Misunderstanding why people tutor their children

The latest horror to assail our civilisation is apparently the idea that parents might hire tutors for their children. No doubt it's the upper middle classes deploying their superior financial resources to make sure that their own special little snowflakes get ahead in the race to grasp the great big brass ring that status and position offer in our society.

In those circumstances, it matters that an ethnic divide is opening up.

Quite right: if those with an enhanced melanin content are being held back by the privileges going to the melanin deficient then this is indeed something we should act upon. Do something about even. Perhaps we should ban private tutorials? Or possibly even reform the education system itself so that none is needed?

We would go with that second option ourselves: all taxpayers cough up for the current publicly funded education system so, yes, all should benefit from the best it has to offer. Except there's one little wrinkle to this:

From the age of 11, as many as 22% of UK children are seeing tutors. But there is a big gap between, on the one hand white children (20%) and, on the other, black children (47%) and Chinese children (48%).

It is not those pinkish hued upper middle classes who are giving their snowflakes a leg up. Given the population distribution in the country, with ethnic minorities largely concentrated into the inner cities, it's actually the people suffering under the yoke of the inner city school systems that are attempting to make up for the deficiencies of those inner city school systems.

The answer thus is not to ban private tutoring but to set off more than a few rockets under those running the inner city school systems.

Although we agree, that's always an unlikely conclusion to a Guardian article....

It's free speech that will defeat Islamist preachers in universities

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi5da2AhDCY I suspect most readers of this blog will agree with Barack Obama's basic point in the video above, which is that by banning racist books and right-wing speakers to 'coddle' oversensitive types, universities are failing students.

This is a problem we have in the UK as well – Brendan O'Neill and Tim Stanley were barred from speaking at a debate about abortion they'd been invited to take part in at Oxford last November, and certain parts of the social justice movement have been waging a quiet war against 'trans-exclusionary' radical feminists (and vice-versa, perhaps) by having them barred from university conferences and events, heckling them when they speak, and so on. People like James Watson have been made untouchable for suggesting that there may be genetic differences in IQ between different races.

This is not entirely a left-wing phenomenon. Today David Cameron has 'named and shamed' universities 'that regularly give platforms to hate preachers who are determined to undermine British values'. It's not clear to me what 'British values' are, or what's so bad about wanting to undermine them. Is belief in the NHS a British value, making free marketeers dangerous too? Is belief in democracy, excluding Jacobite restorationists from campuses and the like?

The obvious response to this is that these people will not just 'undermine British values' but actively encourage students to kill other people. Of course we already have laws against incitement to violence (excessively strict ones, some would say) but perhaps these don't work here. A roundabout suggestion that the, ahem, Zionists are controlling the media and, you know, maybe these ISIS fellas aren't so bad after all is not – and should not be – illegal, but might plant a seed in enough people's minds to lead them to kill.

No doubt there is something rotten in British universities, but I wonder if part of the problem is that opponents of these speakers are heavily restricted by the sort of people Obama attacked yesterday.

How easy is it to oppose Islamism on university campuses? Being anti-abortion is unpopular, but Islamophobia is so forbidden that Ed Miliband proposed to make it a hate crime. Last year Plymouth University's Islamic Society tried to have a speaker from the anti-Islamist Quilliam banned from speaking there. The year before that, a mob of students blocked Israel's deputy Ambassador to Britain from giving a lecture at the University of Essex. There is no shortage of other examples either.

So perhaps institutionalised political correctness is allowing Islamists to get a free pass at universities without being challenged, as it has arguably contributed to child abuse in Rotherham and elsewhere. If feminist comedian Kate Smurthwaite is too edgy to be allowed to perform to Goldsmith University students, what hope do harsh critics of Islamism like Maajid Nawaz or Douglas Murray have?

Banning hate preachers would mean we must also accept the principle of banning Maajid Nawaz for pushing back against them, Tim Stanley for opposing abortion, and Germaine Greer for showing insufficient respect to Caitlin Jenner. It concedes too much.

Open debate is too valuable to give up in places where it is supposed to thrive. It shouldn't be harder for Islamists to speak at universities – it should be easier for their enemies to contradict them. The problem is not what is being said, but what is not being said.

