NAPLAN scores as predictors of access to higher education in Victoria

Abstract: This paper examines the extent to which year-9 performance on the National Assessment Program—Language Arts and Numeracy (NAPLAN) predicts access to higher education as determined by subsequent achievement on year-12 Victoria Certificate of Education (VCE) exams. VCE performance is measured via three binary indicators: achieving an Australian tertiary admission rank (ATAR) above 50 ("ATAR50"), above 70 ("ATAR70"), and above 90 ("ATAR90"); and two continuous indicators: ATAR and the Tertiary Entrance Aggregate (TEA). We find that a four-way classification of year-9 NAPLAN results explains 35% of the  variance in ATAR50, 37% in ATAR70 and 26% in ATAR90; and NAPLAN scores and basic demographic indicators explain 38% of the variance in ATAR and 42% of the variance in TEA values. Examining the joint effect of year-9 NAPLAN scores and socio-economic status in predicting VCE outcomes, we find that while both are significant, NAPLAN scores have a much stronger effect. At the school level, we find that predictions of success rates based on NAPLAN scores and basic demographic indicators

Enforcing compulsory schooling by linking welfare payments to school attendance: lessons from Australia’s Northern Territory

Efforts to enforce compulsory schooling by linking welfare assistance to school attendance are rarely successful in themselves, according to this report. Abstract Efforts to enforce compulsory schooling by linking welfare assistance to school attendance are rarely successful in themselves. One reason is a lack of credibility: targeted families may anticipate that welfare administrators will be reluctant to withdraw support when attendance does not improve. Australia\u27s School Enrolment and Attendance through Welfare Reform Measure (SEAM) demonstrates the impact of a credible threat. Targeting the Indigenous population of the Northern Territory, its credibility stemmed from the extreme circumstances created by the Northern Territory Emergency Response Act and from the troubled history of race relations in Australia. We show, using a difference-in-difference analysis of standardized test data (NAPLAN), that SEAM had a substantial, immediate impact: in its first year it triggered an increase in test participation rates of 16- 20 percentage points over pre-SEAM levels; and it significantly increased the share of tested cohorts achieving national minimum standards by 5-10 percentage points. However, welfare payments were rarely withheld from truant families and participation rates fell in subsequent years, though remaining significantly above pre-SEAM levels. This suggests that initiatives such as SEAM will not be fully effective in the longer term unless accompanied by measures that increase parents’ and children’s appreciation of the value of schooling

Understanding Compulsory Schooling Legislation: A Formal Model and Implications for Empirical Analysis

We construct a simple model of compulsory schooling in which legislation and compliance are endogenously determined by individuals disciplined by social norms, optimizing their voting decisions and the school attendance of their children. The model provides a formal framework for interpreting empirical results on the effect of compulsory-schooling legislation (CSL) on enrollment. This sheds light on the use of CSL as an instrumental variable to identify the benefits of schooling, suggesting how the estimates it produces may be biased.compliance norms, compulsory schooling, education

Understanding compulsory schooling legislation: a formal model and implications for empirical analysis

We construct a simple model of compulsory schooling in which legislation and compliance are endogenously determined by individuals disciplined by social norms, optimizing their voting decisions and the school attendance of their children. The model provides a formal framework for interpreting empirical results on the effect of compulsory-schooling legislation (CSL) on enrollment. This sheds light on the use of CSL as an instrumental variable to identify the benefits of schooling, suggesting how the estimates it produces may be biased

Public Schooling, Social Capital and Growth

We consider the contribution of public education to growth through its role in building social capital—instilling common values and norms that lower economic transaction costs and reduce social tensions between different population groups. This is modeled in the context of a political economy framework that focuses on the role of public education in reducing redistributive rent-seeking. Our analysis shows that the social compromises needed to mobilize popular support for public education are more difficult to achieve the deeper are the cultural divisions in society; and that a uniform public school system, when adopted, promotes stronger growth than would a private system.

Storm Clouds: The “Warning Signs” Fallacy

First paragraph: Soon after Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan shot to death 13 and injured many more at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009, reporters and commentators began to wonder aloud whether warning signs of the homicidal outburst had been ignored. “Officials may not have heeded warning signs,” declared a headline in the Washington Post of Nov. 7. According to an article in the New York Times on Nov. 9, the FBI and the Army may be guilty of “missing possible warning signs that might have stopped a mass killing.” Whether or not such a massacre was predictable, the retrospective invocation of warning signs seems to take place regularly—predictably—in the aftermath of mass murder. Within a day of the massacre at Virginia Tech in April 2007, CBS News already had an article on its website headlined, “Warning Signs from Student Gunman.” Appended to the report of the Virginia Tech Review Panel, likewise, is “a list of red flags, warning signs and indicators.” It is as if the ritual repetition of a phrase served to buffer the shock of events. However, the notion that shocking events are preceded by legible warnings, and could therefore have been prevented if only the warnings were heeded, obscures the self-evident truth that it is easier to predict events after they have occurred

Deceit and transparency in Placebo Research

Studies designed to elicit the full strength of the placebo effect differ from those in which the placebo effect represents a nuisance factor to be accounted for in order to establish the efficacy of a treatment. In the latter, informed consent is the rule; in the first, while consent may be informed in some narrow sense of the word, deception is common. However, the trickery of placebo experimentation goes beyond straightforward lies to include the use of crafty ambiguities, half-truths, and deliberate omissions in scripts read to the subjects of these studies. As words come to resemble therapeutic agents in their own right, it is only to be expected that researchers would methodically exploit verbal effects to evoke the responses they are looking for. Even experiments in which placebo is disclosed as placebo have used language in leading and misleading ways. Such studies are conducted in the hope of yielding results that might translate into clinical practice, but it should be noted that good clinical practice has a placebo value of its own — that is, confers a benefit over and beyond the specific effects of treatments — even if nothing like a sugar pill is administered

Noncoincidence in \u3cem\u3eThe Brothers Karamazov\u3c/em\u3e

The intricate plot of The Brothers Karamazov turns upon conjunctions of events which, on inspection, turn out not to be coincidental. Only by probing the often-subtle connections between events can we appreciate the implications of actions and failures to act in this astonishing work. The Brothers Karamazov tells not of a mysterious power called Coincidence that orders human affairs, but of the responsibilities of human agents, and its wonder lies not only in philosophical excurses like the Grand Inquisitor episode, which seem to transcend its pages, but in the complexity of its own construction