Sophie Sandor Sophie Sandor

Tianah

When I ask 20-somethings just out of university what they want to do, they often tell me that they would rather not work for a company driven by profit. “Profit-making isn’t a good cause.” Seeking profit is a sign of “greed”.

I realised that something needed to be done to address this trendy aversion to capitalism. The economic case for the profit motive has been around for a long time, but many young people are not taking notice, if they have ever even encountered it. So I created Tianah, a short documentary about my friend, to show the human side of profit.

Tianah tells the story of how ambitious entrepreneur, 23-year- old designer Christianah Jones, went from a teenage Psychology student selling clothes from her bedroom on the Depop app, to the businesswoman who created the famous Slim Shady sunglasses brandished by Bella Hadid and Kaia Gerber today.

This is a snapshot in the life of one of the many entrepreneurs active in London in 2018 – a celebration of individualism, technological advancement, and the beauty and necessity of the profit motive.

When Tianah was a teenager she was a fan of style. Since there are so many styles to try, she hated wearing the same thing twice. This made her stand out, but led to clothes stacking up in her bedroom. To get rid of them and make quick money, she sold them along with other cheaply sourced fashion finds that she would patch up herself. It became a hobby, and demand grew. It was when she made a profit and sales kept improving that she realised this is how she might not only make a living, but achieve the success in life she desired.

Tianah took the risk of quitting her graduate job and abandoning her plan to continue her studies to master’s and PhD level. Then she could focus full-time on her business and creating her own fashion lines. With no other income, this step forced her to find increasingly imaginative ways of sourcing labour and materials and keep ahead of what the young masses craved.

It is an inspiring story; it says that backing down from your ambitions in the face of popular beliefs can compromise not only your own success, but your ability to lift the cynics up with you. Tianah explains why profit is vitally important to her survival and why she aims far higher than merely getting by.

If Tianah invests her time, money, special knowledge, and materials into making her latest fashion idea a reality, and these efforts make money, it is a signal. It means that her product – the combination of the resources she brought together in her own way – is more valuable than the sum of its parts, more valuable than those parts were before her vision connected them. If she loses money, she is destroying value, and those resources would have been better expended elsewhere.

As Tianah puts it, nothing is free in this world; she gives people the feel-good factor and she receives something in return for that.

By choosing to buy Slim Shadys, someone has decided that the money it would cost to buy the Slim Shadys is worth less to them than the Slim Shadys being on their face. It is personal; the customer knows best. Others are free to come along and create a better product. But when Tianah does it better, she wins the customers’ money and creates more of the same product that is making people better off than they otherwise would have been. Crucially, the product will become more ubiquitous and affordable as creators realise there is money to be made and compete for business.

Slim Shady sales are an example of this process which transcends fashion and can improve everything from supermarkets to schooling. It is a process that leads to more wealth being created, not taken from anywhere. It is why, throughout history, entrepreneurs such as Tianah contribute to human progress. Profit-seeking means everyone gets richer and life gets better.

Profit makes the world go ‘round.

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Energy & Environment Sophie Sandor Energy & Environment Sophie Sandor

Scotland's irrational GM crop ban

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The Scottish government has decided to ban genetically modified crops to ensure Scotland maintains its ‘clean, green status’. This phrase, symbolic of what we are supposed to want to preserve, has not been defined, and we have no way of discerning exactly how it relates to the consequences of GM crops. Richard Lochhead, Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and Scottish National Party Member, announced the policy as Scotland's stance, ahead of the government's request to be exempted from EU-authorised GM crops. None of the reasons given for the prohibition follow from the evidence we have about GM crops nor from countries’ experiences with them. One anti-GM-crop writer, Mike Small of Bella Caledonia, remarkably complained we are falling foul of an ‘expertocracy’ because of our ‘unswerving devotion to scientists’. He has also given a number of reasons why we should support the prohibition of GM crops in Scotland. Among those were that GM crops are a long-term economic disaster for farmers; do not increase yield potential; increase pesticide use; and have not been shown to be safe to eat. These claims are simply wrong.

