The Volokh Conspiracy

Political scientist Barry Rubin has an interesting column criticizing the modern tendency to teach kids that playing to win is bad:

My son is playing on a local soccer team which has lost every one of its games, often by humiliating scores. The coach is a nice guy, but seems an archetype of contemporary thinking: he tells the kids not to care about whether they win, puts players at any positions they want, and doesn’t listen to their suggestions.

He never criticizes a player or suggests how a player could do better. My son, bless him, once remarked to me: “How are you going to play better if nobody tells you what you’re doing wrong?” The coach just tells them how well they are playing. Even after an 8-0 defeat, he told them they’d played a great game.

And of course, the league gives trophies to everyone, whether their team finishes in first or last place.....

[A]m I right in thinking that sports should prepare children for life, competition, the desire to win, and an understanding that not every individual has the same level of skills? A central element in that world is rewarding those who do better, which also offers an incentive for them and others to strive....

The playing field was perfectly even, but the boys were clearly miserable. They felt like losers, their behavior rejecting the claim that everything was just great, or that mediocrity was satisfactory as long as everyone was treated identically. They knew better than to think outcomes don’t matter....

When the opportunity came to step in as coach for one game, I jumped at the chance to try an experiment.....

For the starting line-up, I put the best players in and kept them in as long as they didn’t say they were tired or seem fatigued.....

I didn’t put terrible players in at forward or in the goal. It didn’t take any genius to do so, just basic sports common sense....

Before the game, I gave them a pep talk, with the key theme as follows:

Every week you’ve been told that the important thing is just to have a good time. Well, this week it’s going to be different. The number one goal is to win; the number two goal is to have a good time. But I assure you: if you win, you will have a much better time!

And that’s just what happened. They took a 1-0 lead and held it, in contrast to the previous week when it was scoreless at the half but turned into a 3-0 humiliation when someone ill-suited was made goalkeeper just because he wanted that job....

I worried that the boys who played less of the game and were given seemingly less significant positions would be resentful. But quite the opposite proved true....

They played harder, with a bit more pressure and a less equal share of personal glory than they’d ever done before. But after the victory, they were glowing and appreciative, amazed that they had actually won a game. Yes, winning and being allowed to give their best effort as a team was far more exciting and rewarding for them than being told they had done wonderfully by just showing up, .... and that the results didn’t matter.

I agree with Rubin here. Playing to win encourages better performance. People, including children, are unlikely to make a real effort if they are told that results don’t matter. Moreover, the incentive of victory helps overcome one of the biggest obstacles to effective teaching of children: the fact that they tend to have very short time-horizons and can’t easily be motivated by benefits that lie far in the future. Few kids will work hard at soccer because doing so will make them more physically fit ten years later (or even ten months later). But many more will do so in the hope of experiencing the thrill of victory. As I wrote in a 2006 post on research on student incentives:

[C]hildren and teenagers have notoriously short time horizons and many are unwilling to work hard today for rewards that they can’t enjoy until many years later. [Harvard economist Roland] Fryer’s financial incentives [for inner city children to do better in school] represent one possible way to give students more immediate rewards for studying hard. As he points out, middle and upper class parents have often used such rewards for studying for their own children....

Like Fryer, ... I was a terrible student for much of my school career. Although I knew that good grades were important for getting into college, this was too distant a reward to motivate me very much. What turned my situation around was high school debate. If I worked hard on a debate topic for 2 or 3 weeks, I could win a prize at a tournament at the end of that time.... Although tournament trophies (like Fryer’s $10 cash prizes) are trivial in value compared to the long-term benefits of education, they were an immediate reward that provided quick gratification to my teenage mind. Over time, learning to work hard on debate issues also led me to study harder in other classes.

Long-term goals such as college did play some role in my eventual academic turnaround. But the short-term incentives of debate had a much more powerful immediate effect. And like Rubin’s soccer players, I also found that winning after making a real effort is a lot more fun than losing after just showing up.

