Maria Fitzpatrick

 

For this post, I interviewed Professor Maria Fitzpatrick. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. In addition, she is the Director of the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs. Her research focuses on policies that affect children and families, and in particular, policies related to education. She studies them through the lens of economics.  

I interviewed Professor Fitzpatrick about her paper, “Early Retirement Incentives and Student Achievement.” In this paper, Professor Fitzpatrick and her coauthor, Michael Lovenheim, look at how these early retirement incentives (ERI) programs for teachers affect students’ academic performance. The results might surprise you.  

Professor Fitzpatrick explained to me that schools, or any employers, offer ERI’s as a cost-saving measure, since more experienced workers are usually more expensive than less experienced workers.  Instead of laying off workers, employers give them bonuses to choose to stop working, and retire early. In some cases, employers are suffering from the effects of a recession, and this is a convenient way to reduce the workforce. But there are other cases where the technology of an industry has changed over time, and newer, more recently trained workers are better-suited for certain jobs.

In the case of teachers, their pension plans are often designed so that it makes the most financial sense for them to work until a particular cutoff date, and retire on that date. Because of the ERI programs, they can now afford to retire early. 

The question these authors are asking is: how do ERI programs affect student learning? Some previous work has found that teacher effectiveness increases with experience. So we might expect that, when these more experienced teachers are replaced with new teachers, student performance would decrease. 

To test this, these authors measure performance with scores on standardized tests in math and English of third, sixth, and eighth graders. Using data from Illinois in the 1990s, they compare scores before and after ERI programs. They actually find that test scores increase as a result of the program.  

So what’s happening here? This is a policy that gives teachers a choice to retire early. While on average teacher quality seems to improve with experience, it’s likely that the least productive teachers are the ones who are taking advantage of the ERI programs: teachers who no longer enjoy teaching and are just waiting to reach that cutoff date, or maybe someone who has recently been sick and hasn’t been able to consistently come to school. We probably all have examples from our own experience of teachers who would fall into this category. Once these teachers take advantage of an ERI program, the higher quality experienced teachers remain, and test scores increase. Hence, we have an example of positive unintended consequences!

The authors also poke around at how different students might be affected differently. One important finding is that the largest increase in test scores from teacher retirements happens in schools that are in low income neighborhoods. This makes sense, because previous work has found that teachers tend to move to wealthier districts over their careers, and moving is easier for higher quality teachers.  

Even though the unintended consequences of this policy were positive, I did ask Professor Fitzpatrick if the results make her think that there might be better ways to design this policy. She told me that this study sheds light on the design of the pension plans: keeping teachers around until that cutoff date, and/or giving them an incentive to retire early may not be the best way to go when thinking about retaining the highest quality teachers. Instead, policymakers should be thinking about creative ways to retain the best teachers. 

I asked Professor Fitzpatrick about some of her other recent work. In her paper, “Pension-spiking, Free-riding, and the Effects of PensionReform on Teachers' Earnings,” she finds some very interesting unintended consequences of pension reform. Pension spiking happens when teachers work a lot towards the end of their careers, because their pensions are based on their work in these years. The government of Illinois tried to reduce pension payouts by preventing teachers from working a lot in just their last couple of years. Teachers responded by working more in the preceding years; so even though pension spiking appeared smoother, the pension fund did not save any money. 

Let’s talk! I would love to know what you think about this example of unintended consequences. Please submit comments and questions.

Carly Robinson

 

For this post, I interviewed Carly Robinson about her paper “The Demotivating Effect (and Unintended Message) of Awards.” Carly is a PhD candidate in Education at Harvard University. In her research, she focuses on experimentally testing specific measures that can be taken to improve students’ educational outcomes.

This paper is co-authored with Jana Gallus, Monica Lee, and Todd Rogers. The award that this paper looks at is one given to middle and high school students in California for excellent attendance. Several studies have shown that students with better attendance perform better in school. In many states, average daily attendance rates are also a determinant of funding for school districts. So, schools might be motivated to increase attendance for both of these reasons. 

The standard intuition that most of us have for awards more generally is that once someone receives one for an accomplishment, we would expect them to continue to strive to achieve in that realm.  In fact, in California, the government has encouraged schools to recognize students for good attendance. These authors wanted to see how effective different types of rewards were in encouraging good attendance after the announcement of the award. So, they conducted a field experiment. A field experiment is like an experiment in the lab, but it’s done out in the real world. These researchers conducted their experiment on more than 15,000 middle and high school students in California. There were three groups of students: one group didn’t get an award (the control group), one group was told that they had the chance to earn an award for having perfect attendance in February (a prospective award for their future behavior), and one earned a retrospective award for already having perfect attendance in a previous month. The retrospective award was an unannounced, surprise award.   

