Economics competition for high school and middle school students in Italy

Yesterday,  Tito Boeri, David Card and I attended the  award ceremony of the EconoMia and EcoQuiz competitions for high school and middle school students in Italy.

 At the Intesa Sanpaolo skyscraper, the award ceremony of the EconoMia and EcoQuiz competitions, as part of the International Festival of Economics. 

Here we are with the high school students whose essays received awards. 

 

 

PS 205: A brief address to my elementary school alma mater, about science in grade school

 A few weeks ago I was surprised to receive this email from a teacher at the elementary school that I attended, PS 205, in the New York City borough of Queens:

"Dear Mr. Roth,

I am a teacher at The Alexander Graham Bell School, PS 205 in Bayside, NY.

This is my 29th year teaching at this school and it is still an amazing school where children acquire the skills to blossom as adults!

It is my understanding that you are a graduate of this school.

We are holding a Career Day on Friday, March 6, 2026.

It would be wonderful if you could participate in some way, whether in person, zoom pre-recorded video or by another method.

As a Nobel Prize winner, this would be very inspiring for our students.

Please let me know if you would like to be part of this awesome event."

 

After some further correspondence, I sent a video greeting of a bit over a minute.  Here's the transcript:
 

 Transcript:

"Hi PS 205!  I hear that you’re having career day today.

  Mr Blum asked me to say a few words about how my career began to take shape when I was a student at PS 205, way back before your parents were born. I was a PS 205 student from 1957 to 1962, and it was in those years that I started to think about becoming a scientist.

In 1957, when I started school, the Sputnik satellite was launched by Russia, and in 1961 the first American astronaut, Allan Shepherd, rocketed into space. So science was in the news.  My big brother Ted (who was also a PS 205 student, four years older than me) was excited by the idea of becoming a scientist, and that made me excited too. And pretty soon I was entering the school’s annual science fairs, with demonstrations of scientific things.

When I grew up I did become a scientist, a social scientist.  I’m  an economist, which allows me to study how we humans coordinate and cooperate and compete with each other, in ways that have made us, on average, live longer and healthier lives. In fact one of the things I have worked on is to help doctors organize how more people can get kidney transplants if they need them, which helps them live longer and healthier lives.

Science can be a lot of fun.  In 2012 I won the Nobel Prize in Economics, which means I got to go to a big celebration of science and literature in Sweden, which almost everyone in that country watches on television. It’s sort of like their Super Bowl.

I can only imagine the things that you will do as you grow up. It will be an adventure."

High school and higher education (30 second video)

 Someone recently sent me this old video snippet (about 30 seconds) from an interview in Stockholm in 2012.  Whenever I'm asked about my high school career I try to emphasize that I'm a big fan of education, even though I didn't finish high school.

Note to the un-Facebooked: if, like me, you don't have a facebook account, you may have to close a facebook come-on before you can see the video.

Banned books

 The LA Times has the story:

Book bans are soaring in U.S. schools, fueled largely by new laws in Republican-led states by  ALEXANDRA E. PETRI

"Fearing criminal penalties, public schools throughout Missouri removed hundreds of books from their libraries after state lawmakers last year made it illegal to provide students with “sexually explicit” material — a new law that carried punishment of up to a year in prison.

"The dangers are playing out in public school districts and campus libraries across the United States, First Amendment advocates warn: Book bans, gassed up by state legislation pushed by conservative officials and groups, are stacking up at an alarming rate.

"In a report published Thursday by PEN America, the nonprofit free speech organization found 1,477 instances of books being prohibited during the first half of the 2022-23 academic year, up 28.5% from 1,149 cases in the previous semester. Overall, the organization has recorded more than 4,000 instances of banned books since it started tracking cases in July 2021.

"At issue is more than “a single book being removed in a single district,” said Kasey Meehan, the Freedom to Read program director at PEN America and a lead author of the report.

“It’s a set of ideas, it’s themes, it’s identities, it’s knowledge on the history of our country — these are the kind of bigger buckets of what is being removed, restricted, suppressed in public schools and public school libraries,” Meehan said."

Lowell High School principal resigns in San Francisco, in latest setback for elite high school

Elite public schools, which admit students by exam, are under attack in many places.