Everything has reasonable limits. We should not encourage elementary school soccer players to be as hypercompetitive as Michael Jordan or Vince Lombardi. There may also be gender differences here. Some research suggests that competitive incentives are on average less effective with girls than boys (which is not to say, of course, that they aren’t effective at all). Nonetheless, Barry Rubin’s approach strikes me as much more sensible than that of his son’s coach and others with similar attitudes. Contra Lombardi, winning isn’t the only thing that matters. But it’s foolish to pretend that it doesn’t matter at all.

AP writer Beth Harpaz worries that we are raising “a generation of nincompoops” because modern technology has obviated the need for kids to learn basic mechanical skills:

Are we raising a generation of nincompoops? And do we have only ourselves to blame? Or are some of these things simply the result of kids growing up with push-button technology in an era when mechanical devices are gradually being replaced by electronics?

Susan Maushart, a mother of three, says her teenage daughter “literally does not know how to use a can opener. Most cans come with pull-tops these days. I see her reaching for a can that requires a can opener, and her shoulders slump and she goes for something else.”

Teenagers are so accustomed to either throwing their clothes on the floor or hanging them on hooks that Maushart says her “kids actually struggle with the mechanics of a clothes hanger.”

Many kids never learn to do ordinary household tasks. They have no chores. Take-out and drive-through meals have replaced home cooking. And busy families who can afford it often outsource house-cleaning and lawn care....

The issue hit home for me when a visiting 12-year-old took an ice-cube tray out of my freezer, then stared at it helplessly. Raised in a world where refrigerators have push-button ice-makers, he’d never had to get cubes out of a tray — in the same way that kids growing up with pull-tab cans don’t understand can openers.

But his passivity was what bothered me most. Come on, kid! If your life depended on it, couldn’t you wrestle that ice-cube tray to the ground? It’s not that complicated!

Mark Bauerlein, author of the best-selling book “The Dumbest Generation,” which contends that cyberculture is turning young people into know-nothings, says “the absence of technology” confuses kids faced with simple mechanical tasks.

But Bauerlein says there’s a second factor: “a loss of independence and a loss of initiative.” He says that growing up with cell phones and Google means kids don’t have to figure things out or solve problems any more. They can look up what they need online or call mom or dad for step-by-step instructions.

I worry a lot about ignorance, including political ignorance, economic ignorance, and to a lesser extent ignorance about religion. But the kind of ignorance Harpaz emphasizes strikes me as a nonissue.

Most of it consists of ignorance of mechanical skills that have either been rendered obsolete by modern technology or are rapidly on the way there (as in the case of using old-fashioned ice-cube trays and cutting open tin cans). In every generation, there are some mechanical skills that were essential in earlier times that are no longer useful because technology has created machines that perform the same functions more efficiently. When I was in high school in the 1980s, I learned how to use a typewriter. Very few teenagers have that skill today because word processors are both simpler to operate and more efficient. In the generation before me, many if not most schoolchildren knew how to use abacuses and slide rules. By my day, we were using the much simpler and more efficient calculators. Does that mean that we were “nincompoops” compared to those who grew up in the 1950s and 60s?

Harpaz and Mark Bauerlein worry that kids who can look up instructions on the internet or their cell phones won’t learn how to “figure things out or solve problems.” To my mind, learning how to access the knowledge of others is itself a very important ability, one that those skilled at using the internet have an important advantage in. As great social theorists such as F.A. Hayek and Edmund Burke pointed out, even the smartest and most capable individuals can benefit a lot from the vastly greater store of knowledge compiled by the rest of society. If Bauerlein is right, than 19th century Americans should have been concerned about the spread of mass literacy and the declining price of books caused by improved printing technology. After all, kids who can look up instructions in books where their parents had to use their own know-how couldn’t possibly learn how to “figure things out” on their own!

Moreover, using technology or knowledge compiled by others to perform simple mechanical tasks frees up time and energy for more important types of learning. I’d rather that kids spend time learning history, economics, science, and foreign languages than spend time learning how to open cans and use ice-cube trays. I’d also rather that they spend more time surfing the internet (which improves research skills) or even talking to their friends on their cell-phones (which develops useful social skills) than practicing simple mechanical tasks. If that means they learn to tie their shoe laces at a slightly older age, I think Western civilization will still survive and even benefit from the tradeoff.

