Copyright (c) 2010 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop Recent documents in John H Bishop en-us Sun, 14 Nov 2010 01:31:58 PST 3600 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/117 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/117 Fri, 12 Nov 2010 08:55:11 PST [Excerpt] Why are boys so much more likely to be academically disengaged in secondary school? It’s not because school is too difficult for them. Standardized test scores are comparable and they are less likely to say they “Find the schoolwork too hard to understand”. It’s not because they believe that ‘the things’ they ‘are learning in school’ are less important “for your later life”. Answers to this question are unrelated to gender. They also enjoy “being at school” just as much as girls. So what is the cause? This paper will attempt to answer this question and then suggest school policies that can improve peer support for effort and engagement. John H. Bishop Student Motivation and Student Culture http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/116 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/116 Wed, 15 Sep 2010 08:18:16 PDT Northern European teenagers are 10+ percent more likely to graduate from secondary school than their American counterparts and learn considerably more as well. This paper explains why Northern Europe’s upper-secondary schools have achieved school cultures that accomplish so much more than typical American secondary schools. The keys to N. Europe's success are: 1. Parents/students decide which program of study to enter. 2. Programs have well signaled reputations that influence access to occupations/professions and higher education programs. 3. Undertaking a challenging program confers prestige. 4. If the program turns out to be too difficult or poorly taught, transfers to a more appropriate program are arranged. 5. A spirit of solidarity is promoted among the students in each program. 6. Students are not competing against classmates. Some learning activities involve large group projects. Teachers encourage fast learners to assist classmates having difficulty. 7. Program funding depends on enrollment, so teachers and principals are no longer incentivized to push-out lagging or troublesome students. 8. Supplementing teacher assessments, there are high quality externally-set examinations describing what students have learned and are able to do at the end of the program. 9. This information is made available when the student applies for a job or admission to a post- secondary institution. Employers and post-secondary institutions recruit/select secondary school leavers based in part on this rich and nuanced information. 10. Students who worked hard to attain the skills taught are rewarded in a natural way by employers and college admission officers. 11. Teachers teach but they also coach and market their students to the next stage of life. 12. Each teacher/student team [program] believes that the goals and achievements they aspire to are just as important and socially valuable as the objectives of the other secondary programs. Choice and external examinations are essential, but they must be structured in a particular way that is designed to build a pro-engagement esprit de corps in each of the teacher led student teams. John H. Bishop Why U.S. High Schools Lag behind Europe and East Asia http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/115 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/115 Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:27:50 PST [Excerpt] Concern that structural factors impede efficient labor market performance is evidenced in both statistical analyses of economic potential and policy proposals for selective employment subsidies. Estimates of the level and expected growth of full-employment GNP have recently been revised downward, as has the 3.2 unemployment multiplier implicit in Okun's Law (see U.S. Council of Economic Advisers and George Perry). These indications of structural changes in labor markets reinforce statistics showing excessively high unemployment rates for youths and blacks, and labor force participation rates that are increasing for women and decreasing for men. The simultaneous concern with high inflation and high measured unemployment, in the context of major changes in labor force composition and increased variance in sectoral unemployment rates (see Perry), has brought forth numerous and sizable selective employment subsidy policies (SESP) in both the United States and Western Europe. The SESP, changes in potential GNP, and Okun's Law are not unrelated phenomena. This paper explores that relationship. Section I presents a brief taxonomy of the primary SESPs which are currently being discussed in Western industrialized countries. Section II provides the economic rationale underlying these measures. Section III explores the relationship of SESP to the prospective growth of aggregate output, in the context of Okun's Law. Evidence on the existence and magnitude of changes in employment decisions in response to the New Jobs Tax Credit (NJTC) is presented in Section IV. John H. Bishop Employment Growth Tax Credits http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/114 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/114 Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:47:41 PST [Excerpt] Given the extraordinary scope of the current economic crisis, no single policy can fully address the challenge of job creation. