The literacy skills demanded of Americans by today’s economy far exceed those required only fifty years ago

From Can Academic Standards Boost Literacy and Close the Achievement Gap? by Ron Haskins, Richard Murnane, Isabel Sawhill, and Catherine Snow.

As shown in a recently released issue of The Future of Children, “Literacy Challenges for the Twenty-First Century,” America has a literacy problem—actually, two literacy problems. The basic cause of both is that the literacy skills demanded of Americans by today’s economy far exceed those required only fifty years ago. It is no longer sufficient to define reading as merely the ability to recognize words and decode text. The American economy, responding to technological advances and international competition, has shed blue-collar and administrative support jobs that involve simple operations and minimal reasoning skills while adding jobs that require the ability to select, categorize, evaluate, and draw conclusions from written texts. Think of twenty-first-century literacy as reading plus.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the reading skills of American children are inadequate for the heightened literacy demands of the twenty-first-century economy. Nor do American students perform well on international test score comparisons. U.S. students score lower in reading than students from fourteen other countries on the Programme for International Student Assessment conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. That is literacy problem number one—the literacy skills of the average American student do not match international standards. And although the NAEP scores of recent cohorts of black and Hispanic U.S. students have improved, the gap in average reading skills between students from high- and low-income families has widened. That’s literacy problem number two—in a nation committed to equality of opportunity and economic mobility, a widening literacy gap between students from rich and poor families is a national affront.

ADDENDUM:
The International Adult Literacy Survey in this post, On all three (literacy) scales, only Sweden had higher percentages of their adults at these levels, is consistent with literacy problem number two identified in the Haskins report. The best are keeping up and leading the international pack but the gap is widening between that top group and the rest within our society. The problem is that this is happening everywhere. All countries are seeing widening internal gaps while the cream of their cognintive and non-cognitive elite compete among the best on the global stage. How do we harvest the benefit of wealth arising from global competition without sacrificing a common sense of community?

Learning how to learn

From The lesson you never got taught in school: How to learn! by Neurobonkers

Quite interesting and useful. I have commented elsewhere that for all the talk about critical thinking, our schools don't seem to focus much on fostering that capability.

This research seems to indicate that our teachers likewise don't pay much attention to which modes of learning are most effective. The researchers identify ten modes of learning 1) Elaborative Interrogation, 2)Self-Explanation, 3) Summarization, 4) Highlighting, 5) The Keyword Mnemonic, 6) Imagery Use for Text Learning, 7) Rereading, 8) Practice Testing, 9) Distributed Practice, and 10) Interleaved Practice. Here is the relative assessed effectiveness of each technique.



Which methods were you taught to use, and which are being used in your children's schools today? And what on earth do they teach to education majors if they don't teach useful knowledge like this?

A useful reminder that the world is a complicated place where single-cause theories are always wrong.

From Was Mancur Olson Wrong? by Jonathan Rauch. Talking about political theory but generally applicable.

. . . a useful reminder that the world is a complicated place where single-cause theories are always wrong.

He was not thinking of politics, just whether or not a book spoke to him

From Reading Wuthering Heights in Kenya by Helen Rittelmeyer.

Do children have to read about characters only like themselves as some activists claim? This vignette offers a contrafactual.

The trouble is figuring out which books will appeal across cultural boundaries. Philip Roth, Edith Wharton, and Louis Auchincloss could all be called regional authors, but I wouldn’t want to assume that their appeal is only regional. (Though Philip Roth obviously isn’t a hit in Sweden—yet.) It is difficult to predict whether a book will pall when it leaves its home borders. The only real way to know is to try it.