There is much to lament about the state of public ignorance and children’s education. But we should focus on ensuring that kids acquire the kind of knowledge that can’t easily be replaced by technology, not petty mechanical skills that will soon become obsolete, if they haven’t already.

At Econlog, GMU economist Bryan Caplan and Princeton economist Bill Dickens have been debating the signaling model of education. See this post for Bryan’s most recent contribution and links to earlier parts of the debate. Bryan argues that a large part of our education spending (perhaps as much as 80%) is socially wasteful “signaling.” It is a kind of arms race where students try to get more education than than their rivals in order to signal their conscientiousness, conformity, and intelligence to potential employers. Crucially, however, much of the information learned is actually not needed for their careers; the real objective is just to rack up better-looking credentials than the Joneses in order to look good to employers.

Both sides make many good points. Overall, I am not persuaded by Bryan’s argument, at least not yet. The crucial objection, raised by Dickens, is that if most education expenditures are primarily about signaling, it should be possible to find other, cheaper ways to signal these desirable traits to employers. Bryan in fact concedes that “intelligence is fairly easy to observe (even in a regime where IQ tests are only semi-legal).” For example, applicants can submit their standardized test scores even if employers don’t require them to do so. Intelligence can also be signaled by getting a high grade in one or a few difficult courses at the high school or college level. You don’t really need four years of college grades. So the debate really turns on the extent to which it’s possible to find easier and cheaper ways to signal conscientiousness and conformity. Here, Bryan argues that there is an adverse selection problem:

[C]onscientiousness and conformity are often hard to spot – especially when people have a strong incentive to fake them. Even worse, low educational attainment relative to IQ is a strong signal of low conscientiousness and conformity. So when employers interview a smart person with little education, they infer that the person is well below-average in other productive traits.

As Bryan sees it, a cheaper or quicker method of signaling (e.g. – a college that takes only one or two years to complete) will tend to attract noncomformists and slackers, the types of people whom most employers seek to avoid. As a result, they will shun graduates of such institutions. This key part of Bryan’s argument is not entirely persuasive. For one thing, the cheaper or quicker method will not attract a disproportionate number of slackers if it is hard to pass. Consider, for instance, a college that will give you a degree in only one year, but requires you to pass a series of extremely difficult courses that are very strictly graded. If higher education is primarily about signaling and the actual content of courses doesn’t matter very much, that type of program will attract hardworking, capable people eager to get into the work world faster and at lower cost. It should spread quickly. Indeed, employers might even start to look askance at the slackers who spend four years hanging out and socializing at conventional colleges.

A second relevant consideration is that conscientiousness and conformity is better signaled by good work at boring and unpleasant tasks than at relatively interesting ones. If you do the latter well, it could just be because you enjoyed them, not because you are dedicated and trustworthy. In most four year colleges, students have considerable choice as to which courses to take, and can usually avoid those they find boring or off-putting. By contrast, many blue collar and service jobs have extremely boring and unpleasant elements that are hard for workers to avoid. If your goal is to signal conscientiousness and conformity, a year of good performance at McDonald’s is probably a better signal than a year of academic success at most colleges. And unlike college, McDonald’s doesn’t charge tuition and pays you a salary (even if a small one).

When I was in high school, I did a lot of babysitting and lawn work. These jobs were generally boring and repetitive, and I often hated them. Yet, for the most part, I did fairly well. My effective performance of these tasks was a much better signal of conscientiousness and dedication than my work in various academic classes, especially the ones I took in college where I had a free hand in picking most of my courses. Indeed, what could be a better signal of conscientiousness and conformity than the fact that people were willing to entrust their children to me, sometimes for many hours at a time?

Yet few if any white collar employers cared about this part of my record. Had I tried to get a job based on a combination of my standardized test scores (signaling intelligence) and glowing recommendations from the people I did babysitting and lawn work for (signaling conscientiousness and conformity), I probably wouldn’t have done very well.

