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Education and economic performance
Book Reviews Many will remain unconvinced that the screening hypothesis is as damaging to human capital theory as this hook suggests. However, it certainly does demonstrate Ihat the use of qualifications for selection helps to generate I‘xcess demand for higher education in many developing <.ountries, and that the influence of the examination system iiistorts the curriculum. So what is the cure for the diploma disease? Dore rrriginally suggested drastic measures. such as the abolition *rf achievement test qualifications, but the interesing q,hapter by Unger on the Chinese experiment, after the (1ultural Revolution, shows that this had a disastrous effect IIn student motivation, and evidence from Mexico and
Universiry of London
REFERENCES R.P. (1976) The Diploma Disease: Education. Qualification and Development. London: Allen and Unwin. I OCKHEED, M.E., JAMEON, D.T. and LA~J, J.L. (1980) “Farmer Education and Farm Efficiency: A Survey”. In Education and Income (Edited by KING, T.). World Bank Staff Working Paper No. 402. Washington DC: The World Bank. I~NE,
k;ducation and Economic Performance. Edited by G.D.N. WORSWICK. National Institute of I:conomic and Social Research, Policy Studies Institute, and Royal Institute of International Affairs: Joint Studies in Public Policy 9. Aldershot, England and Brookfield, Vermont: <;ower Publishing Co., 1984. pp. 147. $29.95 (I:loth). 1 HIS CONFERENCE report focuses on Great Britain. Despite it,, ambitious title, the book is about 16 to 19 year-old youths, namely, training to help them obtain their first job and training while on that job. Its scope is restricted almost entirely to vocational education and, to a small extent, secondary school mathematics and science. As for “economic performance”, no serious effort is made to
439
analyze the effect on the level or growth of national income even of alternative types of education and training for and on first jobs. Judgments appear but are canceled by contrary assertions of other participants. Earnings and contributions to output over a lifetime are barely mentioned. Nonetheless, when the book is viewed as simply an upto-date (as of 1984) description of training for 16-19 yearolds it is informative and interesting - as the name of G.D.N. Worswick, retired Director of the NIESR, on its cover would lead one to expect. It reports a conference, arranged mainly by S.J. Prais, held in June 1984. Participants included economists, experts in education, a businessman, a labor leader, and a government official, but no one with hands-on experience as teacher or recent student, school leaver or parent. The book consists of an introduction by Worswick; 8 substantive papers; 8 formal comments, each on 2 or 3 papers; 3 summaries of the discussion by Ian S. Jones; and a section on implications for policy and research by Charles Carter that expresses Carter’s views as much as a conference consensus. Five papers are grouped under the heading of “training”. Recent changes in training of the 16-19 age group in Great Britain, including notably the Youth Training Scheme that accommodated 345,000 participants in 19831984, its first year, are described by Leonard Cantor. Prais and Russ Russell (in separate contributions) compare U.K. training with the German system of “apprenticeship” that is compulsory until age 18 for all leaving full-time schooling. Alain d’hibarne describes the rapid changes of the past 20 years in France. In a paper that both participants and this reviewer particularly liked, Jones shows that the ratio of the pay of apprentices to that of adults is much higher in Great Britain than in Germany, a difference that, he argues, accounts for the difference between the chronic small excess of openings for apprentices over applicants in Germany and the much larger chronic large excess of applicants over openings in Great Britain. The remaining three papers are grouped under “education”. T. Neville Postlethwaite shows that British children in the bottom half of the distribution (as well as all children) score worse on International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement tests of reading comprehension, science, and mathematics than their counterparts in a few other countries - “even”, he says, the United States. William Taylor considers productivity and other values as possibly conflicting objectives of the educational system and influences on its development. Stuart Maclure provides a knowledgeable and entertaining essay suggesting that the British educational system is not very responsive to pressures to change, and that this may be a good thing. Maclure also serves as advocate for the absent teachers and their employment and pay safeguards. Ordinary competent teachers, he says, do not wish to protect incompetents but will not stand for authoritarian edicts from the Secretary of State, tinged “with that profound contempt for school teachers which Ministers, mandarins and industrial managers all have in common [even though they are] aware that their own gifts would be unlikely to keep them afloat in the fourth form of an inner city comprehensive school for more than 5 minutes”.
