Gap Years, Recessions, and K-12 Education
Background
On Saturday July 11th 2020 I went to my regular hair salon for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in Boston had started during March. Unlike most, I coped with the lack of a hair stylist by learning to cut my own hair and while I did an acceptable job, it was nice to be returning to a professional. As the most present topic in the public was the pandemic, our conversation during the appointment lingered on that.
I asked her how she and the salon were adjusting to the changes. As it turned out, the salon had actually been reopened a month or two before and I had just not thought to check the website. As for her, I asked about how she was doing with her kids given that there was no school or childcare. She said that her husband has been working from home (he is a designer of some sort) and taking care of the kids while she is at work, including some level of home schooling. The children are around 7–10. When the discussion turned to the fall, she was not sure what would happen especially if schools were not going to open. She supposed her husband would continue working from home and take the lead on educating the children. The economist in me couldn’t help but describe to her how I saw her situation.
It seemed to me she had three options for continuing the children’s education:
- Her husband could continue taking on the kids education. The problem I see with this is that it is not sustainable while maintaining a full-time job. It takes a lot to teach full curricula and more than that to teach across various subjects. It is certainly a decent stop-gap, but with a full-time job, how can one be expected to deliver sufficient time, knowledge, and preparation to keep the children moving forward at the right pace, a full-time job in itself?
- Do nothing. This has obvious drawbacks, namely the kids will fall behind dramatically and some form of entertainment would have to be provided as a supplement. This can be mitigated somewhat if schools have an online component, but younger children are very unlikely to have developed the discipline and understanding of the long term investment in their futures for online learning to be a sufficient replacement for the standard in-person instruction. Additionally, the fundamentals taught at younger ages are more critical for potential future independent learning, not just in content but also in method. I’d guesstimate this to be true at least until 9th — 10th grade.
- Partner up with other parents in her neighborhood/community and get education returns to scale. This accomplishes two things. The first is that the community has limited exposure to outside sources of the virus and contact tracing is much easier to do given the local geographic scale. The second is that parents can coordinate to take the children at different times during the week and to teach different subjects. This should be better than one parent being response for math, english, science, art, etc, and having to dedicate several hours each day to their kids by allowing for each parent to specialize in one subject and to avoid repeating the same lessons in neighboring houses.
Let’s briefly explore option 3 a bit more.
One of the important economic characteristics of the standard delivery methods for education is that the marginal cost of providing education to an additional student given that you are already providing education to at least one student generally scales very slowly relative to the marginal benefit of providing education to an additional student. In other words, if I am teaching a student trigonometry using a white board and/or discussing the topic, the cost to me is about the same if there is one student or if there are two students, or three, or four, while the benefit to each student is about the same. Of course this doesn’t scale indefinitely as we see in research on class sizes, but it should scale for the size of the community classrooms we would be thinking of in this context. The context here is defined by the covid-19 pandemic and so we actually want to restrict community classrooms to be small and local as much as possible. These two ideas point in opposing directions, one arguing for smaller class sizes and one arguing for larger class sizes (for scale) and so in our context we can find the right balance where classes are sufficiently small so that the marginal benefit to an additional student in being educated is not exceeded by the marginal cost of providing the education, and contact tracing is both tractable and easy.
There is one operational detail that makes this somewhat difficult to do effectively at a neighborhood level: different grade levels among children in the neighborhood. One might imagine it is difficult to have a neighborhood class of 5–6 children with 3 substantially different grades represented, for example grades 4,7, and 10. It may be feasible to do it but it is certainly not efficient. It achieves the dispersion of the time cost of education among parents in the neighborhood but it fails to disperse the subject specialization to the most efficient level, i.e. grade 9 math as opposed to grades 1–12 math, the former is clearly easier to prepare for and teach. Therefore the optimal implementation of this strategy would build community classrooms of certain grades, even if this means sourcing outside of the immediate neighborhood.