I suspect that my experience was not atypical. Perhaps most employers are simply too stupid or too tradition-minded to hire workers based on these credentials alone. But, as economic history shows, the first employer to recognize and correct a major inefficiency in hiring labor is likely to get a huge competitive advantage. Over time his rivals will have strong incentives to copy his innovations.

In sum, I think that Bryan overstates the extent to which signaling drives education expenditures. Like Dickens, I conjecture that successful completion of college courses often improves people’s qualifications even if the specific knowledge they learn has very limited market value in itself. For example, it could do so by improving the students’ reasoning ability, writing ability, or organizational skills. Bryan doesn’t deny this completely, but his argument can only work if such effects are very small relative to the impact of signaling. At the same time, I agree with him that the education system has numerous inefficiencies, many (though by no means all) of them caused by government subsidies and regulation. I’m just skeptical that the signaling arms race is nearly as big a part of the problem as he contends.

Stuart Buck has two interesting proposals for increasing educational achievement among minority students, based on his book Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation:

I do suggest one idea that I think has some promise: eliminate individual grades, and let students compete against other schools in academic competitions.

This idea is far from original. Rather, it comes from the eminent sociologist James Coleman. Coleman observed the striking fact that while students regularly cheer for their school’s football or basketball team, they will poke fun or jeer at other students who study too hard or who are too eager in class: “the boy who goes all-out scholastically is scorned and rebuked for working too hard; the athlete who fails to go all-out is scorned and rebuked for not giving his all.”

But this is odd, is it not? Why are attitudes toward academics and athletics so different? Sports are more fun than classwork, of course, but that does not explain why success would actually be discouraged in class.

Coleman’s explanation was disarmingly simple: The students on the athletic teams are not competing against other students from their own school. Instead, they are competing against another school. And when they win a game, they bring glory to their fellow students, who get to feel like they too are victors, if only vicariously.

But the students in the same class are competing against each other for grades and for the teacher’s attention. Naturally, that competition gives rise to resentment against other children who are too successful (just as students will hate the football team from a cross-town rival).....

Coleman’s suggestion, therefore, was that if you want the students’ attitudes towards their studies to resemble their attitudes toward sports, you should minimize the role of grades — which involve competition against one’s classmates. In his words, we need to get rid of the “notion that each student’s achievement must be continually evaluated or ‘graded’ in every subject.”

Instead, such grades should be “infrequent or absent,” and should be replaced by “contests and games” between schools, such as “debate teams, music contests, drama contests, science fairs, . . . math tournaments, speaking contests,” etc. Then, the students in any one class or school would have a greater incentive to encourage their fellow students to study hard, and to take pride in their fellow students’ success.

I agree with Buck’s proposal for increasing the role of interscholastic intellectual competition. I have defended that view myself, though on somewhat different grounds. As I argued in my post on high school debate, interscholastic academic competitions help overcome the problems caused by the short term orientation of most teenagers. Getting into a good college or getting a good job are valuable prizes. But they are beyond many teenagers’ time-horizons. On the other hand, trophies and prestige acquired from winning competitions have little objective importance, but do provide much more instant gratification.

I doubt that debate or math team victories will ever get as much prestige as sports victories do. There are many more nonathletes who enjoy watching basketball games than nondebaters who enjoy watching debate rounds. But they can provide enough prestige to motivate participants to strive for higher levels of intellectual achievement. It certainly helped turn around my own high school academic standing, which was mediocre at best before I got into debate.

On the other hand, I think abolishing grades will do more harm than good. The abolition of individual grades actually was tried in the USSR in the 1920s and communist China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In both cases, it predictably led to plummeting student achievement as incentives to study hard declined. Even committed communists recognized this problem and soon went back to assigning individual grades. Grades are also of value to colleges and potential employers in evaluating student applicants.

More generally, I am skeptical of James Coleman’s and Buck’s claims that students view academic achievement more negatively than sports achievement because the former involves competition with your fellow students, while the latter is about competing against other schools. To get on a good high school football or basketball team, you have to beat out many of your fellow students who also wanted to be on the team, but weren’t good enough. Successful high school athletes are often objects of resentment and envy. That does not, however, prevent them from having high prestige and social standing in the high school world. Students also often compete against each other in informal athletic competitions, and there is no stigma attached to winning.