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has spurred job creation substantially, but the deterioration in economic prospects since it was passed demands a renewed focus on job growth in the near term. A well-designed temporary federal job creation tax credit should be an integral part of the effort to boost job growth. Besides having broad-based, bipartisan political support, the best argument for a job creation tax credit is simply that it will create almost 3 million jobs in 2010 and over 2 million in 2011. Moreover, it will stimulate the entrepreneurial character of Americans by giving 6.5 million employers and millions more aspiring entrepreneurs a limited-time offer to expand their production or start new endeavors, at a discount. Because choices about whom to hire and what work they should do are left to independent decision makers who can act immediately, the credit will have just as quick an impact. This paper outlines a version of this credit that aims to induce increases in payroll—either through adding new jobs or by increasing the hours or wages of current workers—and estimates its economic impact: • A job creation tax credit that refunded 15% of new wage costs in 2010 and 10% of new wage costs in 2011 could create 5.1 million additional jobs in the U.S. economy over these two years. • The net cost of the tax credit would be roughly $27 billion, or about $5,400 per new full-time-equivalent job created over these two years. John H. Bishop Employment Growth Tax Credits http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/113 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/113 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:26:58 PDT American employers and their workers under invest in employer training. Under investment occurs because training generates externalities, because the tax system is biased against training investments, and because most workers are unable to finance general training because they lack access to loans to finance consumption during periods of heavy investment in training. School based occupational training ameliorates the under investment problem somewhat but it is not a complete answer to the problem. The French approach of requiring firms to spend at least 1.4 percent of their wage bill on continuing training of employees (if they are to avoid paying a tax) holds a good deal of promise but suffers from some critical flaws. These flaws are not basic to the tax offset design, however, so the paper concludes with a description of how a mandate to spend for the United States should be designed. John H. Bishop Employee Training http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/112 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/112 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:26:57 PDT [Excerpt] The fundamental cause of the low effort level of American students, parents, and voters in school elections is the absence of good signals of effort and accomplishment and the consequent lack of rewards for learning. In most other advanced countries mastery of the curriculum is assessed by examinations that are set and graded at the national or regional level. Grades on these exams signal the student's achievement to employers and colleges and influence the jobs that graduates get and the universities and programs to which they are admitted. Exam results also influence school reputations and in some countries the number of students applying for admission to the school. In the United States, by contrast, students take aptitude tests that are not intended to assess the learning that has occurred in most of the classes taken in high school. The primary signals of academic achievement are diplomas awarded for time spent in school and grades and rank in class—criteria that assess achievement relative to other students in the school or classroom, not relative to an external standard. John H. Bishop Selecting Employees http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/111 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/111 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:26:56 PDT Externally set curriculum-based examinations at the end of high school apparently have pervasive backwash effects on middle school students, their parents, teachers and school administrators. Holding the social class background of students constant, students from Canadian provinces with examination systems were substantially (23 percent of a standard deviation) better prepared in mathematics and 18 percent of a standard deviation better prepared in science than students from provinces lacking such exams. The effect of an exam system on mathematics achievement of 13 year olds is larger in a standard deviation metric than the decline in math SAT scores between 1969 and 1980 that has been such a focus of public concern. Other natural experiments yield similar findings. When adjustments are made for ethnicity, gender and social class of SAT test takers, New York State ranks higher on the SAT than any of the other 38 states where the test is taken by large numbers of students. The mathematics and science achievement of Swedish high school seniors declined in the years following the elimination of high/medium stakes curriculum-based exams.The analysis also found that examination systems had pervasive effects on school administrators, teachers and parents. In the provinces with external exams, schools were more likely to:-- employ specialist teachers of mathematics and science-- employ teachers who had studied the subject in college,-- have high quality science laboratories-- schedule extra hours of math and science instruction-- assign more homework in math, in science and in other subjects-- have students do or watch experiments in science class and-- schedule frequent tests in math and science class.At home students watch less TV, spend more time reading for fun, and are more likely to report their parents want them to do well in math and science. In addition, parents are more likely to talk to their child about what they are learning at school. John H. Bishop Curriculum-based External Exit Exam Systems http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/109 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/109 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:26:55 