Jonathan N. Mills

Risky business: an analysis of teacher risk preferences

A range of proposals aim to reform teacher compensation, recruitment, and retention. Teachers have generally not embraced these policies. One potential explanation for their objections is that teachers are relatively risk averse. We examine this hypothesis using a risk-elicitation task common to experimental economics. By comparing preferences of new teachers with those entering other professions, we find that individuals choosing to teach are significantly more risk averse. This suggests that the teaching profession may attract individuals who are less amenable to certain reforms. Policy-makers should take into account teacher risk characteristics when considering reforms that may clash with preferences.

No Excuses Charter Schools: A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence on Student Achievement

While charter schools differ widely in philosophy and pedagogical views, the United States’s most famous urban charter schools typically use the No Excuses approach. Enrolling mainly poor and minority students, these schools feature high academic standards, strict disciplinary codes, extended instructional time, and targeted supports for low-performing students. The strenuous and regimented style is controversial amongst some scholars, but others contend that the No Excuses approach is needed to rapidly close the achievement gap. We conduct the first meta-analysis of the achievement impacts of No Excuses charter schools. Focusing on experimental studies, we find that No Excuses charter schools significantly improve math scores and reading scores. We estimate gains of 0.25 and 0.16 standard deviations on math and literacy achievement, respectively, as the effect of attending a No Excuses charter school for one year. Though the effect is large and meaningful, we offer some caveats to this finding and discuss policy implications for the United States as well as other countries.

Behaviors, Noncognitive Skills, and School Choice

While choice opponents and proponents tend to focus on how programs impact achievement, the growing body of research indicating a strong relationship between future outcomes and noncognitive skills indicates a need to broaden the basis for assessing programs. This article synthesizes the existing literature on the development of noncognitive skills in private schools, charter schools, and public school choice programs. Comprehensive knowledge of the effects of school choice should include an understanding of the promotion of noncognitive skills and socially acceptable behavior in choice settings. This article highlights the need for future research examining the impacts of schools of choice on noncognitive skill development and student behaviors.

Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips by Gene Glass

Education reformers and conventional educators inhabit different worlds, but if reformers are to have significant impact they need to understand how the people they are trying to reform think. In recent years, if you asked a literate National Education Association official their favorite book on school reform, they might well cite Diane Ravitch’s (2010) Death and Life of the Great American School System. Ask an equally literate administrator, and they would be likely to cite Gene Glass’s Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strip, which makes the latter a very important read. In Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips, author Gene Glass endeavors to offer the reader “a realistic view of how [the nation has] come to this state of affairs in education” (p. 249). He describes how technological advances and demographic shifts have transformed American society, theorizes how these changes will impact public education in the United States, and offers his thoughts on the true intentions underlying proposed reforms. Although bits of truth are scattered throughout the work, Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips fails to provide an accurate description of the facts surrounding education policy due to its misrepresentation of reformer arguments, reliance on inappropriate causal inference, and selective presentation of research. According to Glass, the three elements listed in the book’s title represent forces that have transformed American society over the last century. Technological advances in agricultural production (Fertilizers) dramatically increased farm productivity, leading to the great rural-to-urban migrations of the early 20th century. As society grew more urbanized, education came to be viewed as having an important relationship with the economy (pp. 66–67). Medical advances (Pills) additionally contributed to a changing American society by increasing life expectancy and reducing the average U.S. birth rate, effectively transforming America “from a pronatal. . . to an antinatal society” (p. 76). Finally, technological advances in the financial sector which offered individuals easy access to debt (Magnetic Strips), along with the middle class’s insatiable thirst for consumption have left primary supporters of public education saddled with massive personal debt (p. 93). Coupled with these factors is the decline of the White majority as a percentage of the U.S. population; a fact largely driven both by increasing