Tag Archives: Education

The 2019 PEF Student Essay Contest is now open! Calling all Canadian students anywhere in the world and all post-secondary students in Canada who are working on papers taking a critical approach to the functioning, efficiency, social, and environmental consequences of unconstrained markets. The winning essays will receive a cash prize of $1,000 for the graduate student category and $500 for the undergraduate student category. You can download a poster in English or Français. Please help us...

Over at the Behind The Numbers website, I’ve written a blog post titled “Ten considerations for the next Alberta budget.” The blog post is a summary of a recent workshop organized by the Alberta Alternative Budget Working Group. The link to the blog post is here. Enjoy and share:

“We don’t teach anything,” says Nicolas Sadirac, head of École 42. “The students create what they need all the time.”... Who cares about another coding school? Schools around the world, from kindergarten up, are scrambling to figure out what skills kids need to thrive in the future. Disagreement abounds about which skills should be prioritized, and how they should be taught, but opinions coalesce around some mix of collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, communication, and...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action This weekend I’m planning on reading this crazy-looking story about the Ocean’s 11 team that tricked the government of Angola into sending $500 Million to an accountant’s front office in London and how they were caught (h/t Ken Opalo)

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. I’ve been really enjoying the Vox and IRC collaboration podcast Displaced (Apple). Some highlights for me were Rachel Glennerster (who had an amazing response to the Guardian op-ed on RCTs), Alix Zwane, Owen Barder, and Stefan Dercon. I think I pinpointed one reason it feels so informative – the hosts have clearly read up on the topic, and the way they ask questions gives you all the background you need to get right into a really...

This article looks at Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education critically. Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University. The economic school of thought with which he identifies is public choice, e.g, James Buchanan.While I regard Caplan's solutions as questionable if not ridiculous, as does the author of the review, he does make a point. What is contemporary education really for? That does not seem to be clear as Caplan points out. He concludes therefore that education is...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. “Back in school we used to call it chew and pour,” he says. Meaning, for each possible question, the teacher gives you one correct answer to memorize — or “chew” — so that come test time, you can regurgitate it — “pour it” back to her verbatim. “And then,” adds Agbavor with a chuckle, “you forget about it. Nothing is retained.” That’s from one of my favorite podcasts, NPR’s Rough Translation, which is hosted by their former...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. We show that this East-West difference is due to girls’ attitudes, confidence and competitiveness in math, and not to other confounding factors, such as the difference in economic conditions or teaching styles across the former political border. (via Lisa Cook)  Jobs: Richard Thaler writes about the evolution of behavioral economics in AER. (Gated, but you can watch him explain it in his Nobel lecture version and slides). ...

Guest Post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Alex Tabarrok summarizes the story from the new book on RCTs, Randomistas, about how TOMS shoes invited an external evaluation of their program giving away shoes and discovered it wasn’t helping recipients very much. This isn’t that unusual in development, but faced with the evidence, they agreed to be named in the paper and be public about it, and tried to figure out how to use the insights to do better. (See study author Bruce...

One of the ways in which the neoliberal era has entrenched itself and, in this case, will perpetuate its negative legacy for years to come is to infiltrate the educational system. This has occurred in various ways over the decades as the corporate sector has sought to have more influence over what is taught and researched in universities. The benefits of this influence to capital are obvious. They create a stream of compliant recruits who have learned to jump through hoops to get delayed...