In San Francisco, that would be Lowell high school, whose principal has just resigned.  SFGate has the story.

Principal at Lowell High School abruptly resigns, rebuking SFUSD in resignation email  by Joshua Bote

"The principal of Lowell High School — the highly selective, highly controversial school at the center of this year’s San Francisco school board recalls — has resigned, rebuking the school district in a farewell email sent Wednesday.

...

“While I deeply appreciate you all for the community and support I have received in the last three years, the decision to leave SFUSD is solely based on my desire to apply my passion for education in a district that values its students and staff through well organized systems, fiscal responsibility and sound instructional practices as the path towards equity,” Dominguez wrote in the email.

"Statewide budget cuts, due in large part to decreasing student attendance, have hit San Francisco Unified hard this year, with Lowell being affected by a pause of funding to its Advanced Placement program — perhaps where the allusion to “fiscal responsibility” in Dominguez’s email comes from.

"In the past year, Lowell made national headlines when the decision to replace its GPA- and test score-based admissions policy with a districtwide lottery was approved by the previous school board, receiving criticism from parents who said that they were “caught off guard” by the decision. The move, intended to increase racial equity and diversity on campus, was put on hold by a San Francisco court in November 2021."

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Here are some earlier related stories about the troubles at Lowell and in SF:

More School Board Drama Looming, as Lowell High Sticks to Lottery-Based Admissions Another Year  2 DECEMBER 2021

"The SFUSD superintendent says there’s not enough time to implement a court order to re-vote on admissions changes at Lowell. That’s likely to further infuriate the alumni groups that sued the district to win that court order."

 ------------

The SF Chronicle covered the first act of this play in three acts:

S.F.'s elite Lowell High School would permanently switch to lottery admission under fast-track proposal  by Jill Tucker  Jan. 30, 2021

"San Francisco’s elite academic public high school would no longer admit students based on top grades and test scores, and instead use a random lottery system for admission, if the school board approves a measure fast-tracked for a vote."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

And here's an earlier post that touches on similar developments in Boston and NYC:

Monday, March 22, 2021

Elite public schools move away from exams

Science Talent Search in the schools, after 100 years

 When I was in high school in the 1960's, I participated in a long-established student competition called the Science Talent Search, which in those days was sponsored by Westinghouse.  In subsequent years it was sponsored by Intel, and lately by Regeneron.  Winners of the competition were feted in Washington and received college scholarships, but it was a fun experience also for the many more of us who just got to spend time studying and building things that helped us appreciate science.

It turns out that that competition is 100 years old now. Here's a press release, and here's a searchable site of notable alumni, among whom are two winners of the Fields Medal, and fourteen Nobel prize winners, so far. The site doesn't identify which noted alumni won awards as students, but my guess is that for most of us participation itself was the prize.  And I wonder what can be learned about science and math education from these competitions. (My sense is that you can certainly learn something about American immigration, and about the growing participation of girls and women from the student participants and prizewinners, and the notable alums in each decade...)

Here are this year's student winners: Students Win $1.8 Million at Regeneron Science Talent Search 2022 for Exceptional Research on Neutron Star—Black Hole Systems, Narrowband Radar, and Ribosome Movement in Protein Translation

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Earlier:

Friday, March 19, 2021

Matching theorist wins high school science talent search

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Science talent search finalists (and some alumni)

Matching Teach For America Teachers to Schools, by Jonathan Davis

Some years ago Clayton Featherstone and I worked with Teach for America to design their process for matching new recruits to school districts.  Now here's a paper on the next step in the assignment process: matching teachers to particular schools.

Labor Market Design Can Improve Match Outcomes: Evidence from Matching Teach For America Teachers to Schools   by Jonathan M.V. Davis

Abstract: "I worked with Teach For America (TFA) to match high school teachers to schools in Chicago using the deferred acceptance algorithm (DA), while keeping its original mechanism unchanged for elementary teachers. Comparing actual matches under DA to simulated counterfactual matches suggests half of teachers strictly prefer their matches under DA and very few teachers are worse off. This improved matching yields longer-run benefits: matching with DA increased teachers retention through their two-year commitment to TFA by between 6 and 12 percent. This provides empirical support for the hypothesis that economic design can improve match outcomes in labor markets without negotiable wages. "

"Before I began working with TFA, interview day matches were determined by what I will refer to as the First Offer Mechanism (FO). This mechanism works as follows:

"Step 1. Complete round 1 interviews. After completing the round 1 interview, each school decides whether to make an offer to the teacher they interviewed. If given an offer, the teacher must accept it or exit Teach For America.