440
Book Reviews
All the papers are easy to understand (once one masters a seemingly interminable use of initials), almost all provide useful information. and most present the considered views of informed people. In no case, however, did I find a writer presenting an inference important for policy that could withstand assertions that an opposite inference was correct or. at least, that the evidence permitted no inference. One key unresolved issue concerns the relative merits of schools and employers as job trainers. Related and also important is the proper role of formal “credentials”. A country cannot have an efficient labor market if it prevents an individual from doing any type of work he knows how to do, no matter how he acquires or evidences that knowledge. or if it prohibits an employer from hiring an unqualified worker of any age and training him at work. Overreliance on certificates seems to me a weakness of the German economy. But it is argued that certificates motivate reluctant students to obtain skills and knowlcdae. Possibly certificates that. like merit badges, appeal only-to the recipient’s esteem will suffice but if motivation requires that certificates be prerequisites for jobs and not just evidence of the acquisition of a skill. which the employer can weigh as he likes, there is an obvious conflict with an open labor market. A possible subsidiary conflict is between offering certificates for small tasks and single subjects. which in this country is sometimes advocated for motivation, and restricting certificates to those who possess all the qualifications for an occupation or pass concurrent examinations in a wide range of subjects, a policy that was considered by some conference participants to be necessary for effective training or education. Some contributors, anxious to draw conclusions. yielded to the temptation to assert that if A’s economic performance exceeds B’s there is a presumption that anything it does differently is probably better. Mark Blaug takes Prais to task for inferring from such reasoning that the German training system surpasses the British. Blaug says more countries must be examined before one can “even begin” to take Prais‘s argument seriously; Dermot Glynn observes that, in sharp contrast to Germany, Japan (with a much higher growth rate) emphasizes education rather than training and avoids specialization at all educational levels. But more countries would not in any case be sufficient for an inference like Prais’s. The fact is that levels and growth rates of national income are governed by many determinants and it would be odd indeed to find countries ranked in the same order for every determinant as for the growth rate. The United States had a lower growth rate of national income in the 1950s and 1960s than most industrial countries despite an unusually large increase in the average amount of education of its workers, not because of it. Left unanswered is whether we know how to improve education. A new statement by the Committee for Economic Development. in the United States, claims that “research has shown what makes [good] schools effective” and we need only apply “what we already know” in every classroom; some participants in the conference clearly felt the same about Britain. Others felt we did not know but could find out; this reviewer has long suspected that during the past century everything conceivable must have been tried I000 times or more in the tens of thousands of school
systems in the United States and Britain, and that we keep going in circles mainly because experience is not recorded, recalled, and systematically evaluated. Maclure suggests the still more pessimistic view that ‘*educational research has produced few immediately marketable ideas or strategies” because there are no best ways; everything depends on circumstances. EIXVAK~ F. DENISON The Brookings Institution
Teachers, Unions, and Change: A Comparative Study. D.K. JESSUP. New York: Praeger, 1985. pp. x + 256. Price: $33.95 (cloth). CASE STUD~ESare often useful devices for the illumination of issues that are otherwise lost. in necessarily less detailed, albeit more general, theoretical accounts. Thus Teachers, Unions, and Change: A Comparative Study by Dorothy Kerr Jessup comes as a welcome change from typical theoretical accounts of union behavior. Dr Jessup’s book is a sociological study of the changes occurring within teachers’ unions and a description of the operation of those unions in the turbulent decade between 196X-1YhY and 1978-1979. The author surveys three southern New York State school districts. These districts were originally chosen because of the presence in them of union chapters affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers. Mailed survey questionnaires and interviews were employed in each district to elicit responses from teachers, administrators, and school board members to questions regarding the development and growth of the teachers union. The year 1968 is a significant date because in I967 New York Sate passed its Taylor law requiring collective bargaining for public employees and prohibiting public employee strikes. The study took place in an environment which was rapidly and dramatically changing. As an economist, this reviewer is usually called upon to study the impacts of unions on employers