In 2013, on the [New York] state exams that gauge proficiency in math and English, Success Academy schools far outscored not only the city’s regular public schools but also its most highly regarded charters, networks like Achievement First, KIPP (the Knowledge Is Power Program) and Uncommon Schools. At one of [Eva] Moskowitz’s Harlem academies, the fifth graders surpassed all other public schools in the state in math, even their counterparts in the whitest and richest suburbs, Scarsdale and Briarcliff Manor...It might seem as if any New York mayor would be thrilled to have thousands of the city’s most underprivileged children educated so well. But during Bill de Blasio’s campaign last year and then as he claimed City Hall, he and Moskowitz took each other on in a ferocious political battle...For many critics, performance is almost beside the point. To [Diane] Ravitch [New York University professor and education historian], the [charter school] movement itself is destructive; “it undermines the public’s commitment to public education.”...What these philanthropists are all about, Ravitch says, is making themselves feel good while using charters as a halfway step in a covert effort to pull the country toward the privatization of education.

A terrific New York Times article on the battle between New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and charter school network leader Eva Moskowitz.
 
The data-driven accountability approach (read: a lot classroom testing) that charter schools emphasize removes the glossy image around child learning and development. And the growth of charter schools, that use public funds but operate under private authority, competes with the attractive national commitment to mandatory public education. However, that image of promising universal opportunities was actually tainted ages ago when it became clear that public schools were often not successfully educating the country's poor children. The fact that this network of charter schools is able to overturn the giant table of privilege and poverty is evidence of the inexcusable necessity of reform.

Learning is complicated and school reform is hard to do. And my experience has mostly been through my advisor, who mines global nooks and crannies for the specific things that improve learning in poor countries (which is enormously different from the US context).  In other words, I am playing outside my sandbox here. But if a school or charter network is actually improving learning outcomes and closing educational disparities, I think its worth putting Ravich's (and de Blasio's) issue with the principle of charter schools aside. These schools do privatize education to some degree (and certainly introduce competition), but failing to reform for the sake of a national vision is at the expense of too many children. If this network of charter schools is actually working, I say: don't fix it, de Blasio. 

In other news, Maskowitz's advocacy group, Families for Excellent Schools, sounds about as mysterious and ominous as a Koch brothers' super-PAC.

1. It turns out that contract farming shortens the duration of periods of hunger during the dry season (in addition to increasing income) for smallholder farmers in Madagascar. Is contract farming specific to developing countries? Nope; Tyson's popularized it in the chicken market in 1947. Don Tyson developed industrial chicken production (and contributed to the oligopoly of the chicken market) through a high-tech form of sharecropping.

2. Women in academia are less likely to collaborate with junior colleagues. Keep in mind that the sample size is 55 female faculty members in this study. That is less than the number of female faculty members in the Psychology Department at the University of Minnesota.

3. How (the demand for) toilet paper (and other types of sanitation) explain (wealth in) the world

4. Images from Crimea.

1. Shakeup at the Minneapolis Fed. Turns out economists can't resolve their differences either.

2. Peeta Mellark, the feminist.  Unpredictably, I love the challenges of typical gender roles in this film. But full disclosure: I'm on a complete Hunger Games binge at present. The second movie was amazing.

3. Do Mark Dayton's policies promote job growth in Minnesota? While I agree with many of Dayton's progressive policies, drawing the distinction between Wisconsin and Minnesota economies only based on three years of state leadership is audacious. Ceteris paribus? Not even close.

Hat tips: LANS, DW, Mom.
 

Superstition.

It's awkward to discuss. Religion is tied enormously to development work; it often motivates international organizations, catalyzes fundraising and plays a huge role in the lives of the poor.

But religion, spirituality and superstition can also stand in the way of preventative health behavior, education, financial savings and can serve as a pretentious vehicle of exploitation.

Narendra Dabholkar, a "fighter against superstition" was killed in Maharashtra, India in September. His obituary in the Economist is inspiring.

Yet over three decades, ever since he had decided to switch his work from curing bodies to curing deluded minds, he had become famous. The organisation he had founded in 1989, the Committee for Eradication of Blind Faith (MANS in its Marathi acronym), had 180 branches in the state. In village after village he and his activists would confront the babas, sadhus and other “godmen” who preyed on the poor and simple, challenging their claims and reporting them to the police. He investigated and demystified cases of black magic and possession by ghosts; he campaigned against animal sacrifice, the prodigious waste of drinking water and good food during religious festivities, and the pollution of local rivers during Ganesha’s birthday festival by the immersion of thousands of idols made of plaster of Paris.