If anything, I suspect that the low academic achievement is more commonly the result of students not caring whether their classmates are doing better than they are, than of caring too much. A class full of competitive grade-grubbers isn’t always admirable. But it probably has higher academic achievement than a class full of people who are happy to get “gentleman’s C’s.”

My DU colleague Thomas Russell, who used to teach at the University of Texas Law school, has a written a paper, available on SSRN, which urges the University of Texas Law School to rename Simkins Hall, a law and graduate male student dormitory named for William Stewart Simkins. Simkins taught equity, contracts, procedure, and related topics at UT for three decades in the early 20th century. He was also a founder of the Ku Klux Klan in Florida, and every year at UT he gave a formal speech extolling the Klan.

Most of Russell’s paper concentrates on Simkins’ career at UT, as well as the 1954 decision (five weeks after Brown v. Board was announced) to name the dormitory after him. I was curious to learn more about Simkins had actually done with the Florida Klan, so I read Michael Newtown’s book The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida.

Continue reading ‘The Bernardine Dohrn of the early 20th century: The terrorist professor at U of Texas law school’ »

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Today’s Washington Post features a story by Michael Birnbaum on the controversial new Texas social studies standards.  As characterized by the Post, the standards sound quite bad.  Ann Althouse was concerned by the story, so she looked at the Texas materials (for which the Post had declined to provide a link) and was appalled.  “Virtually everything cited in the article to make the curriculum seem controversial is misstated!” She summarizes:

If you’re going to criticize the new social studies curriculum adopted by the Texas Board of Education, you’d better quote it.  Or at least link to the text. And if you choose to paraphrase and not even link, and I have to look up the text myself, and your paraphrase is not accurate, it is my job to embarrass you by pointing that out.

Based on what Althouse reports, Birnbaum and the Post should certainly be embarrased.

UPDATE: Just so there is no confusion, neither this post nor that by Ann Althouse is a defense of the Texas standards. However bad they are, news outlets should report on them accurately.  What Althouse shows is that the Post utterly failed in this regard.  Criticizing the Texas standards should not require misrepresenting them.

SECOND UPDATE: It appears Ms. Althouse may have blogged too soon — and I may have been too quick to repeat her accusations against the Post.  Althouse relied upon the text of the standards as proposed a few months ago, not the final language.  The Texas State Board of Education revised the standards this past week before approving them.  Based on live-blogging by the liberal Texas Freedom Network (see here and here), and the direct quotes (and, in some cases, video they provide), the Post‘s characterizations of the final language is much more accurate that Althouse suggested.  I think it’s fair to suggest the Post story should have quoted the relevant language (as this prior story did), but unless there is something inaccurate about TFN’s account, Althouse and I both owe the Post and Birnbaum an apology.

Today is the final day of the 2010 Colorado legislature, and cautious optimists are looking forward to final passage of Senate Bill 191, a dramatic reform of Colorado’s tenure system for public school teachers. To be precise, after three years, Colorado teachers get a set of “due process” rights, not tenure, but the effect is to make it nearly impossible for ineffective teachers to be fired. Senate Bill 191, sponsored by Denver Democrat and former public school principal Michael Johnston, would change all that.

In brief, the bill would replace the current system of gaining tenure (work three years without getting fired) with a requirement for three consecutive years of teaching success. Tenure could be lost, however, based on two consecutive years of teaching failure. After that, a school district could choose not to rehire a teacher for the next school year, but if so, the teacher would be entitled to an appeals process. The appeal amendment was added yesterday, and was the price of getting the bill though the Colorado House.

Fifty percent of what constitutes “success” would be based on the academic progress made by students during the school year, according to objective tests. The other 50% is to be based on objective criteria to be established by the State Board of Education. The metrics must take into account factors such as “student mobility” (e.g., students whose live with one parent who has no fixed address, and who only attend school sporadically), which of course make academic progress much more difficult.