"Step 2 ≤ k ≤ K. Complete round k interviews involving unhired teachers. Each school decides whether to make an offer to the teacher they interviewed. If given an offer, the teacher must accept it or exit Teach For America.

...

"In fall 2013, I contacted TFA and suggested that they may benefit from replacing FO with DA. Given TFA’s policy that teachers accept their first offer and the organizational value that “TFA teachers go wherever they are needed”, the school position proposing version of DA was selected. In order to credibly identify the impact of the change, I worked with TFA to initially implement DA at its high school interview days for its 2014 cohort. This cohort was admitted to TFA in early 2014 and committed to teaching with TFA during the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years. They continued using FO at the elementary interview days for this cohort."

The importance of very early education, by Gray-Lobe, Pathak, and Walters

 There's more to education than exam scores.  Here's a recent paper on the effects of early preschool education on long term educational outcomes.

The Long-Term Effects of Universal Preschool in Boston  by Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Parag Pathak, and Christopher Walters, SEII Discussion Paper #2021.05  ay 2021

ABSTRACT: We use admissions lotteries to estimate the effects of large-scale public preschool in Boston on college-going, college preparation, standardized test scores, and behavioral outcomes. Preschool enrollment boosts college attendance, as well as SAT test-taking and high school graduation. Preschool also decreases several disciplinary measures including juvenile incarceration, but has no detectable impact on state achievement test scores. An analysis of subgroups shows that effects on college enrollment, SAT-taking, and disciplinary outcomes are larger for boys than for girls. Our findings illustrate possibilities for large-scale modern, public preschool and highlight the importance of measuring long-term and non-test score outcomes in evaluating the effectiveness of education programs

Teaching online: Singapore, NYC react to Zoombombing of online classes

Some of us are old enough to remember when email didn't come with security concerns.  Things are moving faster these days, so it's no surprise that there are Zoom trolls and scammers.  Singapore and NYC schools have decided not to use Zoom to conduct their online classes any more.

Here's the Singapore story from the Guardian:

Singapore bans teachers using Zoom after hackers post obscene images on screens
‘Very serious incidents’ have forced suspension from online schools as conferencing app faces renewed questions over security

"Singapore has suspended the use of video-conferencing tool Zoom by teachers after “very serious incidents” in the first week of a coronavirus lockdown that has seen schools move to home-based learning.

"One incident involved obscene images appearing on screens and male strangers making lewd comments during the streaming of a geography lesson with teenage girls, media reports said."
**********
Here's the NYC story from CNN:

New York City schools won't be using Zoom anymore because of security concerns
By Nicole Chavez and Sarah Jorgensen

"Schools in New York City are moving away from using the video conference app Zoom after a review of security concerns.
...
"The department does not have a central contract with Zoom, Filson said, and students and staff will be transitioning to Microsoft Teams, which has "the same capabilities with appropriate security measures in place."

"Earlier this week, federal officials began warning of a new potential privacy and security concern called "Zoombombing."
...
"Eric Yuan, the founder and CEO of Zoom, apologized to the video conferencing app's users for the privacy issues earlier this week, saying his team will stop adding new features for the next 90 days and instead focus solely on addressing privacy issues.
...
"Yuan said over 90,000 schools across 20 countries have been using the platform for online teaching since the company offered its services free of charge to schools because of the Covid-19 pandemic."

Enticing new graduates to become prison guards, British edition

In the U.S., new college graduates are tempted into teaching in under-served schools through Teach for America, and in Britain through Teach First.  Here's a program for prison guards: Unlocked Graduates

Here's a story from The Guardian:

The graduates training as prison officers: 'People think we just turn keys and shout orders'
These are volatile times for prisons in England and Wales, with overcrowding and record levels of violence. Can a new scheme that aims to do what Teach First did in schools change things from the inside?