The novelist James Ngugi (who now goes by his Kikuyu name Ngugi wa Thiong’o) was educated in colonial Kenya, first at a mission school, then a village school, then a British-style boarding school for black students. His memoir of his schooldays, released two months ago, tells of his attempt to read every book in his boarding school library—not a strange ambition for a boy who would grow up to be a Nobel contender. Almost all of the books were written by white European authors. This alienated him in some cases, but by no means all:

Good: Three Men in a Boat; Wuthering Heights (“the winds of the Yorkshire moors reminded me of the frosty winds in Limuru in July”); Tolstoy’s childhood memoirs; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“recalls the magic of African oral tradition”); As You Like It (“I could not help comparing the pairs of exiles in Arden to my brother, Good Wallace,” who had run off to join the Mau Mau); Treasure Island; Sherlock Holmes; Robin Hood; the Grimms; Aesop; Hans Cristian Andersen.

Bad: King Solomon’s Mines (“could not stand without a savage Africa as the background”); With Clive in India; Biggles in Africa (though the other Biggles books were fine); any poem about flowers and seasons (“in Kenya there was sunshine and green life all year round, and flowers were never a thing of surprise”).

The breadth of his taste is probably disappointing to those who wish he had torn up his library card and proclaimed “These books are irrelevant to me as a black student.” It must also disappoint those who assume that the appeal of great books is always universal. I figured the nature poems of the Romantics would speak to anyone who had ever been outside, so his line about flowers being ho-hum to a Kenyan threw me a bit. But that’s the point—it’s very hard for an outsider to predict what will fall flat and what will resonate. (Three Men in a Boat?)

[snip]

But the opinions in his memoir are those of a teenage boy, which makes them immature but also very honest. He was not thinking of politics, just whether or not a book spoke to him. There are two lessons to be drawn from this: that, contra the canon warriors, sometimes smart people should be taken at their word when they say that a great work of literature just doesn’t speak to their cultural experience; and that this often has very little to do with whether or not the author looks like them.

And those decisions can vary a good deal from age to age and society to society

From Terry Eagleton, a British Marxist literary critic. I have not been able to track down the original article but have found it referenced here.

One of the permanent embarrassments of studying literature is that nobody has ever been able to come up with an adequate definition of what exactly it is. The dividing lines between 'literary' works and other forms of writing are notoriously blurred and unstable. Cardinal Newman is (perhaps) literature, but Charles Darwin is not; some execrable poetry in a 'high' mode belongs to the canon, but some superb contemporary science fiction in a more popular mode does not. East Enders is not literature, but quite a few turgid minor seventeenth-century dramas are. The poet, John Cooper Clarke, who can pack a fair-sized hall any night of the week, is not really literature, whereas a more respectable poet who would be lucky to pack a broom cupboard will be graced with the title. There is, in fact, no such thing as literature: literature is just the kind of writing which the cultural and academic establishments decide is literary. And those decisions can vary a good deal from age to age and society to society.

The principle of limited sloppiness

From Avoid Boring People, the autobiography of James D. Watson. Page 91.

3. Irreproducible results can be blessings in disguise

A desired result in science is gratifying, but there is no contentment until you have repeated your experiments several times and got the same answer. Al Hersehy called such moments of satisfaction "Hershey heaven." Just the opposite feeling of maddening inferno comes from irreproducible results. Albert Kelner and Renato Dulbecco felt it before they found that visible light can reverse much UV damage. Delbruck, struck by how long this phenomenon remained undiscovered, put it down to fastidiousness. He described what he called "the principle of limited sloppiness." If you are too sloppy, of course you never get reproducible results. But if you are just a little sloppy, you have a good chance of introducing an unsuspected variable and possibly nailing down an important new phenomenon. In contrast, always doing an experiment in precisely the same way limits you to exploring conditions that you already suspect might influence your experimental results. Before the Kelner-Dulbecco observations, no one had cause to suspect that under any conditions visible light could reverse the effects of UV irradiation. Great inspirations are often accidents.

So few small scale projects scale successfully

Dylan Matthews in Hey Congress: Pre-K is a better investment than the stock market refers to the rate of return generated by a high-cost pre-school program as calculated by James Heckman, an economist whose work I greatly admire.