The researchers expected both award groups to have better attendance than the control group. But what they found was that those students who received the surprise, retrospective award missed 8% more days of school in February than those who did not receive an award. And the attendance of the students who had a chance to earn an award in February – the prospective group – was no different than that of the control group in that month. But in March their attendance decreased. So, both types of awards actually led to reduced attendance after the award period was over.

So, what’s happening here? The researchers think that, once students earn an award, they believe that  they have at least met, and likely surpassed what’s expected of them, and so they feel licensed to miss school going forward. And, interestingly, the researchers also find that academically low performing students have more absences after the award period than their high performing peers. Since these students are probably least likely to enjoy school, they may use having earned the attendance award to negotiate missing more school going forward. 

So, our standard intuition, and California’s recommendations, don’t appear to be working as intended! And, just in case you think that you should have known better: the researchers surveyed teachers and administrators; and only 2% of them predicted that an award would reduce attendance after the award period. 

I asked Carly what recommendations she has for improving school attendance, since awards don’t seem to work.  First, she pointed out that one reason these awards might not work is that good attendance is something that students should be doing all the time, and it is therefore not really award-worthy. A better way to reduce absences is to keep parents informed. Carly says that parents chronically underestimate their children’s absences. In this paper, you can see the results of another field experiment in which Carly and her coauthors gave parents real time information about the number of days their children had missed. As a result, attendance did improve.  

Let’s talk! I would love to know what you think about this example of unintended consequences. Please submit comments and questions.

Joseph Hotz

                                                     

For this post, I interviewed Professor Joseph Hotz. He is the Arts and Sciences Professor of Economics at Duke University. He is a labor economist who specializes in the economics of the family. His research spans the entire life cycle of the family, including the relationships between parents and children at various stages of their development.  

I interviewed Professor Hotz about his paper, “The Impact of Regulations on the Supply and Quality of Care in Child Care Markets.” In this paper, Professor Hotz and his coauthor, Professor Mo Xiao, seek to investigate the effects of policies that are designed to improve the quality of child care in the U.S.   

Child care centers are regulated at the state level. The regulations are mostly focused on insuring the welfare of children in the centers. They include: (1) maximum child to staff ratios, which vary by age of child; (2) maximum group size; and (3) educational requirements of staff. They also might include other rules like background checks for the staff, and some requirements for safety like equipment checks. But these authors focus on the three that I’ve enumerated, which are widely adopted by states. The specificity of the regulations, and their severity, vary by state.

There are also two types of centers: center-based, and home-based or family-based. The home-based centers tend to be smaller, and less stringently regulated. Developmental psychologists generally agree that center-based care is of higher quality, in terms of educational enrichment, than home-based care. 

The authors have detailed data about both types of child care centers in all 50 states, over the period from 1987 to 1997. And, it turns out that there are some interesting unintended consequences of the regulations. For one, the authors find that states that have more stringently regulated center-based care have fewer of these centers; and in particular it is low income neighborhoods that lose these centers, as compared to high income neighborhoods. Families tend to find care close to home, so it seems that these regulations, designed to ensure that centers are developmentally enriching, instead limit access to them; and more so for the families that might need them the most. In fact, as an example, if the average child to staff ratio (7.5) is imposed in low income child care markets, the number of centers would fall by 10%, whereas this requirement would lead to an increase of 8.7% in the number of centers in high income neighborhoods. Further, with fewer center-based care options, these low income children end up in family-based centers, in what is generally considered lower quality care.

There is some good news. The regulations seem to be working: the centers that do remain as a result of these stringent regulations tend to be of higher quality. However, again, these centers tend to be located in high income neighborhoods. So, overall, high income families are the ones benefiting from this care. All in all, it seems that high income families benefit from these regulations, while low income families might struggle to gain access to the best quality centers.  

I asked Professor Hotz if there would be a better way to design child care regulations, to avoid these negative unintended consequences. He told me that he believes that subsidies to low income households should be the focus. Such subsidies do exist, but the emphasis has often been on the parents, with the goal of helping a parent, usually a mother, get off of welfare and into work. The subsidy will get a child into daycare, but with less attention paid to the quality of the care. He argues that the focus should be on the child. For example, it should not be a requirement that the mother must work in order to receive the subsidy. Developmental psychologists have made some headway on this issue, and it’s made some progress in Congress. But it has not gotten off the ground yet.  

I asked Professor Hotz about some of his other recent work. In this paper, he and his coauthors are studying families with stepkin. They are interested in learning about how much time stepparents spend with their adult stepchildren, and how much time adult children spend with their elderly stepparents. 

Let’s talk! I would love to know what you think about this example of unintended consequences. Please submit comments and questions.