If we take a look at a meta-analysis conducted last year of the impacts of genetically modified organisms we see that the agronomic and economic benefits of GM crops are large and significant. The positive feedback we hear from people in developing countries is reflected in the studies as we find that yield and profit gains are higher in developing countries than in developed countries. It concludes that, on average, GM technology has increased crop yields by 21%, reduced pesticide quantity by 37% and pesticide cost by 39%, and meant average profit gains of 69% for GM-adopting farmers.

 

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The World Health Organisation has verified that all GM foods available in the international market have passed safety assessments and are not likely to present risks for human health. People have been consuming them for decades in the United States and in 2014 GM crops made up 94% of soybean acreage, 93% of all corn planted, and 96% of all cotton. For as long as populations have consumed them no resulting effects on human health have been shown in the countries where they have been approved.

While farmers in the rest of the UK are looking to take advantage of GM technology, farmers in Scotland are concerned by the Scottish Parliament's backwards policy; spokespeople for the agricultural industry say it will impede their efficiency and competitiveness. They are right: Scottish farmers will not be capable of competing in the same market as their neighbours if shut off from technological advances just as other countries are adopting GM crops.

To give any credence to Mike Small and similar superstitious claims would be to completely go against accepted evidence and rationality. So if Scottish politicians follow through with the GMO prohibition without any credible counteracting evidence that it would be harmful for Scotland, it will not only hold the country back, but the boundaries of scientific research will be redefined and Scotland might lose its leading research experts to more supportive political environments.

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Education Sophie Sandor Education Sophie Sandor

Regulating away Britain's best teachers

The latest report from The Sutton Trust (pdf) looks at a topic it last visited in 2003: how the backgrounds of state school teachers compare to those of independent school teachers. Its finding is that there is still a significant difference between the proportion of teachers at state and independent schools that have studied at the UK's best universities. Independent school teachers were also found to be the most likely to have a degree in the main subject that they teach. Here is the percentage of all teachers who attended a Russel Group University, by post-A level qualification:

Most people would expect this result. But what is more surprising, yet garners less attention, is that the heavily-regulated environment of state education hinders its flexibility to hire the same, or better, quality of teachers as independent schools.

There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that the lack of formal requirements for teachers entering the independent sector actually encourages, rather than discourages, applications from graduates of some of the UK's leading universities, because top applicants wish to enter the teaching sector immediately, rather than pursuing further qualifications.

State schools in England, Wales and Scotland are required to be registered with the NCTL and their General Teaching Councils, respectively. Private schools are free of this requirement and can hire applicants with specialist subject knowledge that want to teach soon after they leave their field of expertise.

In independent schools, teachers are not required to have Qualified Teacher Status, which, according to Elliott Lockhart's 2010 survey "has led some to portray teachers in the independent sector as unregulated, unaccountable and lacking the necessary professional preparation that would make them fit to teach."

As we know from the report and our general experience of the private education market, this is far from the case and actually strengthens the choice of employees that independent schools benefit from. For Scotland, this is particularly concerning as we are about to enact a law (see a recent Telegraph article about it here) making independent schools subject to the same requirements as state schools. So we would practically have no schools not subject to these restrictions.

Right now Scottish independent schools, like is the case in all of the UK's constituent parts, take advantage of teachers registered outside of Scotland and this legislation would prevent that. On top of this, the Scottish government also doesn't engage with Teach First; a programme that is injecting fresh talent into schools in England and Wales and is one of the reasons, judging by the teacher background metric, that state schools have been catching up with independent schools in the last 12 years.

Scottish politicians should reject the Education (Scotland) Bill as private schools are the perfect testing ground for trying out what works and doesn't work. Subjecting them to the same rules as state schools will impede progress and diminish their autonomy - they're independent for a reason.