and workers. Jessup’s study. on the other hand, focuses on the internal dynamics within unions and of unions within the educational system rather than the impacts of unions themselves. In other words Jessup’s study focuses on the determinants of union impacts rather than on the existence of these impacts per se. It is clear that internal union dynamics are important in understanding the outcomes of union actions and while some of the results of the collective bargaining process may be well known, such as the union wage effect. Jessup’s work reminds the reader that differences in union leadership, bargaining opposition, union goals, union membership composition, and the historical era all have impacts on the process resulting in bargaining outcomes as well as the outcomes themselves. Economists see unions as having “two faces” a monopoly face and a collective voicciinstitutional rcaponse
Universiry of London
REFERENCES R.P. (1976) The Diploma Disease: Education. Qualification and Development. London: Allen and Unwin. I OCKHEED, M.E., JAMEON, D.T. and LA~J, J.L. (1980) “Farmer Education and Farm Efficiency: A Survey”. In Education and Income (Edited by KING, T.). World Bank Staff Working Paper No. 402. Washington DC: The World Bank. I~NE,
k;ducation and Economic Performance. Edited by G.D.N. WORSWICK. National Institute of I:conomic and Social Research, Policy Studies Institute, and Royal Institute of International Affairs: Joint Studies in Public Policy 9. Aldershot, England and Brookfield, Vermont: <;ower Publishing Co., 1984. pp. 147. $29.95 (I:loth). 1 HIS CONFERENCE report focuses on Great Britain. Despite it,, ambitious title, the book is about 16 to 19 year-old youths, namely, training to help them obtain their first job and training while on that job. Its scope is restricted almost entirely to vocational education and, to a small extent, secondary school mathematics and science. As for “economic performance”, no serious effort is made to
439
analyze the effect on the level or growth of national income even of alternative types of education and training for and on first jobs. Judgments appear but are canceled by contrary assertions of other participants. Earnings and contributions to output over a lifetime are barely mentioned. Nonetheless, when the book is viewed as simply an upto-date (as of 1984) description of training for 16-19 yearolds it is informative and interesting - as the name of G.D.N. Worswick, retired Director of the NIESR, on its cover would lead one to expect. It reports a conference, arranged mainly by S.J. Prais, held in June 1984. Participants included economists, experts in education, a businessman, a labor leader, and a government official, but no one with hands-on experience as teacher or recent student, school leaver or parent. The book consists of an introduction by Worswick; 8 substantive papers; 8 formal comments, each on 2 or 3 papers; 3 summaries of the discussion by Ian S. Jones; and a section on implications for policy and research by Charles Carter that expresses Carter’s views as much as a conference consensus. Five papers are grouped under the heading of “training”. Recent changes in training of the 16-19 age group in Great Britain, including notably the Youth Training Scheme that accommodated 345,000 participants in 19831984, its first year, are described by Leonard Cantor. Prais and Russ Russell (in separate contributions) compare U.K. training with the German system of “apprenticeship” that is compulsory until age 18 for all leaving full-time schooling. Alain d’hibarne describes the rapid changes of the past 20 years in France. In a paper that both participants and this reviewer particularly liked, Jones shows that the ratio of the pay of apprentices to that of adults is much higher in Great Britain than in Germany, a difference that, he argues, accounts for the difference between the chronic small excess of openings for apprentices over applicants in Germany and the much larger chronic large excess of applicants over openings in Great Britain. The remaining three papers are grouped under “education”. T. Neville Postlethwaite shows that British children in the bottom half of the distribution (as well as all children) score worse on International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement tests of reading comprehension, science, and mathematics than their counterparts in a few other countries - “even”, he says, the United States. William Taylor considers productivity and other values as possibly conflicting objectives of the educational system and influences on its development. Stuart Maclure provides a knowledgeable and entertaining essay suggesting that the British educational system is not very responsive to pressures to change, and that this may be a good thing. Maclure also serves as advocate for the absent teachers and their employment and pay safeguards. Ordinary competent teachers, he says, do not wish to protect incompetents but will not stand for authoritarian edicts from the Secretary of State, tinged “with that profound contempt for school teachers which Ministers, mandarins and industrial managers all have in common [even though they are] aware that their own gifts would be unlikely to keep them afloat in the fourth form of an inner city comprehensive school for more than 5 minutes”.