Fraser Nelson might be too laudatory here

But isn't it going to be just marvelous if he isn't? For he's talking about the state of education, the state of the state school sector. And it appears at least that the problem has finally been cracked:

When Boris Johnson is asked about his education, he cheerily replies that he would like “thousands of school as good as the one I went to: Eton”. Once, this would have been seen as preposterous: how can state schools compete with a £35,000-a-year Leviathan? But each year shows what teachers can do, given enough power and trust. Battersea Park was a failing school when Harris took it over last September with only 45 per cent of its pupils securing five decent GCSEs. Yesterday, it announced this has risen to 68 per cent. King’s Maths School, a free school in London, released its first-ever results earlier this week. Its average points score is among the top 10 schools in the land. Not the top 10 per cent; the top ten schools.

The staggering advances being made by state schools in Britain are the work of teachers and pupils, rather than politicians. Kenneth Baker, Tony Blair and Michael Gove simply offered increasing amounts of freedom to teachers, and their faith has been amply rewarded. For those who had despaired of ever finding a remedy for sink schools, this is nothing short of miraculous – and it’s only just beginning. School reform can now be seen as the greatest achievement of the Labour years, even if the Conservatives are the only ones who believe in it.

We might even call this a victory for conservatism (no, not Conservatism). Burke's little platoons can indeed organise society so that it actually works. But the much larger point that we need to keep pointing out here is that there's a vast difference between government or state financing of something and government or state provision of something. This is relevant to the railways, the NHS, to the power sector and all the rest as well.

There are indeed good arguments, Adam Smith made one of them for example, that there should be governmental subsidy to the education system. Being part of a generally literate and numerate population almost certainly is a public good. But that does not mean that it has to be government that actually provides the education. The same is true of health care: yes, it probably is true that at least some goodly portion of health care financing should be provided through the insurance pool of the entire population. And thus through the mechanisms of if not the tax system in its entirety then at least some portion of that insurance net. But this is not at all the same as stating that every provider of health care should be a government employee, nor that politics should be the mechanism by which we decide what health care, in detail, to offer.

As this schools revolution is showing, there is that vast difference between government financing of something desirable and government provision and management of it in detail. And as that revolution is showing, removing the government provision of it seems to be the best method of improving the provision of it.

Securitising Britain’s Future: A free market solution to university funding

  When the Coalition Government increased tuition fees from £3,300 to £9,000 a year, it had done so to provide a sustainable alternative that would boost university’s incomes and cut government spending. But there are reasons to believe this has failed. The Guardian reported that the new funding system is likely to cost the government not less, but more money than the system it replaced. It is time to reevaluate university funding, and I propose the following alternative: a system under which students would agree to ‘sell’ a percentage of their future income to their university in exchange for an education.

Under the current system moral hazard occurs since the universities need not worry about its students’ ability to repay their loans. Instead, the government will bear the costs if students default. This is a problem in desperate need of addressing especially considering that an estimated 73% of graduates will not be able to fully repay their loans.

Under the proposed system in which universities own the income rights to students’ future earnings, the incentive structure would be changed as to align the interests of students, universities and society alike. Universities will factor in how much their education will benefit their students in terms of their future earnings. This allows relative prices to convey how much certain professions are, in fact, valued by society. The university would encourage more students to take up careers that are more valued and it could charge less (in terms of percentage points) for the degrees with better prospects than those with worse.

By contrast, universities today charge uniform rates and have an incentive to provide the most appealing courses - which often mean courses that are enjoyable or easy - rather than being actually useful or valuable. The graduates may therefore lack the skills to be productive members of the workforce, despite accumulating large debts. Universities even have an incentive to admit students it knows will not benefit from the course since it will nonetheless receive government funding.

In turn, universities could sell its future income rights through a process of ‘securitisation’, per course or as a diversified portfolio. This free-market solution provides an equitable opportunity to all, since students’ ability to attend university is not depended upon current wealth but future earnings; thus depended upon skill and merit, not money. This system would streamline all stakeholders’ interests and ‘securitise’ Britain’s free and prosperous future.