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Education Sophie Sandor Education Sophie Sandor

School choice for Scotland

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Nevada has become the first state in the US to enact a law making school choice universal. This is a groundbreaking example for other countries mildly experimenting with school choice. Adopting something similar in the UK context is an especially interesting idea. It works through an education savings account (ESA) in which the state deposits what it would averagely expend educating a child under the state system. Parents can use this fund for everything from school fees to private tuition – the choice offered in educational services being as wide-ranging and high-quality as individuals demand. And the catchment allocation of pupils to schools they don’t want to attend is a thing of the past.

Notably, families can roll over unused funds from year to year, a feature that makes this approach particularly attractive. It is the only choice model to date that puts downward pressure on prices. Parents consider not only the quality of education service they receive, but the cost, since they can save unused funds for future education expenses.

Scotland, with roughly double the population size of Nevada and a completely devolved education system, could technically do something similar. Not least because it's an idea that people of all political ideologies seem to be supportive of (see my previous post), but there is no freedom of movement in the education system – something that is neither fair on those trapped in the postcode of poorer schools nor an efficient way of driving up standards.

Remarkably many UK private schools at the cheaper end of the spectrum are running at a lower cost than state schools. Take a look at a 2011 paper (pdf) by James Croft that breaks down the cost of state and private sector schools, controlling for expenditures particular to each. Given that profit-making schools can achieve better outcomes for less money, the state handing back the cost of a child's 'free' education would enable people to attend a private school who previously couldn't afford it.

41% operate on fee levels less than, or on a par with, the national average per pupil funding in the state-maintained sector. On average, fees are approximately £7,500 annually. Fees at the more accessible end of the spectrum attract a high proportion of first-time buyers of independent education.

The best education policy currently on offer in Scotland is detailed in the Scottish Conservatives' 2016 Holyrood election manifesto (pdf) which promises school vouchers. But realistically, 60% of Scottish people voting next year are planning to support the SNP. There's just no avoiding for now that Scottish politicians will churn out yet more legislation from our unicameral conveyor belt to undermine independent schools’ autonomy and unintentionally halt our education system's advancement.

Take the Education (Scotland) Bill 2015 (pdf), which I have highlighted in a recent post for an unreasoned section that attempts to outlaw inequality in state schools – if it's successfully implemented teachers not registered with Scotland's General Teaching Council will be barred from teaching.This will massively limit what expert teaching Scottish pupils are exposed to. Meanwhile looms the threat that charitable status, and therefore up to 80% tax relief, will be removed from private schools, affecting hundreds of bursaries for disadvantaged children.

Interference with the better-performing independent schools and misdirected moves in state sector has created an environment in which it is impossible for an education market with school choice and low-cost private schools to emerge. Until we take steps in the right direction, the transience of politics will prove to be either a blessing or a curse.

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Education Sophie Sandor Education Sophie Sandor

The long history of school choice division

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Most people, acting rationally, would prefer to choose the school their child goes to as opposed to having their child forcibly assigned to a school. So opposition to school choice seems no less strange wherever it comes from. Nonetheless understanding the reasons is enlightening. The divide of opinion on school vouchers in the States, for example, is portrayed as being between the left and the right. Or Republicans against Democrats and whites against minorities. But it is not as simple as this and not really the case. A new paper (pdf) by Shuls and Wolf studies the empirical reality regarding the political and racial divide over vouchers and explains its history in the U.S to offer conclusions about the logic of political support of and opposition to school choice. It also explains, for the unacquainted, what we mean when we talk about private school choice.

These two charts demonstrate the rise and prevalence of Private School Choice Programs in the States today:

 

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The interesting finding is that while support for vouchers does tend to be higher among Republicans, support at the policymaking level is found both among ideological Democrats of the social-justice-promoting kind like Senator Corey Booker, and Republicans like Senator Rand Paul who support free markets. Those opposed tend to be moderate and mostly rural Republicans and establishment Democrats.