Heckman and his coauthors started from the observation that those who received preschool in the Perry experiment ended up earning more money — and thus paying more taxes — as well as using fewer criminal justice system resources (because they committed fewer crimes) and receiving less in the way of welfare, food stamps and other transfer payments. He tried to determine the annual return on investment, using those cost reductions to society, and to the government in particular, as benefits and comparing them to the upfront $18,000 a year cost.

He found that the annualized rate of return was somewhere between 7 percent and 10 percent. For comparison, historically the stock market has grown an average of 5.8 percent each year. Bonds have grown less. By this calculus, early childhood education is a better investment than either. And those benefits compound over time. If you assume the conservative estimate of 7 percent annual returns, that’s a sixty-fold increase over 60 years. Abecedarian was similarly successful. Thirty-six percent of recipients of early childhood ed going to college, compared to 14 percent of non-participants.

What’s going on here? Heckman’s theory, which he explained both in an essay in “Boston Review” and an episode of “This American Life,” is that preschool programs help kids develop “non-cognitive skills.” Traditionally, we think of school as imparting book smarts: adding and multiplying, reading and writing, foreign languages, etc. But especially for young students, they also teach skills like patience, cooperation, planning and delaying gratification. Over time, those basic self-discipline skills become immensely valuable, enabling other learning and making students better participants in institutions like schools and workplaces.

I think Heckman is likely right about cause-and-effect.  Good non-cognitive skills lead to better life outcomes.  The question isn't necessarily about the causation per se (though there is plenty for discussion in that sand-box).  I think the real issue is in magnitudes.  It is not enough to show that something is net beneficial.   You have to show that it is net beneficial to a greater degree than alternative uses of that time and money.  I think there are very fair questions to be asked about the confidence we have in the 7-10% number as well as whether the benefits are greater than the average benefit we might expect from some other usage of that capital. 

There are plenty of reasons to be cautious about the analysis. Avoided costs is always a dodgy argument to make. The sample is small. Education and sociology are rife with small scale trials that later turn out to not be scalable, i.e. the results show up in carefully controlled experiments but as soon as you expand the program into the real world, the benefits disappear. Head Start is a good example of what turned out to be a non-scalable program. $10 billion a year is being spent on a well intended and perfectly logical program which is not yielding (and has not yielded for decades) any of the results  which were anticipated.

But what might be the root cause of near universal failure between trial and real-world expansion. The 7-10% rate of return was what caught my eye. Generally, the larger the amount of capital at stake, the more the number of people to be affected, and the greater the number of independent variables involved, the more confident you have to be in the rate of return and in particular, the larger it has to be to account for risk. 7-10% is a very low number, particularly when it includes avoided costs. Avoided costs tend to be the category of benefits least likely to occur in business transformations and government programs. People forget about them, don't measure them, and most often, they simply don't occur. So the likely benefit from the Perry Preschool Project is much lower than 7-10%. How much lower we can't say because I don't see a breakout of the useful data such as average increase in participant's income as a class of benefits versus the avoided costs from reduced crime and incarceration. If the latter are a significant portion or majority of the benefits captured in the 7-10% range, then it is likely that the real ROI is much less, perhaps 3-5%.

3-5% ROI is at least positive but is it real and is it enough to cover the risks attendant to a major capital investment?

I don't know. However, the other unaddressed element that is usually not discussed, has to do with a different aspect of the fact that the projects are so small (58-65 students). Most Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) are prone to various confounding effects (and it should be noted that the Perry Preschool Project was not an RCT). The confounding effects have various terms and slightly differing causes and effects. The Hawthorne Effect (simply observing workers changes their productivity), the Halo effect (participants are influenced by self-perceived celebrity), the Placebo effect, and the Pygmalion effect (the expectations of those conducting the experiment affect the outcomes). My question - is there a standard size of these effects?