Tamay is the runner-up in the 18-21 category of the ASI's 'Young Writer on Liberty' competition. 

A difficult problem but we'd really better try and find a solution

Disturbing news about social mobility in the UK. To he point that something really must be done:

Well-off parents create a “glass floor” for their less academically inclined children ensuring they “hoard the best opportunities” over poorer peers, a study has suggested.

Children from wealthier families but with less academic ability are 35% more likely to become high earners than their more gifted counterparts from poor families, according to findings from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.

Clearly something just must be done. The report itself is here and commenting upon it we get:

Study author Dr Abigail McKnight from the London School of Economics said: “The fact that middle class families are successful in hoarding the best opportunities in the education system and in the labour market is a real barrier to the upward social mobility of less advantaged children.”

“Children from less advantaged families who show high potential at age five are struggling to convert this potential into later labour market success.”

“Schools could do much more to help children from less advantaged families build on high early potential.”

Difficult to know what to do really. Perhaps some system could be devised whereby we identified those bright but poor children and then gave them the academic, specialist, education which would enable them to make the best use of those talents? Would it be too, too, odd to suggest that they might even be sent to separate schools?

This will put the cat among the pigeons

Disturbing findings for a central tenet of the prevailing left wing educational ideology:

Teenagers facing the ire of parents over their exam results may have found the perfect excuse after a new study concluded that exam success is largely inherited. Scientists at King’s College London discovered that up to 65 per cent of the difference in pupil’s GCSEs grades was down to genetics. Previous research found that genetics could influence core subjects like English, mathematics and science but it now appears that they also play the same role in humanities, languages and art. It suggests that if parents have struggled to draw, learn a second language or understand algebra, their children are also likely to find those subjects difficult.

For that prevailing ideology is that it is entirely the environment and education itself which determine such things. Danny Dorling once put it as anyone could grow up to be professor of social geography at Sheffield University: something which prompted us to comment that obviously anyone had. The implications of this blank slate idea being that differences in outcome must be due to differences in access to resources. Thus poor people do badly because they are poor, deprived even simply be inequality.

That 65% of academic success (to the point that passing exams is that success) blows rather a hole in this idea.

We should not, of course, immediately lurch over into the errors of social darwinism though. For this is just a restatement of what should be blindingly obvious about a mammalian species. There are indeed mutations, there's a shuffling of the genes in every generation. We should therefore be assuming that there will be variance other than simple and direct inheritance of intelligence, just as with any other genetically determined characteristic. Thus all should have access to the same opportunities but we just shouldn't be surprised when outcomes are not equal.

Regulating away Britain's best teachers

The latest report from The Sutton Trust (pdf) looks at a topic it last visited in 2003: how the backgrounds of state school teachers compare to those of independent school teachers. Its finding is that there is still a significant difference between the proportion of teachers at state and independent schools that have studied at the UK's best universities. Independent school teachers were also found to be the most likely to have a degree in the main subject that they teach. Here is the percentage of all teachers who attended a Russel Group University, by post-A level qualification:

Most people would expect this result. But what is more surprising, yet garners less attention, is that the heavily-regulated environment of state education hinders its flexibility to hire the same, or better, quality of teachers as independent schools.

There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that the lack of formal requirements for teachers entering the independent sector actually encourages, rather than discourages, applications from graduates of some of the UK's leading universities, because top applicants wish to enter the teaching sector immediately, rather than pursuing further qualifications.

State schools in England, Wales and Scotland are required to be registered with the NCTL and their General Teaching Councils, respectively. Private schools are free of this requirement and can hire applicants with specialist subject knowledge that want to teach soon after they leave their field of expertise.

In independent schools, teachers are not required to have Qualified Teacher Status, which, according to Elliott Lockhart's 2010 survey "has led some to portray teachers in the independent sector as unregulated, unaccountable and lacking the necessary professional preparation that would make them fit to teach."

As we know from the report and our general experience of the private education market, this is far from the case and actually strengthens the choice of employees that independent schools benefit from. For Scotland, this is particularly concerning as we are about to enact a law (see a recent Telegraph article about it here) making independent schools subject to the same requirements as state schools. So we would practically have no schools not subject to these restrictions.