Teachers’ unions contribute more money than any other interested party to election candidates in the U.S. Of their campaign contributions, 88-99% of national-level, and 80-90% of state-level, contributions have gone to Democrats. The priority policy issue for the main teaching unions – the National Education Association and (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) – is to stop the spread of private school choice. Therefore one reason why so many Democrats may actually be opposed to school choice is that they would be doing so in spite of their single largest funder.

On the contrary, one has to ask why elected politicians in the U.S would support private school choice given teaching unions’ opposition. Research conducted for the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice found 40% of parents polled would prefer to send their child to a private school and 10% of respondents would rather a public charter school. Private school vouchers were supported by 63% of respondents.

As DiPerna reports, “The demographic groups having the highest positive margins and most likely to favor school vouchers are school parents (+42 points), Southerners (+36 points), Republicans (+42 points), young voters (+44 points), low-income earners (+47 points), African Americans (+50 points), and Latinos (+47 points)” (DiPerna 2014, p. 14).

Reports from parents are far-off actual enrolment figures. The National Center for Educational Statistics tells us 9% of K-12 students attend private schools and 4% attend charter schools. So the Friedman Foundation poll suggests that opposition from the unions is pitted against popular opinion, especially in areas with more young people and ethnic minorities.

Inspired by the Prisoner's Dilemma, the School Choice Dilemma explains some of this by  illustrating the compelling reasons for the opposition and support found in various political factions. Imagine two groups of students, one "advantaged" and one "disadvantaged"; one has enjoyed educational trips, access to materials and so on and the other hasn't. When both are given the opportunity to either accept their assigned school or to choose it themselves, they will be impacted in different ways.

If they both accept the assigned school, then there will be a mix of advantaged and disadvantaged students, which benefits (B) the disadvantaged from integrating with a brighter peer group; but may actually harm (H) the advantaged. Compared to this, the diagram shows that both will have an incentive to 'defect' and move to a situation where only they get S—the benefit of school choice. Advantaged students can already do this by buying houses near good schools or going to private schools—but the disadvantaged achieve this through targeted vouchers.

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The conclusion is that we will probably continue to see rational politicians from both sides oppose school choice as the establishment in both parties have strong political incentives for protecting the status quo. Meanwhile social-justice politicians see school choice as a means to improving educational outcomes for disadvantaged students, and free-market individuals see school choice as a fundamental way to make education more efficient.

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Education Sophie Sandor Education Sophie Sandor

Charter schools and the aspiring classes

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There is significant research concluding that the ever-spreading charter schools in the U.S. are markedly improving pupils’ performance. Charter schools are free to attend, open to all children and publicly funded but independently run – the most similar comparison close to home being the Free Schools Programme in England. Since the first charter school law passed in Minnesota in 1991, almost seven thousand have opened with two and a half million children now being educated in a charter school. Previous studies have looked at lottery estimates. These compare how charter applicants perform when admitted to a charter school with how they would have performed had they attended a state school as the randomness ensures there are no systematic differences between those selected and not selected. But these studies do not account for pupils who never applied to a charter school and ended up attending one. Or for pupils attending charter schools for which demand is weak.

A new discussion paper (pdf) by Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Joshua D. Angrist, Peter D. Hull, and Parag A. Pathak does just this by testing the treatment effects of charter school attendance on middle-schoolers that are part of the new takeovers in New Orleans and Boston.

Takeovers see traditional state schools closed and then re-opened as charter schools. Students enrolled in schools designated for closure are eligible to be ‘grandfathered’ into the newly-opened charter schools. This means that they are guaranteed a place.

What this new paper finds is that highly disadvantaged students have experienced substantial gains in their achievement after enrolling in takeovers passively. It was previously believed that urban charter lottery applicants enjoy an unrepresentatively large benefit from charter attendance because they are either highly motivated or uniquely primed to benefit from the education these schools offer. Now we have both estimates from grandfathering and lottery-based research that weigh against this view.

These successes have also prompted similar approaches to be explored in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee despite the controversy caused by the proliferation of charter takeovers in New Orleans, Boston and elsewhere.