Of course, the options I just mentioned are in the case that schools do not reopen in the fall, but it would seem that even if schools do reopen parents may not be out of the woods. In a graph from The Economist using data from YouGov we see that the vast majority of parents with K-12 children are not comfortable sending their kids to school in the fall, and a smaller majority also don’t intend to get their children the vaccine when it becomes available.
If the poll is accurate and the government does not intend to mandate administration of the vaccine, parents won’t consider schools to be safe to return to for some time, and indeed, even after the vaccine schools won’t be safe if parents don’t vaccinate their children. Option 3 is seeming more and more like a necessary option for keeping children progressing with their education system. Sadly, it seems my stylist was not convinced by my pitch, but this doesn’t mean other parents wouldn’t be.
Due to having thought about this during my haircut appointment, I seemed to be the only one not surprised in the following week by the headlines that read “Many parents want it; few can afford it. Amid school uncertainty, private tutoring ramps up,” and “For parents who can afford it, a solution for fall: Bring the teachers to them.” People were not pleased about this, and I can understand why.
The privilege enjoyed by the wealthy in America has come under increased scrutiny in recent history. It is one thing for the public to view wealth as a privilege, something benefiting others but perhaps not taking away from everyone else, but I suspect that the wealthy getting special privilege to afford tutors and private teachers is viewed less in this way, and more as actual damage to others whose children may suffer from not being in school. However, that view is speculation, the main point is that this problem is one that is likely to dramatically worsen the education gap between the wealthy and the rest of America, and this could well make it more difficult for underprivileged Americans to make their way in the world, and certainly is likely to be bad for the long-term economic success of the United States.
How do we solve this problem? Well, as it turns out there are two other problems occurring concurrently that are likely to serve as a potential solution: the recession, and the college-student gap year dilemma.
Gap Years
One of the fallouts from the pandemic was the shaking up of the American college system. Universities and colleges are particularly at risk of spreading infectious diseases due to the high population density stemming from lots of people living in student housing, the shared communal areas including bathrooms and lecture halls, the high foot traffic throughout the compound, and the high levels of social interaction in and around the campus. As a response to the threat posed by the college/university environment many colleges and universities have elected to move to online instruction for some or all of their classes in the fall.
The graph taken from The Chronicle of Higher Education shows the distribution of plans for schools in the fall. Often times this is in combination with some level of reduced on-campus student presence as far as residence is concerned, and most certainly a significant or full reduction in planned social activity on campus. College this fall is not going to be anything like the typical “college experience” that most incoming students shell out the high sticker price to experience. The value proposition of college this coming academic year has fallen significantly, and colleges know this.
As a means of trying to get students to commit and send over that non-refundable tuition deposit, colleges have been promising in-person instruction but this has turned out to be a weak promise. As the summer came into full swing and the policies designed to curb the spread of the virus became more and more politicized (mask wearing in specific), the virus has seen vast re-emergence and this has meant that colleges’ promise to have in-person instruction in the fall has quickly evaporated, assuming it was predicated on a forecast of a controlled virus by the time fall rolled around. As a consequence, colleges have had to rescind their promise and plan for a transition to an online experience in part or in full, further weakening the value proposition for many college students and encouraging many of them to consider taking a “covid gap year” of some sort while they wait for a vaccine which optimistically should be available by the start of Academic Year 2021–22.
This is going to lead American society to an uncharacteristic excess of young people not in school, but during a time when getting a job not requiring a college degree is quite unlikely, travel abroad is not an option, and most of the other traditional gap-year activities are not feasible. Indeed, some people recommend against the gap-year approach for similar reasons, while others, such as a writer for the LA Times, recommend taking a gap-year but being more creative with the plan such as enrolling in a conservation program. According to a survey by the American Council on Education, nearly one in five college students were not sure about their plans to re-enroll in the fall, so the size of the student population considering these issues is not trivial. What makes the issue more complicated is that schools have heterogeneous and, possibly, strict deferral or gap-year policies. In the same LA Times article, they report that Cal State Fresno will allow incoming freshman to defer but taking college classes at another school during this deferral will void it and students will have to reapply for transfer admission. This does not bode well for potential gap-year programs like the one at the Harvard Extension School which offers a more reasonably priced educational experience that is conveniently structured to fit in one year and can diversify a student’s skills and education during a gap-year.