Right now Scottish independent schools, like is the case in all of the UK's constituent parts, take advantage of teachers registered outside of Scotland and this legislation would prevent that. On top of this, the Scottish government also doesn't engage with Teach First; a programme that is injecting fresh talent into schools in England and Wales and is one of the reasons, judging by the teacher background metric, that state schools have been catching up with independent schools in the last 12 years.

Scottish politicians should reject the Education (Scotland) Bill as private schools are the perfect testing ground for trying out what works and doesn't work. Subjecting them to the same rules as state schools will impede progress and diminish their autonomy - they're independent for a reason.

School choice for Scotland

Nevada has become the first state in the US to enact a law making school choice universal. This is a groundbreaking example for other countries mildly experimenting with school choice. Adopting something similar in the UK context is an especially interesting idea. It works through an education savings account (ESA) in which the state deposits what it would averagely expend educating a child under the state system. Parents can use this fund for everything from school fees to private tuition – the choice offered in educational services being as wide-ranging and high-quality as individuals demand. And the catchment allocation of pupils to schools they don’t want to attend is a thing of the past.

Notably, families can roll over unused funds from year to year, a feature that makes this approach particularly attractive. It is the only choice model to date that puts downward pressure on prices. Parents consider not only the quality of education service they receive, but the cost, since they can save unused funds for future education expenses.

Scotland, with roughly double the population size of Nevada and a completely devolved education system, could technically do something similar. Not least because it's an idea that people of all political ideologies seem to be supportive of (see my previous post), but there is no freedom of movement in the education system – something that is neither fair on those trapped in the postcode of poorer schools nor an efficient way of driving up standards.

Remarkably many UK private schools at the cheaper end of the spectrum are running at a lower cost than state schools. Take a look at a 2011 paper (pdf) by James Croft that breaks down the cost of state and private sector schools, controlling for expenditures particular to each. Given that profit-making schools can achieve better outcomes for less money, the state handing back the cost of a child's 'free' education would enable people to attend a private school who previously couldn't afford it.

41% operate on fee levels less than, or on a par with, the national average per pupil funding in the state-maintained sector. On average, fees are approximately £7,500 annually. Fees at the more accessible end of the spectrum attract a high proportion of first-time buyers of independent education.

The best education policy currently on offer in Scotland is detailed in the Scottish Conservatives' 2016 Holyrood election manifesto (pdf) which promises school vouchers. But realistically, 60% of Scottish people voting next year are planning to support the SNP. There's just no avoiding for now that Scottish politicians will churn out yet more legislation from our unicameral conveyor belt to undermine independent schools’ autonomy and unintentionally halt our education system's advancement.

Take the Education (Scotland) Bill 2015 (pdf), which I have highlighted in a recent post for an unreasoned section that attempts to outlaw inequality in state schools – if it's successfully implemented teachers not registered with Scotland's General Teaching Council will be barred from teaching.This will massively limit what expert teaching Scottish pupils are exposed to. Meanwhile looms the threat that charitable status, and therefore up to 80% tax relief, will be removed from private schools, affecting hundreds of bursaries for disadvantaged children.

Interference with the better-performing independent schools and misdirected moves in state sector has created an environment in which it is impossible for an education market with school choice and low-cost private schools to emerge. Until we take steps in the right direction, the transience of politics will prove to be either a blessing or a curse.

So student loans seem to be working as a policy then

Some will no doubt decry this finding as evidence of the increasing commercialisation of society, the death of all that is good and holy. We would respond that this is actually the point of having student loans:

The first students to graduate since the imposition of £9,000 annual tuition fees are more focused on securing a well-paid job than their predecessors to pay off their higher levels of debt, according to a major survey of post-university employment.

The survey of 18,000 final year students at 30 universities reported a record proportion had started researching career paths as early as their first year of studies, and more of them undertook work experience to improve their chances of getting a good job after graduation.

The survey found the average level of debt by this summer’s graduates had ballooned to £30,000, compared with averages of £20,000 in 2014 and 2013.

