Monthly Archives: September 2011

“Crystal clear” correlation between long school days and student outcomes is not causal

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Scott Lehigh in the Boston Globe: On charter time: A longer school day transforms low-income kids into high achievers.

Drawing on recent state test score (MCAS) data, Lehigh notes that charter schools, which have longer school days than public schools, are doing better in terms of scores. He then muses that

At this point, several things should be crystal clear to everyone.

First, more learning time can transform low-income kids into high achievers. Second, charters, which offer a significantly longer day for the same per pupil expense, are a bargain for taxpayers. Third, incremental change in the traditional schools will no longer suffice.

But there are two big problems. One is that there are presumably several things about charter schools that distinguish them from public schools, beyond the length of the school day. No attempt is made here to separate out the independent effect of school day length. More importantly, there is the huge selection effect: students who enroll in charter schools are different, probably in terms of being more motivated to achieve, than those who don’t.

Ok, so I’m just shooting fish in a barrel, right? But it still seems problematic that this is what passes for informed debate when it comes to education policy. I don’t assume to know how education policy develops, but it seems safe to assume that the Boston Globe editorial pages are an important factor.

Do voters care if ex-lawmakers take industry jobs?

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Globe: Senate kills five-year ban on taking casino jobs; One-year prohibition OK’d for legislators. Key quotes:

Lawmakers’ rationale for weakening the bill may be hard to explain outside the marble corridors of the State House: They said that a strong prohibition would only feed the public’s perception that lawmakers cannot be trusted.

[...]

“Most people don’t pay attention or understand the political process,’’ said Peter Ubertaccio, a Stonehill College political scientist who watched the debate yesterday. “But what people will understand is when a major political party goes into closed caucus and makes it easier for themselves to get jobs when they leave.’’

Note how different assumptions about how voters think of the process seemed to be driving the predictions of the causal effects of the provision. (Yes, and the lucrative nature of casino industry jobs.)

NPR asks: Do new voting laws suppress fraud? Or Democrats?

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“I believe what Republicans are trying to do is make it harder for Democratic candidates to turn out an electorate [like] they turned out in 2008, which is young voters, African-Americans, Hispanics,” Berman tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered.

More here. This was found the Election Law Blog, which I just started watching and highly recommend.

I’m sure Berman is a super hard-working reporter, and it’s great that someone is still doing investigative reporting. But I can’t help but wish there was a better answer than Berman’s “beliefs.” In fact the people who have studied this scientifically find no effect of such laws.

Significantly something

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The authors say the effect is significant. A man whose wife or girlfriend has greater contact with some of his good friends than he does is about 92 percent more likely to have erectile dysfunction than a man who is closer to all his friends than his partner is. The younger men (57 to 64) were two and a half times more likely to have erectile dysfunction. The good news? As men enter their 70s, the negative impact wanes and disappears.

From here. Two things to note. First, the journalist (and maybe the researchers) are claiming this shows that “A Man’s Sex Life May Suffer if His Partner Gets Too Close to His Pals,” in the words of the headline. This is pretty funny, since there is an obvious alternative explanation in the form of reverse causality (dysfunction => partner looks elsewhere). Second, note the huge “92 percent!” effect. Recall the lesson of this article and ask: 92 percent increase over what? If the baseline probability is 0.01%, then a 92% increase is not much.

How can voters both approve of Obama’s agenda but disapprove of his performance?

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Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent has been hitting this point relentlessly in the past weeks, as a string of polls seems to be showing the same thing: voters strongly disapprove both of Obama and his handling of the economy, but they say they like his ideas for fixing the economy. The New York Times editorial board has noticed, too.

So what’s going on? There are a couple of reasons why we might explain this “disconnect”:

-Questions about approval, whether of the person or the policy domain (economy, war, etc) do not elicit attitudes about policy choices. Instead, they only elicit attitudes about affect and what political scientists call “valence”–that is, if the economy seems to be performing well in terms of results, voters approve.

-Voters don’t believe Obama can succeed in getting these policies passed.

-Voters don’t give politicians any credit for proposing solutions, since this is “cheap talk.” They only update their attitudes based on what’s actually been done.

-Voters would express support for any proposed solution that would purportedly create jobs.

In general I actually think it is wrong to see this as a “disconnect,” because there does not seem to be much evidence that voters take policy considerations into account when judging politicians (and institutions; i.e. political trust seems to be driven more by party and valence performance than any real thinking about how institutions work). This is to be expected, since it’s hard enough for us to follow the end result of policy than it is to adjudicate among alternatives and make predictions.