What can we do with the excess supply of young high-school graduates that will be beneficial for society, while at the same time offering good value to the students themselves? We revisit this after first discussing the recession.
The COVID-19 Recession
The economic recession, following the lockdowns in response to the pandemic, has been nothing short of unprecedented. The closest analog, at least as far as the unemployment rate is concerned, is the Great Depression. However, this recession is unique in that there isn’t a one-sided shock to the market; in the Great Recession the primary driver of the recession was on the demand side, namely people had less money and less optimism about their future incomes so they reduced spending in response. In this recession, both the demand and supply sides have been disrupted. Demand has fallen as people haven’t been able to maintain their usual consumption patterns for things like experiences, and services, while the supply side fell as supply chains became disrupted due to factories closing and manufacturing slowing down, as well as slow downs in shipping although it is unclear if this is simply a secondary fallout from manufacturing falling or caused by the pandemic directly. Despite the circumstances unique to this recession, there are lessons we have learned from recessions gone by that will be applicable in aiding the recovery.
On a Freakonomics Podcast episode, Christina Romer, an Economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley whose research interests lie in recessions and who served in the Obama administration as an economist, described several strategies that were employed in previous recessions, some successful and some less so. One of the successful ones was the WPA’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) which, according to a report prepared by Lou Ann Speulda, enrolled “300,000 unemployed young men between the ages of 18 and 25, who were unmarried, and whose families were on relief roles.” To qualify for the program the men had to have been unemployed for at least six months. The CCC worked on a variety of projects including structural improvements, wildlife conservation, and forest protection, among others. The Corps members were paid a monthly wage, one quarter of which was provided directly to the members while three quarters of which was sent back to the member’s family or to a savings account accessible after their tenure in the program. As the CCC was developed as a response to the recession at the time, it was intended as a temporary agency and subject to congressional re-approval. The History Network writes about the CCC: “[It was] Considered by many to be one of the most successful of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, the CCC planted more than three billion trees and constructed trails and shelters in more than 800 parks nationwide during its nine years of existence. The CCC helped to shape the modern national and state park systems we enjoy today.”
However, Romer notes about the potential to adapt a similar approach to today’s recession: “But can you imagine proposing that today of, ‘Let’s hire young men, send them out to the woods and send their checks home to their parents?’ That just, I think, is not in the modern American way of doing things.” While I agree with Romer that a duplication of the CCC may not be the right way to go in 2020, I think the core ideas can be adapted to the present context.
So, how do Gap Years, Recessions, and K-12 education fit together? An astute reader will likely have already guessed at my suggestion.
Gap Years, Recessions, and K-12 Education: Solution
In this particular pandemic induced recession, we have been presented with several individual problems disrupting different aspects of American society, but I think each group’s problems can be solved by the other’s needs. Specifically there are three parties of note here:
- Government: Needs a way to stimulate the economy to minimize the impact of the recession. Currently doing this by offering free money but without stimulating real economic activity.
- College Students: Need a way to be productive in the next year that keeps them progressing in their fledgling career tracks, while not being able to enjoy the traditional method of doing this, i.e. college coursework in progress to their Bachelor’s degree.
- Families with Children: Need a way to keep their children progressing in their education, while being careful about exposing their children and themselves to the 2019 novel coronavirus.
