of patients with features x, y and z, q percent have a serious heart condition”.
The rather surprising, and completely consistent, result of these studies is that there are no known cases where clinicians reliably out-perform actuarial methods, even when the statistical models are just linear classification rules…. In many areas, statistical classifiers significantly out-perform human experts. They even out-perform experts who have access to the statistical results, apparently because the experts place too much weight on their own judgment…. [H]uman experts are… no better than simple statistical models.
On the other hand, there is another body of experimental work, admittedly more recent, on “simple heuristics that make us smart”, which seems to show that people are often very good judges, under natural conditions. That is to say, we’re very good at solving the problems we tend to actually encounter, presented in the way we encounter them. The heuristics we use to solve those problems may not be generally applicable, but they are adapted to our environments, and, in those environments, are fast, simple and effective.
I have a bit of difficulty reconciling these two pictures in my mind. I can think of three resolutions.

  1. The “clinicial versus actuarial” results… do not reflect the “natural” conditions of clinical judgment…. What one really wants is a representative sample of actual cases, comparing the normal judgment of clinicians to that of the statistical models. This may have been done; I don’t know.
  2. The “fast and frugal heuristics” results are… irrelevant…. [A]daptive mechanisms [that] let us figure out good heuristics in everyday life don’t apply in the situations where we rely on clinical expertise…. [S]omething… about the conditions of clinicial judgment… render our normal cognitive mechanisms ineffective there.
  3. Clinicial judgment is a “fast and frugal heuristic”, with emphasis on the fast and frugal…. [C]linicians are… as accurate as one can get, using only a reasonable amount of information and a reasonable amount of time, while still using the human brain, which is not a computing platform well-suited to floating-point operations…

I am unable to judge between these.

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Learned Today 2008 09 02

Relics like lectures have to give way to the advances in cognitive sciences specifically, we must account for the fact that we know a whole lot more on how we learn (ok, not that much but enough). This means that we must have more interactive classes, more lab and less lectures. The sad thing is that I think that only a few people specially from my alma mater try to buck these relics of the past. I long for the day when instead of lectures we have coaches. If the academic programs can learn something from the sports programs its that coaches are also good teachers and its mainly due to how they teach.

from Brad Delong here, do read the whole thing:

Why Are We Here? (In a Big Lecture, That Is)

from Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal by Brad DeLong

Why do we still have big lecture courses in universities? It is somewhat of a mystery…
The Pre-Gutenberg University:

  • Universities have their origins in the medieval need of the powerful to train theologians (for the church) and to train judges (for the emperor and the kings of France, England, Castile, and other kingdoms.
  • A manuscript hand-copied book back in 1000 cost roughly the same share of average annual income as $50,000 is today.
  • Hence if you have a “normal” college–eight semesters, four courses a semester–and demand that people buy and read one book a course, you are talking the equivalent of $1.6M in book outlay. Can’t be done.
  • Hence you assemble the hundred or so people who want to read Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy in a room, and have the professor read to them–hence lecture, lecturer, from the Latin lector, reader–while they frantically take notes because they are likely to never see a copy of that book again once they are out in the world administering justice in Wuerzburg or wherever…
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    Choosing

    On a personal note since graduation I’ve noticed people getting gym memberships and the marked improvement in their self images. I feel that its the fact that when you really start to choose for yourself , choosing becomes easier and its self reinforcing.  I read somewhere that we have a limited amount of self control but as we practice more self control this limit expands. I feel that this is the same thing, after finally deciding to improve and bit by bit trying to improve we expand this self control.

    from Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen

    So if we could get people to exercise more, would they become more risk-loving, want less insurance, make more aggressive investments, and induce faster economic growth?  Would this be a good thing?

    That’s Robin Hanson, the basic empirical result is that physically weaker people are more risk-averse in a wide variety of settings.

    from Overcoming Bias blog here.