Charters Without Lotteries: Testing Takeovers in New Orleans and Boston is one report of what is becoming a substantial compilation of literature on why charter schools are working. They are some of the top-performing schools in the country with a higher percentage of charter school students accepted into a college or university. They are raising the bar of what is possible and should be expected in public education.

Teachers in charter schools are given the freedom to innovate and have more powers to explore the best practices. The schools can adopt themes and focus on specific fields like STEM subjects, performing arts or meeting the special needs, for example, of autistic children.

How charter schools are quickly extending choice to the poorest is exciting. And crucial. It is not widely recognised that choice already exists – but for the wealthiest. The most privileged can not only afford private schools but through the state school catchment system the housing market is the market for schools. An accepted way of boosting real estate is by improving schools as families want to buy houses in areas with good schools. School choice gives the poor a way to access the already existing market.

The disadvantaged are on the rise and benefiting more than ever from state education as a result of what is the best prominent educational movement in the U.S right now.

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Education Sophie Sandor Education Sophie Sandor

Scotland must Finnish that myth

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Just after the independence referendum was a momentous time to be in that exhausted Chamber of the Scottish Parliament. It marked the first debate not focussed on the constitution for as long as we could remember. And education was finally the centre of attention.

The attainment gap in Scottish state schools is something that the main parties in Scotland care about a lot. Oft-quoted statistics portraying state schools practically next to each other as performing at opposite ends of the attainment spectrum provide the impetus. 

It is true - Scotland's 'educational apartheid’ has been described as a ‘national disgrace’. Now Scotland’s First Minister is behind a dangerously vague and impossible Education Bill (pdf) that proposes to outlaw inequality if it receives cross-party support in Holyrood this year.

So closing this ‘gulf' in performance, to most Scottish politicians, is a worthy goal. And perhaps this remains part of the appeal of the Finnish education system. Its schools are among the most uniform in the world. 

Certainly in 2001, when Finland came to be regarded as an education superpower, its results in the OECD’s Programme for International Assessment (PISA) made it the most desirable model in the world. 

Of the 41 nations that took part that year, Finland was impressively topping the tables in science, mathematics and reading and competing with the notoriously well-performing Asian nations. Ever since then we have been making the most myopic movements in education reform in order to emulate their achievements.

Indeed, Scotland’s controversial Curriculum for Excellence was largely inspired by the Finnish model. Created in 2004 and implemented in 2010, CfE has been one of these unimaginative, inside-the-box changes in the Scottish schooling sphere. 

To counteract the case made that more school choice and competition between schools is the answer to spreading quality and innovation, the Finnish argument is still made. The correlation between the reforms in Finland and the time of its exemplary PISA results has led to the common conclusion that the reforms caused the success.

In this very debate following the referendum, Kezia Dugdale, the deputy leader of the Scottish Labour Party, once more spoke of her visit to Finland and lessons we should still be learning from the country’s example.

Remarkably, until now, nobody has actually scratched beneath the surface of this spiel. The Centre for Policy Studies has just published Real Finnish Lessons (pdf) by Gabriel Heller Sahlgren of CMRE. It is the first paper of its kind to take a reasoned and thorough look at the Finnish schooling sensation. 

The first point of note is that performance began declining since those reforms were enacted. 

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What the new analysis tell us is that Finland’s rise accelerated primarily during the old system when the traditionalist, rote-learning pedagogy was at its core. 

While results increased by approximately the equivalent of 23 TIMSS points between 1965 and 1980, they rose a further 32 points in the 1980s. They also increased a further 34 points in the 1990s, but started to level off in the latter part of the decade, and ultimately started to decline in the mid-2000s.

Considering the age of the pupils when they were tested, the strongest gains took place when pupils mostly attended school before the old system was entirely abolished.

Other data, too, supports the general trajectory of rise and decline in international surveys. 

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Here we see that performance improved while male youngsters attended primary—and lower—secondary school before the old system was entirely abolished and began falling when they became exposed to the new one. 