Senate Bill 191 is supported by the Colorado Association of School Boards, the Colorado Children’s Campaign (which Colorado’s current Lt. Governor, Barbara O’Brien, used to head), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Democratic Governor Bill Ritter, all Republicans in the state legislature, and a critical mass of pro-reform legislative Democrats. It is opposed by the Colorado Education Association, which has a much larger membership in Colorado than the AFT.

A crucial reason why the bill appears headed for passage this year is the federal “Race to the Top” grants program, administered by the US Department of Education. Race to the Top does not hand out grants promiscuously, but instead awards grants to a few states based on detailed programs for dramatic reform. Only Delaware and Tennessee won grants in the first round. Once it became clear that Colorado needed tenure reform in order to have a realistic chance in round two, Senate Bill 191 began to gain momentum in the legislature. In short, Race to the Top is helping to foster bipartisan reform.

In a January 2009 op-ed, Picking Duncan as Schools Chief, Obama Sides with Kids, the Independence Institute expressed hopes that Obama administration education policies would deliver real change, and rather than being controlled by the National Education Association. Although we were disappointed that Obama killed the DC voucher program, Obama has continued the Bush policy of strongly supporting charter schools, and Obama, unlike Bush, is helping to reform tenure so that teachers with an established record of ineffectiveness can be moved aside and new teachers given an opportunity.

If enacted, Senate Bill 191 will take several years to be put into full effect. Further, it is undoubtedly true that the most important single cause of low academic achievement is not poor teaching, but home environments that provide no support for literacy or any other intellectual skill. But better teachers can make an imporant difference for many students, and the Obama/Duncan Race to the Top program has been a sine qua non for tenure reform in Colorado.

Generally speaking, I favor much less federal involvement in local education, which is why I disagreed with Bush’s No Child Left Behind, even though NCLB had many good features. In fact, I would prefer that the federal Department of Education be abolished. But President Obama wasn’t elected to abolish the DOE. He was elected to deliver Change We Can Believe In, and in the Race to the Top program, President Obama and Secretary Duncan are providing the leadership for constructive change.

At the Freakonomics blog, economist Justin Wolfers criticizes a recent Texas Board of Education effort to include the work of F.A. Hayek in high school economics classes. He sees it as a “conservative” ideological mandate that isn’t justified by Hayek’s scholarly influence:

Sunday’s New York Times reported on attempts by the Texas Board of Education to rewrite the high school curriculum in accordance with its conservative values..... I find the raw ideological force exerted by these “educators” to be both striking and dispiriting.

How do they plan to rewrite high school economics?

In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, to the usual list of economists to be studied – economists like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes.

Taking social science seriously surely means teaching the insights of the most prominent, most important, or most influential economists. This involves teaching important theories—even those you disagree with. There’s no doubt about the influence of Smith, Marx and Keynes; Friedman also belongs. But does Hayek belong on this list?

Let’s use data to inform this debate. I counted the number of references to each economist in the scholarly literature indexed by JSTOR, finding 30,708 articles mentioning “Adam Smith”; 25,626 articles mentioning “Karl Marx”; and 4,945 mentioning “John Maynard Keynes” (the middle name was required to avoid articles by his father, John Neville Keynes). “Milton Friedman” sits easily with this group, and was mentioned in 8,924 articles.

But searching for “Friedrich von Hayek” only yielded 398 articles; adding “Friedrich Hayek” raised his total to 1242 mentions; also allowing “FH Hayek” raised his count to 1561....

By the way, “Lawrence Summers” was mentioned 1712 times, adding “Larry Summers” raises his score to 1972 mentions; and also including “LH Summers” raises his score to 2064....

This exercise suggests that Larry Summers is more influential than Hayek, and so I’m led to conclude that teaching “insights from Larry Summers” involves less of an ideological subsidy than teaching “insights from Hayek....”

The message from the Texas Board of Education seems to be: If you can’t win in the marketplace of ideas, turn to government institutions to prop you up. I don’t think Hayek would approve.