"Jack is one of the first cohort of Unlocked Graduates, a new, two-year prison-officer training programme modelled on the phenomenally successful Teach Firstscheme, which takes ambitious graduates and, after minimal training, parachutes them into inner-city schools where they are tasked with raising the aspirations of some of the most deprived children in the country.

"Teach First has been the biggest graduate recruiter for the past three years, training more than 1,400 graduates each year. Almost 60% remain in teaching with the rest going out into the world, tasked with building a movement of people leading efforts to tackle educational inequality in schools and beyond. About a fifth of teachers in low-income schools are now Teach First graduates, around 70%of them from elite Russell Group universities. Unlocked Graduates works in the same way and hopes to mirror Teach First’s success inside prisons – and outside, too.

The prison system is, without question, in urgent need of help. Two-thirds of prisons in England and Wales are overcrowded, with the population rising by more than 1,200 places in the 13 weeks since May. It is now higher than at any other point in the past four years. Ministry of Justice (MoJ) figures show 68% of prisons are housing more inmates than their “certified normal accommodation” – the limit for ensuring a “good, decent standard”, with some more than 50% over capacity.

"According to a report last month by the HM Inspectorate of Prisons, prisoners are living in cells that are too small, with inadequate ventilation, damaged furniture and unscreened, unhygienic toilets, for up to 23 hours a day. And with almost half of all prisoners returning to prison within a year of release, it is clear that more needs to be done to break the cycle of reoffending."

Information, school quality and school choice

Here's a recent article by Gail Cornwall in The Atlantic, summarizing some of the work on school choice which points out that it is easier for parents to judge the test scores of graduates than the value-added by the school.

Why Parents Make Flawed Choices About Their Kids' Schooling
A new study shows that families act on insufficient information when it comes to figuring out where to enroll their children.

It covers (among other things) work by Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Parag Pathak and various colleagues, including the recent NBER working paper

Do Parents Value School Effectiveness?

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag A. Pathak, Jonathan Schellenberg, Christopher R. Walters

NBER Working Paper No. 23912
Issued in October 2017
NBER Program(s):   ED   LS 

School choice may lead to improvements in school productivity if parents' choices reward effective schools and punish ineffective ones. This mechanism requires parents to choose schools based on causal effectiveness rather than peer characteristics. We study relationships among parent preferences, peer quality, and causal effects on outcomes for applicants to New York City's centralized high school assignment mechanism. We use applicants' rank-ordered choice lists to measure preferences and to construct selection-corrected estimates of treatment effects on test scores and high school graduation. We also estimate impacts on college attendance and college quality. Parents prefer schools that enroll high-achieving peers, and these schools generate larger improvements in short- and long-run student outcomes. We find no relationship between preferences and school effectiveness after controlling for peer quality.

Data access makes research on schools (and school choice) hard

Courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act, an intrepid reporter lets us in on some of the emails about data access between the Louisiana Department of Education and school choice researchers Parag Pathak and Atila Abdulkadiroglu. These shed light on a controversy and some name calling having to do with a study showing some early problems in Louisiana's school voucher program. The name calling involved accusations that the researchers rushed to publish without waiting for more data. The emails show that they tried unsuccessfully to get more data from the D of E, without success.

Who Gets Access to School Data? A Case Study in How Privacy, Politics & Budget Pressures Can Affect Education Research  by Matt Barnum
"Just who gets access to education data? A case study in La. after a critical early study on school vouchers"

"In the early days of 2016, a study by MIT and Duke University researchers showing the first year of Louisiana’s school voucher program led to marked decreases in student achievement landed in the press and policy worlds with a degree of attention that went beyond the usual wonky provinces of education research.
...
"John White, the state’s high-profile schools superintendent whose pro-school choice policies had long been scrutinized, publicly accused the Duke and MIT researchers of improperly rushing to publish their results and The Wall Street Journal condemned them for similar reasons in an editorial.

The criticism turned on whether the researchers should have waited for additional data before publishing their findings. But even that assertion, it turns out, was complicated. Not long after the headline-grabbing study was released, Louisiana ended its data-sharing relationship with the MIT and Duke researchers, according to emails obtained by The 74 through a public records request.

...