PDT [Excerpt] The paper began with an examination of the effects of tougher graduation requirements on course taking patterns in high school. High school graduation tests reduced the number of occupational vocational courses taken by students and lowered their likelihood of becoming vocational concentrators. While this finding confirms the hypothesis we specified at the start, the rest of our findings contradict conventional wisdom and our initial hypotheses. Increased course graduation requirements did not decrease vocational course taking. Indeed, students in states with above average Carnegie unit graduation minimums took significantly more vocational education courses than students in states with low minimums. An even more surprising finding was the absence of significant increases in academic course taking in states and school districts with tougher graduation requirements. Instead tougher graduation requirements seem to have increased the number of art, music, health and other personal interest courses taken. We doubt this is what policy makers had in mind when they established these policies. Why do minimum competency exams appear to increase personal interest course taking and not academic course taking? What is it about higher course graduation requirements that results in students taking more personal interest courses and not taking more academic courses? Possibly, what is distinctive about states with high Carnegie unit graduation minimums is that they require extra personal interest courses or extra elective courses not extra academic courses. More research is needed on the impacts of individual components of state course graduation requirements on course taking, test score gains and other outcomes.The paper then examined the determinants of test score gains between 8th and 12th grade in core academic subjects. Not surprisingly, gains were larger for students who took many academic courses and smaller for those who took introductory vocational courses. Occupational courses and personal interest courses had no effect on test score gains. Course graduation requirements and local option minimum competency exams had no effect (either direct or indirect) on learning during high school. State minimum competency examinations modestly increased learning by non-vocational students but not by vocational concentrators. John H. Bishop Career-Technical Education and Occupational Skills http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/110 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/110 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:26:55 PDT [Excerpt] This article examines the causal connections between these two phenomena: changes in the academic achievement of high school graduates and changes in the payoff to college. Four specific questions are addressed. The questions and the answers generated by our examination of the data are outlined below[...] John H. Bishop Which Skills Make You More Productive and Better Paid http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/108 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/108 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:26:54 PDT [Excerpt] This paper will attempt to determine the extent to which changes in female college attendance over time have been responses to the various factors discussed above. In Section I, a simple model of the college attendance decision is developed which incorporates most of the factors discussed above. Section II presents the results of fitting the specification implied by the theory developed in Section I to data on the college attendance choices of 29,141 women who were high school juniors in 1960. Major findings of this analysis are that female college attendance is very responsive to public decisions about the location of colleges and the level of tuition. A second finding is that the economic payoff to college is also an important determinant of attendance. John H. Bishop Trends http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/107 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/107 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:26:53 PDT The paper challenges the widespread assumption that the wage effects of federal training programs are reliable and unbiased estimates of productivity effects and social benefits. Evidence is presented that the reputations of government training programs are unreliable and that employers stigmatize those eligible for TJTC and CETA OJT contracts. Graduates of classroom training programs which are known to be funded by JTP A are likely to be similarly stigmatized. TJTC eligibles are seriously underpaid by employers and JTPA graduates may experience a similar fate. Consequently, the true effects of JTP A on the productivity of disadvantaged workers may be considerably larger than its effects on wages. Methods of obtaining estimates of productivity effects are described. John H. Bishop Career-Technical Education and Occupational Skills http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/106 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/106 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:26:52 PDT [Excerpt] In the last three months employment declined by 1.2 million jobs and the number of part time workers who want but cannot find full-time work increased by 1.5 million. We are in a downward spiral that John Thain of Merrill Lynch predicts will be compared with 1929-33. Economists of all stripes (eg. Martin Feldstein, Larry Summers, Nouriel Roubini, Edmund Phelps, Paul Krugman, Brad Setzer) are recommending a massive temporary fiscal stimulus of 4 percent of GDP or more. Investments in infrastructure, renewable energy, and energy efficiency are preferred because they raise future productivity. Many worry, however, that infrastructure projects alone cannot quickly generate the $600 billion stimulus that many believe is