Wolfers’ argument has already gotten some strong criticism from the University of Chicago law professor Todd Henderson, economist William Easterly, and my colleague Josh Wright. As Henderson points out, much of Hayek’s influence was in scholarly fields that are not well-represented in the J-STORS database. He notes that Hayek ranks very high in citations by legal scholars (J-Stors includes very few law journals).

Josh and Easterly correctly emphasize that Hayek’s work focuses on broad issues that are of special important to students in an intro course. He wrote about the fundamental tradeoff between the market and government planning, and about the ways in which markets outperform government in conveying and using information. His classic article “The Use of Knowledge in Society” is arguably the most important on this fundamental question, and is readily accessible to nonexperts. By contrast, Summers’ work is mostly on more narrow technical issues. These matters are of great importance to experts, but less likely to be essential reading for high school students. Ironically, Summers himself (quoted by Easterly) has made the same point:

What’s the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today? What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the [un]hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That’s the consensus among economists. That’s the Hayek legacy.

I myself summarized Hayek’s relevance to current debates here. Some of his arguments are badly flawed or outdated. But his central insights are almost as important today as they were when he developed them decades ago.

I think Wolfers also underestimates Hayek’s prominence even in the J-STOR data. Counting Hayek’s cites is difficult because of the many different variations on his name. Wolfers captures some of these ( “Friedrich von Hayek,” “Friedriech Hayek,” and “F.H. Hayek”), but not all. At various times, Hayek also was referred to as “F.A. Hayek” (574 cites), “F.A. von Hayek” (68), “Friedrich A. Hayek” (648), and possibly other variants that don’t occur to me. Including just these three variations adds another 1290 cites to Hayek’s count, pushing him to a total of 2851, well ahead of Summers, though still far behind Keynes and Friedman. Part of the problem arises from the fact that Hayek eventually dropped the aristrocratic “von” from his name because he thought it was incompatible with his egalitarian political views.

Just running “Hayek” through the search engine yields a total of 12,136 cites. A few of these are cites to other people named “Hayek,” but not many. I checked the first several hundred cites that came up and all but one or two were to Friedrich Hayek. The situation with Friedman and Summers is very different, since both names are far more common than Hayek, especially in the English-speaking world; Summers and Friedman also were not referred to by as many different variations on their names as Hayek. If you conservatively give Hayek credit for half or two thirds of the 12,000 “Hayek” citations, he is definitely in the same ballpark as Friedman and Keynes, though still trailing Adam Smith and Karl Marx.

Hayek’s citation count is all the more impressive when we remember that academics are overwhelmingly left of center (including economists), and people naturally tend to pay more attention to ideas they agree with.

Finally, it’s worth noting that, contrary to Wolfers’ assumptions (and possibly those of the Texas Board), the man who wrote an essay entitled “Why I am not a Conservative” was, ahem, not a conservative.

Like Hayek, I am opposed to the control of education by government boards. I think that schooling should be left to the private sector, with perhaps some government subsidization of education for the poor through vouchers. But so long as we do have public schools and government-mandated curricula, it is better that they include Hayek’s work than leave it out – just as it is also good for them to include major left-wing thinkers like Marx and Keynes. Reading Hayek might even lead some Texas students to question whether the state should have control over what they learn.

UPDATE: It turns out that political scientist Jacob Levy has performed some of the same calculations as I did, and got similar results.

UPDATE #2: I have now included a link to the full text of Daniel Klein and Charlotta Stern’s paper on the political views of economists. Among other things, it shows that some 58% of economists identify as Democrats, compared to 23% Republican. It also shows that the average economist is very far from being a consistent free market supporter. The combination of these two findings strongly suggests that the economists really are overwhelmingly left of center, though probably not as much so as scholars in many other disciplines.

Paul Samuelson has died, at the age of 94.  From the New York Times obituary:

In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Mr. Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from one that ruminates about economic issues to one that solves problems, answering questions about cause and effect with mathematical rigor and clarity.

When economists “sit down with a piece of paper to calculate or analyze something, you would have to say that no one was more important in providing the tools they use and the ideas that they employ than Paul Samuelson,” said Robert M. Solow, a fellow Nobel laureate and colleague.of Mr. Samuelson’s at M.I.T.