“For a program that’s ongoing, there are real issues of who gets to evaluate the program. Is it open to many teams, which I think is a good model. Or is it restricted to partners?” said MIT professor Parag Pathak, part of the team that studied Louisiana’s voucher program. “There are real broad issues in social science — it’s something that we’re all wrestling with.”

**********

Read it all...you can see why access to data can be hard.

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Update: the first comment below points to this critical blog post by Professor Jay Greene:
The Chutzpah of Abdulkadiroglu, Pathak, and Walters

A comment by Christopher Walters points to  this reply by Abdulkadiroglu, Pathak, and Walters:
Statement on Allegations of Academic Fraud by Jay P. Greene
Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Duke; Parag Pathak, MIT; Christopher Walters, UC Berkeley
August 5, 2017

FutureEd

FutureEd is a new(ish) educational think tank at Georgetown, founded by veteran Ed writer Thomas Toch.


"FutureEd is an independent, solution-oriented think tank at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy. We are committed to bringing fresh energy to the causes of excellence, equity, and efficiency in K-12 and higher education on behalf of the nation's disadvantaged students. As a nonpartisan, public-facing organization, we work to produce clear, compelling analysis on key education issues for policymakers, practitioners, the media, and other key education change agents and influencers at the federal, state, and local levels—promoting smart policymaking in a complex and fast-changing educational landscape."

School choice is one of the topics they cover.

The market for jobs in international schools (elementary through high school)

Two search firms seem to facilitate the market for teachers who want to work internationally:

International Schools Services, and Search Associates

School Vouchers and Student Achievement: some sobering news from Abdulkadiroglu, Pathak, and Walters

School Vouchers and Student Achievement: First-Year Evidence from the Louisiana Scholarship Program

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag A. Pathak, Christopher R. Walters

NBER Working Paper No. 21839
Issued in December 2015
NBER Program(s):   ED   LS   PE 

We evaluate the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP), a prominent school voucher plan. The LSP provides public funds for disadvantaged students at low-performing Louisiana public schools to attend private schools of their choice. LSP vouchers are allocated by random lottery at schools with more eligible applicants than available seats. We estimate causal effects of voucher receipt by comparing outcomes for lottery winners and losers in the first year after the program expanded statewide. This comparison reveals that LSP participation substantially reduces academic achievement. Attendance at an LSP-eligible private school lowers math scores by 0.4 standard deviations and increases the likelihood of a failing score by 50 percent. Voucher effects for reading, science and social studies are also negative and large. The negative impacts of vouchers are consistent across income groups, geographic areas, and private school characteristics, and are larger for younger children. These effects are not explained by the quality of fallback public schools for LSP applicants: students lotteried out of the program attend public schools with scores below the Louisiana average. Survey data show that LSP-eligible private schools experience rapid enrollment declines prior to entering the program, indicating that the LSP may attract private schools struggling to maintain enrollment. These results suggest caution in the design of voucher systems aimed at expanding school choice for disadvantaged students.

Public schools and private philanthropy

Public school budgets are always stretched to their limits, and one of the ways those limits are sometimes surmounted is with an infusion of private funds, from big foundations with an interest in education, and also, apparently, from wealthy individuals. The NY Times has a story on how this part of school financing for New York City schools flourished more under the former mayor than it appears to be under the current one.
Public Schools Fund, Under de Blasio, Is Struggling to Lure Wealthy Donors

"The Fund for Public Schools, the nonprofit organization that former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his schools chancellors built into a fund-raising juggernaut, has struggled to attract donations under Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The fund, which raised an average of $29 million a year over the last decade, has raised just $18 million this fiscal year, which ends June 30, fund officials said. About half of that comes from two large multiyear grants that began under the Bloomberg administration."