Prior to the influx of community family planning workers in my little research district in Tanzania, most people were seeking their reproductive healthcare from the witch doctor. I occasionally refer to him as "traditional medicine healer," in a weak effort to be respectful, but my Tanzanian colleagues are insistent that the correct translation is witch doctor. It's a fair, he did try to sell me love potion.

People like Dabholkar are fighting an underestimated battle in favor of education, rationality and welfare improving decisions. As an American, its awkward for me to address this abroad without a lot of cultural (and religious?) imperialism. It's much easier to talk about innocent reasons for poverty: lack of good schools, insufficient healthcare, limited labor markets, but what if the poor are just making bad superstitious decisions?

Uninformed opinions affect household decisions every day, and counter the central economic tenant of rational decision-making. It's unexpected and awkward, but so is the fact that I ask complete strangers about their sexual behaviors.

What is the impact of superstition on poverty? Worth more research.

Because apparently many people don't believe economics is a science. Raj Chetty defends the field in the face of disagreement here in the NYT. First of all, economics is a social science. Secondly, as with most scientific research, testing theory through hypotheses and empirical analysis makes the field scientifically and policy relevant. Thus, the macroeconomists are maybe a little jealous of the development economists' RCTs:

As is the case with epidemiologists, the fundamental challenge faced by economists — and a root cause of many disagreements in the field — is our limited ability to run experiments. If we could randomize policy decisions and then observe what happens to the economy and people’s lives, we would be able to get a precise understanding of how the economy works and how to improve policy. But the practical and ethical costs of such experiments preclude this sort of approach. (Surely we don’t want to create more financial crises just to understand how they work.)

Hat tip: COCO (a real scientist)

Remember my grumbling post about the major lack of participation among women in my economics courses? And how I brought this up in the context of women's leadership and Sandberg's Lean In?

It turns out I'm not the only one who sees this association (i.e. told ya so). Harvard Business School underwent a self-imposed gender makeover, adjusting curriculum, social rules and rituals and trying to change institutional norms. Part of this: hand-raising lessons.

Nearly two years earlier, in the fall of 2011, Neda Navab sat in a class participation workshop, incredulous. The daughter of Iranian immigrants, Ms. Navab had been the president of her class at Columbia, advised chief executives as a McKinsey & Company consultant and trained women as entrepreneurs in Rwanda. Yet now that she had arrived at the business school at age 25, she was being taught how to raise her hand.

A second-year student, a former member of the military, stood in the front of the classroom issuing commands: Reach up assertively! No apologetic little half-waves! Ms. Navab exchanged amused glances with new friends.

There is certainly a persistent difference in how men and women participate in class (a friend of mine said that in his male-dominated department, men do not actually raise their hand- they simply start talking).  The fact that this difference exists for ambitious twenty-something professional and graduate students is indicative of a larger socialization training on appropriate behavior for boys and girls. It might be hard to overturn by the time these students reach grad school, but I admire Harvard for taking on the challenge.

Also notable from the in-depth article: there was a fair amount of push-back from the students who did not particularly appreciate being subject to the incessant gender lens.  If you're happy to believe that there aren't any problems to fix, consider this:

At an extracurricular presentation the year before, a female student asked William Boyce, a co-founder of Highland Capital Partners, a venture capital firm, for advice for women who wanted to go into his field. “Don’t,” he laughed, according to several students present.  Male partners did not want them there, he continued, and he was doing them a favor by warning them.

Adding another sweet line to her resume, Esther Duflo was nominated for a post on the White House’s new Global Development Council. In a great article from the Daily Beast, she describes why randomized control trails in development are so important: "If we don’t know whether [aid is] doing any good, we are not any better than the medieval doctors and their leeches.”

Sports commentator Frank Deford lamented that kickers are too accurate, and that 88% success rates take the fun out of American football. And part of this, he attributes to kickers switching from toe-balls to instep shots:

However, toes -- those both educated and illiterate -- have been replaced on the gridiron by soccer-style kickers, who boot the pigskin side-footed. When these guys first started coming into the NFL they were often as not little foreigners, and Alex Karras of the Detroit Lions, who died last week, used to mimic them, calling out in falsetto, "I keeck a touchdown! I keeck a touchdown." Today, though, kickers tend to be good-sized Americans who are more proficient than ever.

Although its is occasionally nostalgic to romanticize the good old days, anyone who has ever played soccer past six grade learned how to hit the ball powerfully and accurately. And it is not with your toe. In American football, the transition from toe-balls to instep apparently didn't happen until the 1960s, when a Europeans showed the NFL how do it right.  The rest of the world had been playing a sport dedicated to kicking a ball and it took Americans fifty years to figure it out.