Real Finnish Lessons convincingly shows how Finland’s outcomes are better explained by a detailed examination of its political, social and cultural underpinnings by looking beyond the fashionable explanations in the international media. It concludes that those popular policy-related reasons for its rise to prominence do not stand up to scrutiny and if anything coincide with its slippage.

The current Scottish Government continues to prioritise eliminating inequality while advocating the Finnish school-style characteristics. But it is clear, now, as we still send our education ministers to Finland each year, that we have been following a flawed interpretation of their system. 

In a competitive system schools adopt the methods that work—not fashionable educationalist fads—and the misinterpretation of Finnish data would be much less likely to happen. Choice would see the schools that work spread whatever the orthodoxy of the day says. Unlike in a government-controlled system where well-meaning Progressive ministers can effectively overturn everything without parental consent.

So with increasing evidence in our favour, it is time to consider that steps towards choice, competition and innovation are key.

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Economics, Politics & Government Sophie Sandor Economics, Politics & Government Sophie Sandor

Are EU scared?

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One of the greatest fallacies of the Scottish independence referendum was that Scotland was being offered “independence”. Yes, we would have been independent in many respects. But the undisputed plan was to immediately begin re-acceding to the European Union. 

Whatever this meant - from fulfilling requirements to become a member again to no longer being one of the big players (usually meaning France, Germany and the UK) with a greater say than the other nations - we certainly weren’t going to be independent. 

It was not only concerning to witness it seldom questioned by Scottish people that we would be rejoining the EU - despite expecting an in/out EU referendum as part of the UK - but it is concerning, too, that the majority of pro-EU politicians don’t want to reform it or even to achieve a better deal for Britain.

What is more, there is a lot of scaremongering going on as fans of the European project say we couldn’t survive without many of our decisions being taken in Strasbourg. 

A new report authored by Ewen Stewart, Stuart Coster and Brian Monteith seeks to dispel the myths about the UK’s survival without the EU and explains why a Brexit would not bring economic isolation to the UK as scaremongering claims by politicians suggest.

The paper has five arguments to show why often-repeated political claims are intimidating the British electorate into shutting their minds to the possibility of change and preventing a rational debate taking place:

1. In reality, the EU is more dependent on being able to export to our significant market than we are on selling to the European Single Market.

2. There is a real threat to UK employment, influence and broader prosperity if we do decide to remain an EU member.

3. Our future economic well-being depends instead on gaining access and selling to the faster-expanding markets that lie beyond the EU.

4. Employment growth would be even stronger if Britain was free to adopt bilateral arrangements of its own, outside membership of the EU.

5. A growing percentage of cross-border issues and regulatory requirements are determined now by bodies at the global level.

A lot of research is looked into about the UK's performance in comparison to that of the European Union. And the conclusion reached is that British jobs are not dependent on the EU and so this is no reason to leave. Jobs would in fact be gained by leaving the EU.

The UK has performed much more strongly over the last 6 and 12 year time horizons that EU averages while 14 out of our 20 fastest growing markets are with non-EU nations.

We have global links with the Americas, Asia and Africa, as well as the Commonwealth, meaning it is perfectly possible that the UK could have good trading relationships with not just our European neighbours but the rest of the world by enabling trade policy to be determined at home.

The political stability of the UK, the English language and the rule of law coupled with secure property rights and a population that is by far and away the most diverse in Europe mean we will always continue to benefit from global growth.

If the Scottish independence referendum is anything to go by - scaremongering a population about change can make the positive arguments shine and usually backfires. Hopefully it does.

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Education Sophie Sandor Education Sophie Sandor

Battle against the union blob

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It is not surprising that teaching unions are objecting to the proposed 2% pay rise for England’s top teachers. Unions have long protested against performance-based pay for teachers and now they pose another barrier to the School Teachers Review Body. In the STRB's latest submission (pdfto the government, highlighted is the need for a wages increase to encourage the desired competition in the teaching profession.