Mr. Samuelson attracted a brilliant roster of economists to teach or study at the university, among them Mr. Solow as well as such other future Nobel laureates as George A. Akerlof, Robert F. Engle III, Lawrence R. Klein, Paul Krugman, Franco Modigliani, Robert C. Merton and Joseph E. Stiglitz.

Mr. Samuelson wrote one of the most widely used college textbooks in the history of American education. The book, “Economics,” first published in 1948, was the nation’s best-selling textbook for nearly 30 years. Translated into 20 languages, it was selling 50,000 copies a year a half century after it first appeared.

In the City Journal, Heather Mac Donald has an interesting article showing how California’s 1998 ban on bilingual education (a referendum initiative that passed despite the opposition of most of the political and education establishment) has improved English Language acquisition by immigrant Hispanic students. Unsurprisingly, young children learn new languages better by immersion. Mac Donald also claims that this result ran counter to the predictions of various experts in education and psychology:

Unless Hispanic children were taught in Spanish, the bilingual advocates moaned, they would be unable to learn English or to succeed in other academic subjects....

The 1960s Chicano rights movement (“Chicano” refers to Mexican-Americans) asserted that the American tradition of assimilation was destroying not just Mexican-American identity but also Mexican-American students’ capacity to learn. Teaching these students in English rather than in Spanish hurt their self-esteem and pride in their culture, Chicano activists alleged: hence the high drop-out rates, poor academic performance, and gang involvement that characterized so many Mexican-American students in the Southwest. Manuel Ramirez III, currently a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, argued that bilingual education was necessary to ensure “the academic survival of Chicano children and the political and economic strength of the Chicano community...”

Novel linguistic theories arose to buttress this political platform. Children could not learn a second language well unless they were already fully literate in their native tongue, the newly minted bilingual-ed proponents argued. To teach English to a five-year-old who spoke Spanish at home, you had to instruct him in Spanish for several more years, until he had mastered Spanish grammar and spelling. “Young children are not language sponges,” asserts McGill University psychology professor Fred Genesee, defying centuries of parental observation.

Such claims are difficult to take seriously. Centuries of immigrant experience show that immersion enables young children to quickly pick up new languages, whether they are literate in their original language or not. When I arrived in the US at the age of six, I didn’t speak a word of English and I couldn’t read and write in Russian at all, never mind being “fully literate” in it. Nonetheless, as a result of immersion, I was fluent in English within a year and literate within two – long before I belatedly achieved literacy in Russian at the age of ten. Since we spoke Russian at home, my progress with English was almost entirely the result of immersion in school.

It would be wrong to generalize from personal experience alone. But I have seen numerous other immigrant children with similar stories, both in the Russian community and elsewhere. For example, when I was in college, I was a volunteer tutor for Cambodian refugee school children. Most of the parents were poor, ill-educated, and had limited or no English proficiency. Nonetheless, their kids who had arrived in the US at elementary school ages all spoke fluent English because of immersion (public schools in the area probably lacked the personnel to teach these students in Cambodian, even if they had wanted to). Those who came to the US at high school ages had a much tougher time, but were still making progress. I can understand claims that bilingual education is needed for students who arrive in the US at high school age or later. But for elementary school students, immersion is by far the best way to go. Moreover, as Mac Donald points out, immersion is a standard, highly effective technique used by leading programs that teach students foreign languages (e.g. – Middlebury College’s Language Schools). Even adult students benefit from it, though admittedly not as much or as quickly as children.

I would add that in most immigrant communities, the usual concern about immersion is not that it prevents kids from learning English, but that it leads them to lose competency in their native languages. I’ve often heard immigrant parents lament this, though few want to put their kids in bilingual ed programs to prevent it (because they realize that failure to learn English quickly is likely to hurt their children’s future prospects). Loss of native language competency is a genuine problem; speaking a second language has great value in today’s globalized economy. But this issue should be addressed by means that don’t slow students’ progress in English.