A simple solution to these three problems that should be a win-win-win is for the government to employ college students, incoming and current, as teachers for K-12 education in the community teaching scheme described at the start of the article. This accomplishes 3 things:
- The government can help stimulate the economy by providing public jobs for the unemployed, specifically the age groups with the largest unemployment rate from COVID-19. 16 to 19 year olds have an unemployment rate 17.3 percentage points higher than the same time last year, and 20 to 24 year olds have an employment rate 16.2 percentage points higher.
- College students have an alternative opportunity to returning or starting college, one that provides a positive addition to their resume, and it will put some additional money in their pocket so when they return to college they can reduce or pay down some of their student loans, or perhaps even simply support more consumption when typical consumption patterns become feasible again after the pandemic ends; a boon to the recovery.
- K-12 students receive education that will keep them from falling behind, likely in smaller classroom settings which may even lead to better learning outcomes, and keep them insulated from the virus, or at least better tracked for contact tracing.
The structure of this project could be based somewhat on the CCC; I especially like the pay structure of one quarter today and three quarter deferred. However, a project of this scale requires no trivial amount of planning and strategizing to enact, and is made even more so difficult by the short lead time if this plan is to be enacted by early fall. The devil, as they say, is in the details, which brings me to the fourth key actor necessary for this strategy to be implemented.
Teaching for America
In her interview on Freakonomics, Romer describes a plan she had in 2009 for stimulating employment with public-works jobs. The plan was to create a massive hiring program for teacher’s aides, which would offset the traditional focus of public works jobs tending to be “for construction workers, male-, often, oriented jobs.” However Romer and her team ran into opposition from local school districts. She recounts the situation as follows:
“And we ran into a certain amount of opposition from, you know, think about local school districts that are laying off teachers. And you say, ‘But I have this great program. I’m going to give you all these teachers’ aides.’ They tended to say, ‘What we really need is the money so we can keep our teachers employed.’”
Romer’s point here raises a more general issue with the public teaching programs in the United States: they are woefully inefficient. Teachers’ unions prize seniority over performance, make it difficult to fire teachers, and likely contribute to a general organizational lethargy that precludes it from having the agility to both enact a new teaching scheme such as the one described here and to diffuse it once the need for this scheme ends. We need another channel of execution for this plan to work.
Enter Teach for America (TFA).
In their own words: “Teach For America is a diverse network of leaders who confront educational inequity by teaching for at least two years and then working with unwavering commitment from every sector of society to create a nation free from this injustice.” Teach for America was founded in 1989 by Wendy Kopp to “address a national teacher shortage and dire academic issues for low-income kids that had not improved in a century.” The lynchpin of her plan to do this focused on recruiting “high-performing college grads to teach in high-need urban and rural schools”.
Teach for America’s existing operations and structure provide the perfect set of qualities for executing on this plan:
- TFA focuses on training recent college graduates to become teachers. This is very similar to the group I suggest for this scheme, with the main difference being a few years of college experience. However, given the smaller nature of the classroom setting in this scheme, the additional years of college experience that I imagine would help with the management of a larger classroom setting might not be as necessary, or can be trained into the teaching staff to reasonable competency.
- TFA builds its teaching force with the intention of the employment being temporary for most staff. TFA expects their teachers to contribute for at least two years with the expectation that many of them will leave the corps after those two years, and they have built recruiting and people management systems with this short-term nature, relative to public teaching systems, in mind. This means they should have optimal hiring processes and training processes in place to manage short-term teaching staff, which is exactly the type of organizational capability necessary for this scheme.
- TFA has mastered training teachers en masse in a short period of time. This can be argued by two factors, the scale of the program and the success of students in TFA classrooms. TFA recruits upward of 4000 new teachers on staff every year since at least 2010, and they effectively train those 4000 incoming teachers over a few weeks at its annual Summer Institute with 60 staff. On the success of this training, TFA reports that a Mathematica Policy Research study found that students in TFA classrooms “learned 2.6 months more mathematics in a year” than other classrooms, and pre-K through second grade students in TFA classrooms “outperformed their peers in reading by the equivalent of an additional 1.3 months of learning.”
