Why School Choice Matters Beyond Academic Achievement!

Vincent Geloso  – June 26, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research 

 

With the pandemic-associated school closures in America, the level of parental discontent towards public schools has been growing. The response of teachers’ unions was particularly irksome to parents who turned in greater numbers to homeschooling and other educational arrangements. This has been accompanied by rising levels of support for school choice as witnessed by the new frequently shared bullet point of “funding students, not systems.” In some states, such as West Virginia, the discontent has allowed a bevy of legislation curtailing the powers of the teachers’ unions. 

The discontent has caused unions to push back to calm down criticisms. In addition to getting heavily involved in electoral politics (even at the city level) to promote union-friendly candidates, they have produced important talking points regarding the efficacy of school choice on securing better outcomes for children. More often than not, the rebuttal speaks to issues of cognitive development and schooling outcomes. Proponents of school choice have only been too happy to accept a debate on these narrow grounds. 

To be sure, there is now a wide body of empirical evidence on the effects of granting parents more choices in choosing the schools of their children. Many of these studies use top-of-the-line research methods to determine causality in their findings. The vast majority of the evidence suggests that there are important gains with regards to academic performance. There are some discordant notes. Some research papers contest the presence of performance gains for children. However, this minority part of the literature does not argue that school choice made outcomes worse. It tends to find near-zero effects on outcomes. Thus, the worst-case scenario is “no effect,” which is still a strong case for school choice as such programs appear to reduce total expenditures. On net, this worst-case scenario implies that the same outcomes can be secured at lowest costs. 

However, all of this constitutes an understatement of the benefits of allowing parents to choose schools for their children. Proponents of school choice have unwittingly selected to hinder the strength of their arguments! 

It is important to bear in mind that schooling is not only about academic achievements. There is much to it! Schooling serves to help children socialize and develop emotional control. These aspects of schooling are not of trivial importance. Just as cognitive development, they are associated with better outcomes in adulthood (e.g. higher levels of schooling persistence, higher levels of life satisfaction, higher levels of income etc.). Given the importance of these non-cognitive aspects of schooling, we should expect parents to care about a wider array of features than those captured by grades. 

As a result, allowing families to choose may allow parents to pick the mix of school features most suited for their children accordingly. Among the factors that parents will weigh are those that speak to the overall health and safety of their children, which are related to socialization and the development of emotional control. In turn, this would impact the later-life well-being in children. Most notably, as is argued in a recent article in School Effectiveness and School Improvement by Angela Dills and Corey DeAngelis, it could allow improvements in the “mental health” outcomes of children. 

The better matching of children to their schools may allow them to feel more at ease in their immediate environment. This would reduce distress and improve mental health. Second, school choice creates competitive pressures to entice families to enroll. As such, schools would attempt to compete with each other not only on academic outcomes but also on non-academic factors such as the policing of bullies or the psychological support offered to children. This would also improve mental health outcomes. Thus, mental health outcomes should improve in states that adopt school choice relative to states that do not. 

How to measure these improvements? In their article, Dills and DeAngelis propose that suicide rates by adolescents constitute a viable measure of the mental well-being of pupils. If school choice programs improve mental well-being, they hypothesize that suicide rates ought to fall (all else being equal). Concentrating on the United States, they find that states that adopted broad-based voucher programs (which are designed to give parents more choices) experienced declines in suicide rates. The effect they find represents a reduction of 10 percent in suicides among 15 to 19 years old. 

Unsatisfied by these results, Dills and DeAngelis also attempted to complement their results by using surveys of self-reported mental health outcomes. For example, these surveys asked respondents how many times, during the past twelve months, they were treated by mental health professionals. They also asked questions regarding eating disorders (e.g. anorexia, bulimia) or other emotional problems that affected school attendance. The answers to these questions can be taken as complementary to the issue of adolescent suicides. 

However, their survey data is a bit different than their suicide rates data: they only have cross-sections for a few given years and their variable of interest is whether a child was in a private school. This poses a problem of interpretation for any results as kids who go to private school could be going because they are more/less fragile to start with. To address this problem, Dills and DeAngelis control for the initial level of a child’s mental health at the time of enrollment. 

This method yields similar results as those for suicide rates: they find better mental outcomes where school choice exists. The likelihood of suffering from emotional problems is reduced by between 1.9 and 2.9 percentage points. Those numbers are not trivial, as the mean rate of mental disorder in their sample is 3% of the population. While these may appear small, these effects complement those Dills and DeAngelis found with regards to adolescent suicides.

These are important findings. In discussions of school choice, the focus is predominantly on academic achievements. As a result, the conversation is centered on whether or not test scores improve. However, it is always worthwhile to take account of the bigger picture. Schooling is not only about what government departments can easily measure; it is also about these harder to measure aspects of a child’s well-being which parents are often best incentivized to understand and identify. Bearing that in mind only strengthens the case for allowing more room for school choice. As the pandemic crisis unwinds, lessons about how to best proceed in the future should include this finding of Dills and DeAngelis.

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Vincent Geloso

Vincent Geloso, senior fellow at AIER, is an assistant professor of economics at King’s University College. He obtained a PhD in Economic History from the London School of Economics.

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Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich’s Second Bet

Vincent Geloso – March 11, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research

In the 1960s and 1970s, environmental scares were rampant. Multiple books, such as Ernst Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful and Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, forecasting a dire future were published. The connection they made was simple: the rapid pace of economic development of the West came at high environmental costs. The depictions of these costs fell into two categories. The first was rising pollution which would reduce quality of life. The second was imminent limits to growth due to the fact that population growth was outpacing the finite quantity of resources available on the planet. 