Arguments against pay incentives are that they encourage ‘teaching to the test’ and orchestrated cheating by teachers and schools. Performance gains are accepted to exist but said to be short-lived. While the long-term benefits, they say, are non-existent and there may even be damage done in the long-run.

But the latest research examining their impact on pupils demonstrates the opposite as being true. Pay for performance schemes are becoming increasingly implemented and contemplated in many developed and developing countries and have re-emerged at the top of the policy agenda in the U.S. They are not just a brilliant way of distinguishing the strivers from the shirkers in schooling systems. Such schemes are reaping good long-term labour market outcomes, too.

Research (pdf) published last month by Victor Lavy looks at a study conducted a decade and a half ago in Israel to determine if there are improvements to future education enrolment, earnings and probability of claiming unemployment benefits. 

The study is the first of its kind to follow students from high-school to adulthood to examine the impact of a teachers’ pay for performance scheme on long-run life outcomes. It found:

A decade after the end of the intervention, treated students are 4.3 percentage points more likely to enrol in a university and to complete an additional 0.17 years of university schooling, a 60 percent increase relative to the control group mean. The road to higher university enrolment and completed years of schooling was paved by the overall improvement in high school matriculation outcomes due to the teachers’ intervention.

So merit-based pay actually improves students' lifetime well-being, judging by school attainment, annual earnings and welfare-dependency, as well as recognising the hardworking, high-flying teachers and making it a more attractive profession.

If we could achieve a similar flexibility in what the best teachers can be paid in the UK, like proposed in the STRB's report, it would mitigate the pressures being faced by schools experiencing increasingly competitive graduate labour markets, tightening budgets and demographics driving up pupil numbers.

A difficulty in recruiting NQTs and experienced classroom teachers in this country has been identified by head teacher unions. A key cause being that salary progression is faster for able graduates in other professions, with the opportunity to reach higher levels of earning as their careers progress, than for the teaching profession.

Ideologically-driven unions are the main enemy of change as they still make it difficult to get rid of timeserving teachers and are hostile to the ambitious reformers in schools and policy-making. It is time to start thinking about the market value of teachers’ talents and penetrate the dogmatic ‘blob’ that the old hat education establishment represents.

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Education Sophie Sandor Education Sophie Sandor

Teachers unions are bad for kids

Though everyone typically sees unions as being mainly for the benefit of their members, teachers' unions use a lot of pro-student rhetoric and often come across fairly angelic. They probably do have only the kids' interests at mind, but a new paper suggests that their existence doesn't necessarily benefit those kids.

Data comparing students' outcomes to teacher unionisation has until recently been fairly lacking. But according to the new study published last month, duty-to-bargain laws (which  mean employers need to work with unions) lead to significantly worse labour market outcomes for students in schools subject to them.

Previous research has shown us that teacher collective bargaining laws increase teacher union membership and increase the likelihood that a school district unionises for the purpose of collective bargaining—i.e. they achieve their direct goals. But looking into the effect on the kids has been hampered by a lack of information liking people’s outcomes and the time that duty-to-bargain laws were passed.

This new study, conducted in the US by Michael F. Lovenheim and Alexander Willen, takes the timing of the passing of the duty-to-bargain laws between 1969 and 1987 and links them with long run educational and labour market outcomes among 35-49 year olds in 2005-2012, i.e. those subject to them..

What they found was that men subject to increased unionisation work less hours as adults and earn less. There is also evidence of a small decline in educational attainment for men and a long-run negative effect on labour supply for women that is equal in magnitude to that of men.

Of course, some of the kids tin this paper were subject to a vastly different educational environment than exists today, so we can't necessarily extrapolate to the UK. Nonetheless the general finding is quite plausible, and should contribute to policy debates around increasing or reducing the role of collective bargaining in the education sector.

If future research in this field continues to make the negative relationship apparent, we may be ever closer to exposing how teaching unions lower educational standards by supporting the timeservers over the strivers in the teaching profession.

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