necessary? Last summer’s tax rebate provided little stimulus. Other guns must be brought to the battlefield. We need a cost effective way of rekindling the animal spirits of the nation’s six million employers and fourteen million self-employed entrepreneurs. John H. Bishop Employment Growth Tax Credits http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/105 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/105 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:26:51 PDT [Excerpt] One of the primary reasons American students learn a good deal less during secondary school than students in other industrialized nations is that they devote less time and intellectual energy to the task.1 Accountability systems designed to get teachers to try harder and set higher standards will not produce more student learning if [as one high school teacher put it] “students are sitting back in their desks, arms crossed, waiting for their teachers to make them smart (Zoch, 1998, p. 70).”Learning is not a passive act; it requires the time and active involvement of the learner. In a classroom with 1 teacher and 25 students, there are 25 learning hours spent for every hour of teaching time. Learning takes work and that work is generally not going to be as much fun as hanging out with friends or watching TV. If students cannot be motivated to give up some time socializing or watching TV so that they can learn difficult material and develop high level skills, the time and talents of teachers will be wasted. John H. Bishop Student Motivation and Student Culture http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/104 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/104 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:26:51 PDT Greater use of employment tests for selecting workers will have important effects on the economy. First, the rewards for developing the competencies measured by the tests will rise and this will increase the supply of workers with these competencies. Employment tests predict job performance because they measure or are correlated with a large set of developed abilities which are causally related to productivity and not because they are correlated with an inherited ability to learn. Our economy currently under-rewards the achievements that are measured by these tests and the resulting weak incentives for hard study have contributed to the low levels of achievement in math and science.Greater use of tests to select workers will also change the sorting of workers across jobs. Its impacts on total output depends on the extent to which the developed abilities measured by employment tests--academic achievement, perceptual speed and psychomotor skills--have larger impacts on worker productivity in dollars in some occupations than in others. This question is examined by analyzing GATB revalidation data on 31,399 workers in 159 occupations and by reviewing the literature on how the standard deviation of worker productivity varies across occupations. The analysis finds that indeed such differentials exist and therefore that reassigning workers who do well on a test to occupations where the payoff to the talent is particularly high will increase aggregate output. The magnitude of the output effect was estimated by reweighting the GATB revalidation data to be representative of the 71 million workers in the non-professional and nonmanagerial occupations and then simulating various resorting scenarios. Selecting new hires randomly lowered aggregate output by at least $129 billion or 8 percent of the compensation received by these workers. An upper bound estimate of the productivity benefits of reassigning workers on the basis of three GATB composites is that it would raise output by $111 billion or 6.9 percent of compensation. Reassignment based on tests had an adverse impact on Blacks and Hispanics but greatly reduced gender segregation in the work place and substantially improved the average wage of the jobs held by women. These results are based on a maintained assumption--the models of job performance which were estimated in samples of job incumbents are after corrections for measurement error and selection on the dependent variable yield unbiased estimates of true population relationships--that is almost certainly wrong. The biases introduced into the calculation by this assumption lower the estimated costs of introducing random assignment of workers to jobs, exaggerate the benefits of greater test use and exaggerate the changes in demographic composition of occupational work forces.The paper concludes with a discussion of ways in which employment tests can simultaneously strengthen incentives to learn, improve sorting and minimize adverse impacts on minority groups. John H. Bishop Employee Training http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/103 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/103 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:26:50 PDT [Excerpt] Educational reformers and most of the American public believe that teachers ask too little of their pupils. African-American and Hispanic parents, in particular, criticize the low expectations and goals that teachers and school administrators often set for their children. These low expectations, they believe, result in watered down curricula and a tolerance of mediocre teaching and inappropriate student behavior. The result is that the prophecy of low achievement becomes self-fulfilling.The problem of low expectations is not limited to minority students or lower income communities. It’s endemic. High school subjects are taught at vastly different levels. Research has shown that learning gains are substantially larger when students take more demanding courses. Controlling for teacher qualifications and student ability and socio-economic status does not significantly reduce the positive effects of course rigor on test score