440
Book Reviews
All the papers are easy to understand (once one masters a seemingly interminable use of initials), almost all provide useful information. and most present the considered views of informed people. In no case, however, did I find a writer presenting an inference important for policy that could withstand assertions that an opposite inference was correct or. at least, that the evidence permitted no inference. One key unresolved issue concerns the relative merits of schools and employers as job trainers. Related and also important is the proper role of formal “credentials”. A country cannot have an efficient labor market if it prevents an individual from doing any type of work he knows how to do, no matter how he acquires or evidences that knowledge. or if it prohibits an employer from hiring an unqualified worker of any age and training him at work. Overreliance on certificates seems to me a weakness of the German economy. But it is argued that certificates motivate reluctant students to obtain skills and knowlcdae. Possibly certificates that. like merit badges, appeal only-to the recipient’s esteem will suffice but if motivation requires that certificates be prerequisites for jobs and not just evidence of the acquisition of a skill. which the employer can weigh as he likes, there is an obvious conflict with an open labor market. A possible subsidiary conflict is between offering certificates for small tasks and single subjects. which in this country is sometimes advocated for motivation, and restricting certificates to those who possess all the qualifications for an occupation or pass concurrent examinations in a wide range of subjects, a policy that was considered by some conference participants to be necessary for effective training or education. Some contributors, anxious to draw conclusions. yielded to the temptation to assert that if A’s economic performance exceeds B’s there is a presumption that anything it does differently is probably better. Mark Blaug takes Prais to task for inferring from such reasoning that the German training system surpasses the British. Blaug says more countries must be examined before one can “even begin” to take Prais‘s argument seriously; Dermot Glynn observes that, in sharp contrast to Germany, Japan (with a much higher growth rate) emphasizes education rather than training and avoids specialization at all educational levels. But more countries would not in any case be sufficient for an inference like Prais’s. The fact is that levels and growth rates of national income are governed by many determinants and it would be odd indeed to find countries ranked in the same order for every determinant as for the growth rate. The United States had a lower growth rate of national income in the 1950s and 1960s than most industrial countries despite an unusually large increase in the average amount of education of its workers, not because of it. Left unanswered is whether we know how to improve education. A new statement by the Committee for Economic Development. in the United States, claims that “research has shown what makes [good] schools effective” and we need only apply “what we already know” in every classroom; some participants in the conference clearly felt the same about Britain. Others felt we did not know but could find out; this reviewer has long suspected that during the past century everything conceivable must have been tried I000 times or more in the tens of thousands of school
systems in the United States and Britain, and that we keep going in circles mainly because experience is not recorded, recalled, and systematically evaluated. Maclure suggests the still more pessimistic view that ‘*educational research has produced few immediately marketable ideas or strategies” because there are no best ways; everything depends on circumstances. EIXVAK~ F. DENISON The Brookings Institution
Teachers, Unions, and Change: A Comparative Study. D.K. JESSUP. New York: Praeger, 1985. pp. x + 256. Price: $33.95 (cloth). CASE STUD~ESare often useful devices for the illumination of issues that are otherwise lost. in necessarily less detailed, albeit more general, theoretical accounts. Thus Teachers, Unions, and Change: A Comparative Study by Dorothy Kerr Jessup comes as a welcome change from typical theoretical accounts of union behavior. Dr Jessup’s book is a sociological study of the changes occurring within teachers’ unions and a description of the operation of those unions in the turbulent decade between 196X-1YhY and 1978-1979. The author surveys three southern New York State school districts. These districts were originally chosen because of the presence in them of union chapters affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers. Mailed survey questionnaires and interviews were employed in each district to elicit responses from teachers, administrators, and school board members to questions regarding the development and growth of the teachers union. The year 1968 is a significant date because in I967 New York Sate passed its Taylor law requiring collective bargaining for public employees and prohibiting public employee strikes. The study took place in an environment which was rapidly and dramatically changing. As an economist, this reviewer is usually called upon to study the impacts of unions on employers and workers. Jessup’s study. on the other hand, focuses on the internal dynamics within unions and of unions within the educational system rather than the impacts of unions themselves. In other words Jessup’s study focuses on the determinants of union impacts rather than on the existence of these impacts per se. It is clear that internal union dynamics are important in understanding the outcomes of union actions and while some of the results of the collective bargaining process may be well known, such as the union wage effect. Jessup’s work reminds the reader that differences in union leadership, bargaining opposition, union goals, union membership composition, and the historical era all have impacts on the process resulting in bargaining outcomes as well as the outcomes themselves. Economists see unions as having “two faces” a monopoly face and a collective voicciinstitutional rcaponse