Links for 1/4/10

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Joshua D. Angrist, Susan M. Dynarski, Thomas J. Kane, and Parag Pathak

This paper estimates the impact of charter school attendance on student achievement using data from Boston, where charter schools enroll a growing share of students. We also evaluate an alternative to the charter model, Boston's pilot schools. These schools have some of the independence of charter schools, but operate within the school district, face little risk of closure, and are covered by many of same collective bargaining provisions as traditional public schools. Estimates using student assignment lotteries show large and significant test score gains for charter lottery winners in middle and high school. In contrast, lottery-based estimates for pilot schools are small and mostly insignificant...

William Lewis

[the education level of the labor force isn't nearly as important for the overall economic performance of a nation as commonly thought]

The great bulk of the evidence about education came from competent multinational corporations of any nationality, who showed that they could go virtually anywhere in the world and take the local workforce and train it to come close to home country productivity…

Jason Hoyt

what concerns me with science, engineering, math, and technology. In the U.S., we are constantly hearing about how the country is falling behind in science. We need more scientists to fill all of those jobs we want to create. And the cure to that is to fund more PhD programs! Yet, when you ask graduate students and postdoctoral scholars what their individual experiences are, a science career is a very tough road with low pay and few career prospects…

As a friend of mine, who has worked for two decades in both academia and industry, recently put it, “it’s a Ponzi scheme”…

despite an ever growing number of PhDs and increased national budgets, there are disproportionally fewer young faculty receiving NIH grants…

Bruce G. Charlton on the problem with science today.

the requirement for around 10, 15, even 20 years of postgraduate ‘training’ before even having a chance at doing some independent research of one’s own choosing, is enough to deter almost anyone with a spark of vitality or self-respect; and utterly exclude anyone with an urgent sense of vocation for creative endeavour. Even after a decade or two of ‘training’ the most likely scientific prospect is that of researching a topic determined by the availability of funding rather than scientific importance, or else functioning as a cog in someone else’s research machine. Either way, the scientist will be working on somebody else’s problem – not his own. Why would any serious intellectual wish to aim for such a career?...

Demanding superhuman perseverance filters-out intelligence and creativity…