The truth being that university is both enjoyable and highly enriching. To the point that, assuming one has taken the right sort of course, lifetime earnings are some hundreds of thousands of pounds higher for those who have a degree than for those who do not. Thus the major beneficiaries of a university education are those who get one: so why shouldn't they be the ones paying for one?

But while that is true that's not really the point of student loans rather than grants. The real point being that a university education is an expensive thing to provide. We'd rather thus encourage people to go and make use of that expensive asset that they've just acquired. Thus recent graduates looking for well paid jobs isn't a fault of the system, it's the major darn point.

That is, that recent graduates are looking for those better paid jobs as a result of having student debt shows that the system of financing degrees by debt is working.

The long history of school choice division

Most people, acting rationally, would prefer to choose the school their child goes to as opposed to having their child forcibly assigned to a school. So opposition to school choice seems no less strange wherever it comes from. Nonetheless understanding the reasons is enlightening. The divide of opinion on school vouchers in the States, for example, is portrayed as being between the left and the right. Or Republicans against Democrats and whites against minorities. But it is not as simple as this and not really the case. A new paper (pdf) by Shuls and Wolf studies the empirical reality regarding the political and racial divide over vouchers and explains its history in the U.S to offer conclusions about the logic of political support of and opposition to school choice. It also explains, for the unacquainted, what we mean when we talk about private school choice.

These two charts demonstrate the rise and prevalence of Private School Choice Programs in the States today:

The interesting finding is that while support for vouchers does tend to be higher among Republicans, support at the policymaking level is found both among ideological Democrats of the social-justice-promoting kind like Senator Corey Booker, and Republicans like Senator Rand Paul who support free markets. Those opposed tend to be moderate and mostly rural Republicans and establishment Democrats.

Teachers’ unions contribute more money than any other interested party to election candidates in the U.S. Of their campaign contributions, 88-99% of national-level, and 80-90% of state-level, contributions have gone to Democrats. The priority policy issue for the main teaching unions – the National Education Association and (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) – is to stop the spread of private school choice. Therefore one reason why so many Democrats may actually be opposed to school choice is that they would be doing so in spite of their single largest funder.

On the contrary, one has to ask why elected politicians in the U.S would support private school choice given teaching unions’ opposition. Research conducted for the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice found 40% of parents polled would prefer to send their child to a private school and 10% of respondents would rather a public charter school. Private school vouchers were supported by 63% of respondents.

As DiPerna reports, “The demographic groups having the highest positive margins and most likely to favor school vouchers are school parents (+42 points), Southerners (+36 points), Republicans (+42 points), young voters (+44 points), low-income earners (+47 points), African Americans (+50 points), and Latinos (+47 points)” (DiPerna 2014, p. 14).

Reports from parents are far-off actual enrolment figures. The National Center for Educational Statistics tells us 9% of K-12 students attend private schools and 4% attend charter schools. So the Friedman Foundation poll suggests that opposition from the unions is pitted against popular opinion, especially in areas with more young people and ethnic minorities.

Inspired by the Prisoner's Dilemma, the School Choice Dilemma explains some of this by  illustrating the compelling reasons for the opposition and support found in various political factions. Imagine two groups of students, one "advantaged" and one "disadvantaged"; one has enjoyed educational trips, access to materials and so on and the other hasn't. When both are given the opportunity to either accept their assigned school or to choose it themselves, they will be impacted in different ways.

If they both accept the assigned school, then there will be a mix of advantaged and disadvantaged students, which benefits (B) the disadvantaged from integrating with a brighter peer group; but may actually harm (H) the advantaged. Compared to this, the diagram shows that both will have an incentive to 'defect' and move to a situation where only they get S—the benefit of school choice. Advantaged students can already do this by buying houses near good schools or going to private schools—but the disadvantaged achieve this through targeted vouchers.

The conclusion is that we will probably continue to see rational politicians from both sides oppose school choice as the establishment in both parties have strong political incentives for protecting the status quo. Meanwhile social-justice politicians see school choice as a means to improving educational outcomes for disadvantaged students, and free-market individuals see school choice as a fundamental way to make education more efficient.