In digging up the Greg Sargent posts, I noticed that I missed a “digest” type post where he links to this New Republic piece by Jonathan Chait, asking this very question. John Sides of the Monkey Cage is quoted with some other thoughts.

Does Elizabeth Warren risk alienating blue collar voters from South Boston?

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Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent writes:

Republicans are planning to paint Warren as a liberal Harvard elitist — they’re already referring to her as “Professor Warren” — in order to make it tougher for her to win over the kind of blue collar whites from places like South Boston that helped power Scott Brown’s upset victory.

Which got me wondering whether this stereotypical characterization of South Boston was true (not that it’s working class–that’s a different question–but that it went for Brown). The City of Boston releases election results by ward and precinct, and this City of Boston map indicates they think Ward 6 is South Boston.

It turns out that Brown beat Coakley by about 55 to 44 percentage points in Ward 6. For comparison, in Dorchester (Ward 16) Brown lost 44 to 55, the mirror image.

A more in depth analysis of the demographics of that special race, by Stephen Ansolabehere and Charles Stewart, appeared last year in the Boston Review.

Which explanation is right? A large swing toward Republicans (with Obama voters supporting Brown), or a low turnout among Democrats? How different is the electoral environment in 2010 from that of 2008, and what does that tell us about prospects for November and 2012?

In Massachusetts no statewide exit poll was conducted, and most public opinion polls focused on the horse race, not the final results. Aggregate election returns, then, broken down by municipalities and precincts, provide the best perspective from which to judge the outcome. They provide ample evidence that both views are right.

Given this explanation, and that we expect higher turnout and more fired up Democrats in 2012, it would seem Warren has a shot. But Brown has been playing it safe ideologically, and seems to have been focusing more on constituency service. He also has more experience politicking, from being a state senator. So, my prediction is not very interesting: it should be close.

NY Times article on single-sex education kerfuffle

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A group of education scholars and psychologists is crying “pseudoscience.”

While some studies have found better outcomes from single-sex schools, the article said, the purported advantages disappear when outcomes are corrected for pre-existing differences. For example, Chicago’s Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men, a school whose high college admissions rates were praised this year by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, was subsequently criticized by the scholar Diane Ravitch as having test results that were actually lower than average on basic skills.

“This is very much a live issue, and I think it’s snowballing,” said Galen Sherwin, a staff lawyer for the Women’s Rights Project of the A.C.L.U., who is handling the Louisiana case. “I see news stories every single week about new proposals, usually based on the idea that boys and girls learn differently. Often it’s people who have attended training programs by Sax or Gurian, saying these programs will cater to boys’ and girls’ specific learning styles.”

More here.

Does elite rhetoric scare people from getting vaccines?

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The headline here suggests yes. But the article gives no evidence on this, and instead spends most of the time giving evidence about the possible link between vaccines and side effects. Here’s the only suggestion of elite leadership I found:

Historically, Dr. Willoughby said, vaccine scares have caused vaccination rates to drop for three or four years, and have led to outbreaks of diseases that had previously been under control, like measles and whooping cough. Measles cases in the United States reached a 15-year high last spring, with more than 100 cases, most in people who had never been vaccinated.

Even if the Times had a plot showing a correlation between elite statements and vaccination rates, causality wouldn’t be shown. The basic problem is that elite rhetoric could anticipate, instead of echo, what the mass public thinks. This issue comes up a lot in public opinion research. Maybe vaccinations and these types of statements are a good way of testing this.

Do taxes lead to redistribution?

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Hm, silly question perhaps? Turns out that the New York Times thinks it is interesting enough to feature it on its “Room for Debate” feature, including a contribution from political scientist Larry Bartels.

Not surprisingly, the Times and its contributors don’t really answer the question. The way they ask it is curious, though: “Do Taxes Narrow the Wealth Gap?” It’s curious because taxes–really, “tax policy”, which can mean imposing or taking away a tax that is either regressive or progressive or “flat”–in theory could redistribute in either direction.

For example, this working paper (via TaxProf Blog) argues that different tax reforms in the US over the past fifty years have had heterogeneous effects on income inequality in the US. One thing to keep in mind is that these authors are using simulations to imagine what the counterfactual income distribution would look like under different tax regimes. These simulations come with what might be hard to swallow assumptions–but there surely better than the Times’ back and forth.

But it turns out there is loads of variation in tax policy in the real world, so observational data combined with quasi-experimental designs could yield some real insights on this question. For example, I recently read that nearly 5,000 local jurisdictions in the US impose a local income tax (also on the TaxProf Blog).

My impression is that there are vast quantities of theoretical work on taxation and redistribution in both economics and political science, but very little data and very few people who study the real effects of tax policy. This is something of a troubling disconnect.