Better late than never: I become a successful middle school student at the school's 60th anniversary

Hello to any of my classmates who are attending Middle School 74's 60th anniversary celebration. When I went there, it was a Junior High School...(my class photo is here). Here's some local news coverage: MS 74 celebrates its 60th on Sunday,

Middle School 74's 60th Anniversary Celebration	Search this site

74 Hall of Fame

We are proud to honor the following members of TEAM 74 for their great success!  If you know of anyone that should be included, please let us know! Grace Meng (Class of 1989) - Congresswoman currently serving first term in House of Representatives (Sixth Congressional District). First Asian-American Member of Congress from New York. Alvin Roth (Class of 1966) - Winner of the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences in 2012.   Howie Rose (Class of 1968) - Radio broadcaster for the New York Mets on WOR 710.   Mark Jackson (Student late 1970s) - NBA All-Star and Rookie of the Year.  Played for the New York Knicks from 1987 - 1992 and coached the Golden State Warriors from 2011-2014. Seymour Simon (Teacher 1960s) - Award winning author of over 250 children's science books.   Arvind Mahankali (Class of 2013) - 2013 Scripps Spelling Bee Winner

Boot camps for new software developers

Tamar Lewin in the NY Times has the story on a new kind of educational institution, designed to quickly produce software developers: Web-Era Trade Schools, Feeding a Need for Code

"SAN FRANCISCO — A new educational institution, the coding boot camp, is quietly emerging as the vocational school for the digital age, devoted to creating software developers.

These boot camps reflect the start-up ethic: small for-profit enterprises that are fast (classes are two to four months), nimble (revising curriculum to meet industry needs) and unconcerned with SAT scores or diplomas. Most are expensive, but some accept a share of the graduates’ first-year earnings or a finder’s fee from employers as payment.

Most important, at a time when so many young people are underemployed, most graduates, especially those from highly selective boot camps, quickly find well-paying jobs. In a recent survey of 48 boot camps, Course Report, an online boot camp directory, found that three-quarters of graduates were employed, with raises averaging 44 percent from their pre-boot camp pay and an average salary of $76,000."

Credentials and degrees (and, I'm now almost a high school grad)

I visited my old high school this past weekend, Martin Van Buren High School in Queens, in New York City. It was fun on a number of different levels. But it reminded me that credentials are complicated. The powers that be inquired into the possibility of giving me a high school diploma, but found, not surprisingly, that I'm still not qualified.  But I got to add an honorary high school diploma to my growing collection of unusual honorary degrees. And I found out that I had been included in the 1969 Yearbook with the rest of my class, although I didn't graduate with them.

Martin Van Buren High School, in New York City

My old high school--which was a giant city school when I attended, with well over 1,000 students graduating each year--hasn't been thriving, and a group of alumni are hosting a Celebration to help revive it.

It turns out that I am the second, not the first Nobel laureate to have attended.
Here are the details.

Saturday, May 17, 2014   •   1:30pm – 12:00 Midnight

A Day of Celebrating Martin Van Buren High School’s
Past, Present and Future!

at Martin Van Buren High School, Queens Village, NY


BASKETBALL CLINIC:  1:30pm – 3:30pm

MVB Alum, and Head Coach of Fordham University’s Basketball Team, Tom Pecora, and his team will conduct a clinic for 6th-8th grade youth from community schools.

 MVB OPEN HOUSE:  3:00pm – 5:00pm

Learn about MVB’s new and exciting programs,
Visit with former teachers, Tour the school, Meet today’s students

Everyone is welcome. There is no charge for this event.

MVB SHOWCASE:  5:00pm – 6:00pm

The Best Of MVB,
Showcasing our band, chorus, and dance troupe.
Everyone is welcome. There is no charge for this event.

HALL OF FAME:  6:00pm – 8:00pm

Honoring Distinguished MVB Alumni

Alvin Roth, Nobel Prize Economics

Frank Wilczek, Nobel Prize Physics

MVB’s 1958 Championship Baseball Team

Ray Kurzweil, Inventor and Futurist

 Donny Deutsch, Media Personality


Attendance is free for this event, but space is limited. Please sign up in advance by email at mvbhsalumns@gmail.com


All-CLASS REUNION: 8:00pm – 12:00 midnight

Join the 55 graduating classes for the first ever all-class reunion at MVB!

Here's some news coverage of the run-up to the event, which includes this:

"After the city lifted zoning restrictions more than 10 years ago, students left Van Buren en masse for schools like Francis Lewis, Bayside and Cardozo high schools. Van Buren received a “D” on its most recent city progress report and received a below-average rating on last year’s school survey.

But under the leadership of new Principal Sam Sochet, the school is poised for a turnaround, Wilson said, and part of the celebration day’s schedule includes an open house promoting a handful of new programs."