gains (Kulik 1984, Monk 1994, Bishop 1996). Why then do students not flock to more demanding courses? First, these courses are considerably more work and grades tend to be lower. Secondly, the rigor of these courses is not well signaled to parents, neighbors, employers and colleges, so the rewards for the extra work are small for most students. Admissions staff of selective colleges learn how to read the transcripts of high schools they recruit from and they evaluate grades in the light of course demands. However, most colleges have, historically, not factored the rigor of high school courses into their admissions decisions. Employers hardly ever consider the rigor of high school courses when they make hiring decisions. Consequently, the bulk of students who do not aspire to attend a selective college quite rationally avoid rigorous courses and demanding teachers. John H. Bishop Curriculum-based External Exit Exam Systems http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/102 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/102 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:26:49 PDT [Excerpt] Even though educational reform marches under a banner of economic renewal, the school subjects that appear to be most directly related to worker productivity-- business education, vocational education, economics, computers--have received little attention from reformers. The five "core" subjects proposed for periodic assessment are English, mathematics, science, history/civics and geography. Yet, if competitiveness is the objective, it is not clear why geography, a subject that is not taught in most American universities, has higher priority than subjects like computers, economics, management and technology? Some of the reform reports have expressed doubt about the economic benefits of vocational education (Committee on Economic Development 1986). Indeed, new graduation requirements introduced by reformers have contributed to an 8 percent reduction in vocational course taking between 1982and 1987. John H. Bishop Career-Technical Education and Occupational Skills http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/100 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/100 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:26:48 PDT [Excerpt] What causes differences in secondary school achievement across these four nations? The first two sections of the paper describe the achievement differences among the four countries and examine the proximate causes of the differentials. I conclude that these achievement differentials are caused by differences in the quality of teachers and of student time and effort inputs devoted to academic achievement. John H. Bishop Why U.S. High Schools Lag behind Europe and East Asia http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/99 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/99 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:26:47 PDT [Excerpt] Three presidents, the National Governors Association, numerous blue ribbon panels and national teachers unions have called for states to develop content standards for core subjects, examinations assessing student achievement aligned with the content standards and accountability mechanisms for insuring that students achieve these standards. In 1999 eighteen states had minimum competency exam (MCE) graduation requirements, 19 rewarded successful schools, 19 had special assistance programs for failing schools, 11 had the power to close down, take over or reconstitute failing schools. John H. Bishop School Accountability http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/98 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/98 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:26:46 PDT [Excerpt] Minority youth and non-minority youth from economically disadvantaged backgrounds have great difficulty finding steady jobs that provide real training and advancement opportunities. In October 1986, only 32 percent of black youth who had recently dropped out of high school had a job and only 42 percent of the previous June's graduates not attending college had a job. For Hispanics, only 46 percent of recent drop outs had a job and only 65 percent of graduates not attending college had a job. While the employment rates among white youth were higher (47 percent for drop outs and 71 percent for noncollege-bound graduates), it is clear the problem is not limited to minorities (BLS 1987). Would greater participation in vocational education on the part of these youth lower these extremely high unemployment rates and improve the quality of the jobs obtained? If so, what form should this education take? Should the goal of the occupational component of high school vocational education be occupationally specific skills, career awareness, basic skills or something else? What should be the relationship between programs providing occupationally specific training and the employers who hire their graduates? John H. Bishop Career-Technical Education and Occupational Skills http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/96 http://works.bepress.com/john_bishop/96 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:26:45 PDT [Excerpt] This article explores the effects that these regulations have on: (a) the form of labor contracts and on training outcomes such as: (b) who pays for work place training of non-exempt employees, (c) whether training is obtained at schools or firms, (d) how much training non-exempt employees get? The evidence on who gets and who pays for training is consistent with the proposition that these regulations are having the effects that economists would predict for them. Many other explanations fit the data just as well, however, so causal connections between these regulations and training outcomes cannot be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. John H. Bishop Employee Training