While the former category is still a subject of debate, the latter no longer is thanks to a famous bet between economist Julian Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich. Simon had, since the early 1970s, been one of the few consistent academic voices (alongside Herman Kahn) arguing that population and economic growth were key methods of providing solutions to environmental problems. For Simon, more people meant more ideas and innovations which, in turn, meant more value created and a greater ability to solve environmental problems. 

To make his case, Simon published an article in Social Science Quarterly that taunted Paul Ehrlich, the main proponent of imminent doom, into taking a bet on their respective views. If population growth was outpacing the finite quantity of resources, the prices of key resources should (theoretically) be rising. If prices increased, then Ehrlich would be vindicated. If not, Simon would be. Ehrlich chose five resource prices and bet on their trends over a decade. Simon won the debate, as all five commodities (copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten) declined in the wager period of 1980 to 1990. 

Since then, the bet has become a bludgeon that conservatives have been using against environmental activists. Indeed, the bet is frequently referred to argue that claims of doom are overblown and that proposed remedies are thus unnecessary.

However, like most political memes, the bet actually says much less than what those who use it to bludgeon suggest. The bet only quashed the latter category of claims regarding the connection between economic growth and environmental indicators. Indeed, the evidence regarding agricultural productivity, farm yields, transport innovation, energy efficiency and dematerialization (the use of smaller and smaller quantities of natural resources to produce 1$ of GDP) conclusively point in that direction: humanity does have a tremendous ability to eliminate the problem of limits to growth due to the finiteness of natural resources. 

But the former category remains as there are signs that economic prosperity is tied to greater pollution. The bet does not deal with this type of environmental concern. However, there was a second bet between Ehrlich and Simon which is not very well known and which allows us to see that Simon’s optimistic worldview deals with that second category of concern. 

After losing to Simon, Ehrlich proposed a new wager. Alongside Stephen Schneider, Ehrlich challenged Simon to bet on 15 environmental trends that related to global temperatures, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, ozone concentrations, sulfur dioxide, cropland, wheat and rice output, oceanic fisheries, firewood, virgin forests, deaths from AIDS, sperm count in human males, and wealth gaps. The bet spanned ten years (from 1994 to 2004). Simon, however, rejected that bet. 

He was right to do so as Pierre Desrochers, Joanna Szurmak and I point out in an article (in two parts) in Social Science Quarterly. Simon would have lost 11 of the 15 indicators. Even when the time frame is extended to the most recent estimates of each indicator, Simon loses to Ehrlich and Schneider (who win 9 out of 15). However, for two interrelated reasons, we point out that the terms in this second wager allow a much richer understanding of the views of Julian Simon than the first bet. 

First of all, Simon argued that many of the indicators that Ehrlich and Schneider proposed had very little to do with human welfare. In fact, Simon frequently argued that losing these indicators would be a sign of vindication of his views. Consider the portion of the second part of the bet that related to oceanic fish catches per capita. Simon pointed out that aquaculture (fish farming) had a great potential for higher productivity than oceanic fisheries. 

Thus, while it is technically true that there are fewer oceanic catches per capita, it is also true that the world witnessed a continuous increase in the quantity of fish and seafood products supplied per capita (+27% since 1994) thanks to aquaculture. This has allowed many wild fish populations, which international organizations had deemed to be in danger, to recover from decades of oceanic overfishing. In other words, Simon argued that environmental outcomes only make sense when they are connected to the consequences for human welfare.  

Secondly, the counter-wager allows us to see how important institutions were to Julian Simon’s claims that markets could provide solutions. Under the terms of the first bet, the logic was relatively unconditional: markets provided solutions or they did not. To make sure the first bet reflected this (then) debated view, one of the conditions that Simon asked for was that the resources selected needed to be free of government interventions. 

Yet, throughout his career, Simon recurrently argued that governments could hinder the ability of markets to provide solutions by failing to secure property rights, distorting prices, subsidizing pollution and taxing innovation. Simon always explicitly stipulated that his claim that markets could provide solutions was conditional on whether there was an institutional environment that permitted them to work. Because of the prominence of the first bet, which internalized this condition implicitly, that statement of Simon is completely ignored. All that people remember is a form of naïve cornucopian outlook. 

Many of the indicators of the second bet reflect this view. Consider only the case of the indicators that relate to climate change (global temperatures and carbon dioxide emissions). Many governments across the planet subsidize fuel consumption. These countries, representing more than a quarter of world oil consumption, keep prices artificially low by using tax revenues to finance the additional consumption. The problem is that it incentivizes few investments in energy efficiency or new forms of energy. Numerous studies have thus found that eliminating these subsidies would reduce worldwide greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions by somewhere between 5 and 36 percent. 

Do not underestimate the value of this point. Governments have been providing these subsidies for close to five decades. Since eliminating them would mean fewer emissions in the future, never having had them in the past means much smaller concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In other words, avoiding five decades of subsidized consumption could have made the current problem of climate change a much smaller one than we face today. In considering how governments fuel environmental problems such as climate change, Simon’s free-market arguments are vindicated in spite of the wager’s outcome.

Now that some four decades have elapsed since the first bet, it is easy to remember Simon as a cheerful optimist whose view can be summarized as “more people, more innovations, more value created, more abilities to deal with environmental problems.” But, in reality, Simon was a much deeper thinker who connected markets and economic growth to solving environmental problems through institutions. As Simon died prematurely in 1998, he is no longer able to make this clear in his own words. Nevertheless, it is worth remembering how rich his outlook was.

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Vincent Geloso

Vincent Geloso, senior fellow at AIER, is an assistant professor of economics at King’s University College. He obtained a PhD in Economic History from the London School of Economics.

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