I am most familiar, from an industrial engineering perspective, with the Hawthorne effect but I have never seen it quantified. A quick web search does not yield an answer. Searches for the size of the Halo, Placebo and Pygmalion effects seem to indicate that on average, each of those effects drive a 30% increase in productivity independent of the nature of the trial. The Hawthorne, Pygmalion, Placebo and other effects of expectation: some notes by Stephen W. Draper is one source.

The net is that, in addition to the issues of unrepresentative sample mixes, small size, non-scalability, etc., unless the desired return or impact is very large, the likelihood of attaining material net returns when scaling from small trial to mass deployment are low to nonexistent.

The precision of a 7-10% ROI is beguiling but there is likely much less there than meets the eye, in part because of the unreliability of the avoided cost numbers and in part because of the aggregate impact of Placebo, Pygmalion, Hawthorne and Halo effects. That would explain why so few small scale projects scale successfully.

Years ago, a couple psychologists, Betty Hart and Todd Risley did a study to determine the magnitude of the impact of the spoken word on children's cognitive development and academic success (Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children)

Major findings:

• Children from all three groups of families started to speak around the same time and developed good structure and use of language.
• Children in professional families heard more words per hour, resulting in larger cumulative vocabularies.
• In professional families, children heard an average of 2,153 words per hour, while children in working class families heard an average of 1,251 words per hour and children in welfare-recipient families heard an average of 616 words per hour. Extrapolated out, this means that in a year children in professional families heard an average of 11 million words, while children in working class families heard an average of 6 million words and children in welfare families heard an average of 3 million words. By age four, a child from a welfare-recipient family could have heard 32 million words fewer than a classmate from a professional family.
• By age three, the observed cumulative vocabulary for children in the professional families was about 1,100 words. For children from working class families, the observed cumulative vocabulary was about 750 words and for children from welfare-recipient families it was just above 500 words.
• Children in professional families heard a higher ratio of encouragements to discouragements than their working class and welfare-supported counterparts.

This project also only involved some 40 or 50 families. I introduce it not to disavow the results from either Hart & Risley or the Perry Project. Only to suggest that there needs to be materiality, trade-off balancing, ease of implementation considerations and consistency.

The Perry Project would, simplistically, call for a doubling of national investment in early childhood education, some hundreds of billions of dollars. All on a single, small scale, non-replicated study.

The Hart & Risley study, simplistically, would indicate that we could achieve a 200% or greater improvement in academic achievement (with attendant beneficial life outcomes in terms of employability, income, etc.) simply by coaching parents to speak with their children more and more effectively. In other words, a dramatically higher rate of return at a dramatically lower cost.

Both projects have the same basis for support, which no matter how much you might agree with them, is weak and inadequate.

Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens

Plessy v. Ferguson, Dissenting Opinion, John Marshall Harlan

The lone dissent in one of the more disreputable decisions ever passed. The words ring clearly more than a century later. But it is worth reading the whole dissent. Harlan wrestled with his sense of perceived facts against his reading of the principles of the Constitution and, alone, came down on the side of principle. It removes nothing from his moral courage though, to gain insight by reading some of the perceived facts which are so far out of sympathy with our current views as to be shocking.

In respect of civil rights common to all citizens, the Constitution of the United States does not, I think, permit any public authority to know the race of those entitled to be protected in the enjoyment of such rights. Every true man has pride of race, and, under appropriate circumstances, when the rights of others, his equals before the law, are not to be affected, it is his privilege to express such pride and to take such action based upon it as to him seems proper. But I deny that any legislative body or judicial tribunal may have regard to the race of citizens when the civil rights of those citizens are involved. Indeed, such legislation as that here in question is inconsistent not only with that equality of rights which pertains to citizenship, National and State, but with the personal liberty enjoyed by everyone within the United States.

[snip]

But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved. It is therefore to be regretted that this high tribunal, the final expositor of the fundamental law of the land, has reached the conclusion that it is competent for a State to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race.

[snip]

The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race while they are on a public highway is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.