- TFA has a massive distribution of teachers across all of America “from Boston to Hawai’i and South Dakota to the Rio Grande Valley.” To manage this large distribution with incoming teachers every year they must have developed a sophisticated logistics network for managing placement and distribution of these teachers, likely a necessary complement to its other people operations needs. Given the complex distribution problem of placing teachers into these smaller classroom settings and the community-local focus on locating these classrooms, an organization with a sophisticated people operations system is a prerequisite for this scheme. Further, given this vast geographic allocation of teachers, TFA has also developed elements in its training programs to fit local contexts because “preparing someone to teach in, say, Appalachia, requires a slightly different approach than preparing them to teach in urban areas.”
- TFA is a strong addition to a resume and can help progress a career especially if graduate school is on the books. A 2-year stint with TFA is generally seen as quite prestigious by a number of career gatekeepers. These include MBA programs at business schools like Harvard Business School and the Yale School of Management and top-tier consulting firms like Bain and Company, and the Boston Consulting Group. According to their website, TFA also serves as a good stepping stone to Public Policy, Medical, and Law, schools. This will be a strong substitute for the career progress that a year of college would otherwise offer to students, and service with TFA can qualify those interested in graduate school for tuition discounts or scholarships.
- Finally TFA already has a relationship with the Federal Government. This is illustrated by the TFA and AmeriCorps partnership that started in 1994. This existing relationship can serve as a building block between the Federal Government (and perhaps State Governments by affiliation) and TFA in pursuit of this scheme. The value of an existing relationship to execute a scheme like this one in a time of high uncertainty and with little lead time should not be underestimated.
All these qualities together make Teach for America an excellent candidate for partnering with the Federal Government and the Department of Education to execute on this scheme for adjusting the education delivery system in response to the concerns imposed by the pandemic, and allows for ease of scaling down the scheme after the pandemic threat ends, especially relative to attempting to execute it in an organization context where Teachers’ Unions have influence.
Conclusion
In the face of an unprecedented threat we must be open to exploring unprecedented solutions. While the conditions facing the various aspects of the United States stemming from the pandemic are somewhat unique, namely education needs for children, career development for young adults, and managing the economic recovery for the government, the specific issues at play for each problem lend themselves well to solving the other’s problems.
The solution scheme I propose here will allow for the government to employ strategies that were successful in a previous recession, namely public employment, but in a 2020 pandemic context. The opportunity to train and work with a prestigious organization like Teach for America offers college students a suitable substitute to a non-traditional year of college coursework for career progression. The employment of community focused teachers will allow for minimization of the pandemic-induced education gap between wealthy families who can afford private local education for their children and poorer families who do not have this option. There are also some positive secondary effects from enacting this scheme.
The first is that it solves the child-care problem facing the adult workforce to some extent. One of the issues being faced by adults who maintain employment, either remotely or onsite, is that the lack of schools being open in the fall, or the threat of sending their children to school in a pandemic, will disrupt their ability to be as productive as would otherwise be the case. This will be a contributing factor to a slower recovery by itself.
The second is that it solves an impending labor market glut for graduating students entering the workforce for the first time. If students continue along their education paths at the same rate as before, we will find a significant excess of labor for a reduced number of jobs given the reduction in employment caused by the pandemic when they graduate. As the recovery progresses we are likely to see the excess labor be absorbed into the workforce but it is not clear how long this will take. If students delay their graduation date by instead substituting a gap-year type activity such as in this scheme, but also in other ways, then at a market level we can avoid or minimize the glut and have a reduced level of unemployment during the recovery. This will also help normalize labor market activity much sooner relative to the case where education progression continues as usual.
If you think this scheme could be helpful in solving the problems outlined, please share the article, especially if you know someone with the decision making power to make this happen.
You can find me @bradchattergoon on Twitter.