Americans living intensely

From French Plan to Add to Already Lengthy School Days Angers Parents and Teachers by Nicola Clark.

Education change is difficult everywhere - goals are too many, too disparate and too lacking in consensus; deferment to emotional decision-making rather than evidence-based decision-making is rampant; distrust in government is too high; overall there are too many oxes that can be gored, to ever make education reform easy.

There are enormous degrees of variation among the OECD countries in terms of goals, means, and structure of educating children. In some ways, fortunately, we are running a huge experiment to see what works where and under what circumstances. We only see through the educational glass darkly.

My anecdotal impression, having been raised, lived and worked in countries in South America, Europe, Australasia and Asia, is that the international comparisons are at best indicative and likely are not particularly accurate. My sense is that all countries do pretty well in educating the top 10% of the population and it is here that the US does especially well. The top 10% of schools in the US, public and private, both K-12 and University, are quite remarkable and have little competition globally. With the next 50%, I suspect the US does about as well, maybe a little better, than most of our OECD peers. It is the bottom 40% where the real differences emerge. All the countries do a pretty poor job of educating the bottom 40% in terms of outcomes. Because of its heterogeneity (in terms of culture) as well as the high proportion of emigrants, the US appears to do much worse than others. However, I think even in this area, the US is probably doing a better job than most. I have seen motivated emigrant children go through disastrous local urban public schools and do phenomenally better than their resident peers. The education is there for the taking, it is a matter of who is motivated to avail themselves of the opportunity. The whole process is not pretty or efficient but until you look at apples-to-apples it is hard to arrive at conclusions on a comparative basis.

A couple of interesting facts from the article.

Despite their four-day week and nearly four months of vacation, French children spend more hours in class than most of their European counterparts: 847 hours a year for third graders, for example, compared with 750 hours on average for children elsewhere in the European Union. (In the United States, the average for students of all ages is around 950 hours.)

In terms of engagement with education and in terms of intensity of work (number of hours worked per year), the average US citizen invests much more in learning and working than their OECD peers, roughly 15-30% more. One consequence is that the US usually records much greater national productivity than our OECD peers. Our closest competitors tend to be France, Germany, the Netherlands against whom we usually measure 5-15% more productive (depending on the study). We are typically 30% more productive than Britain or Japan.

The net is that part of the American exceptionalism is that we study harder, work harder and play harder than just about everybody else. I have heard the argument made, based more on anecdote than data, that part of the reason that the US health care costs are higher than those of other countries is that we live harder than others. We take more risks, we live more intensely, we indulge more risky lifestyles and then we expect to have as good mortality and morbidity results as others at the same or a lesser cost. Instead we do all those things and pay more. If you accept this argument, it is actually kind of remarkable; as intensely as we live, we achieve nearly the same mortality and morbidity results as others, just at a greater cost.

Dropout rates are on the rise, and nearly 40 percent of French 15-year-olds have repeated at least one grade — three times the O.E.C.D. average.

I don't know what the comparable figure is for the US but 40% sure sounds high.

As American as Norman Rockwell

From The Seventeen Traditions by Ralph Nader.

I had not realized that Nader was the son of Lebanese immigrants, raised in an Arabic speaking Greek Orthodox family. And yet, this, his semi-autobiography, is as American as Norman Rockwell. I am always fascinated by the role of culture as expressed through values and behaviors and this is an interesting summary of key elements of the great western enlightenment culture as experienced through a particular set of eyes at a particular time. Here are the seventeen traditions he values from his upbringing.

The tradition of Listening
The tradition of of the Family Table
The tradition of Health
The tradition of History
The tradition of Scarcity
The tradition of Sibling Equality
The tradition of Education and Argument
The tradition of Discipline
The tradition of Simple Enjoyments
The tradition of Reciprocity
The tradition of Independent Thinking
The tradition of Charity
The tradition of Work
The tradition of Business
The tradition of Patriotism
The tradition of Solitude
The tradition of Civics