 So welcome back So welcome back to the final day of our Tanner lecture series this year As a consequence of Carolyn Hawksby's extraordinary Tanner lectures and the splendid commentaries by Jan Werner Mueller Eric Hurst and Sylvia Bungay I for one certainly feel that I over the past few days have acquired new advanced Cognitive skills for which I realize I have now to thank not only our discussants, but also certain world weary long-suffering middle school teachers in the mid 1980s however Not for reasons necessarily of neuroplasticity But just because it's our last day the window for future growth is closing. So let me turn it over as soon as possible To our Tanner lecture and commentators So we'll begin with some further reflections from Jan Werner Mueller Eric Hurst and Sylvia Bungay Then we'll have a brief break of about 10 minutes We'll hear responses from Carolyn Hawksby And then we'll have open discussion including if there are any questions from the audience. So take it away Jan Thank you and I'll stand up if I if I may so I'm afraid I still Haven't acquired the advanced cognitive skill of using PowerPoint But I do firmly believe in the power of my points of which there are two main ones and then also two Questions, which perhaps people who know much more about this area than I do can possibly help me with So as you all know We've heard over the last two days a very powerful case for acquiring advanced cognitive skills in middle school in particular I will try to complement this. This is my first point with in light of our larger political challenges a perhaps predictable case for Well, you may as well say social or more particularly Civic or also in the widest sense political skills and My sense is that a couple of decades ago. This would have all been entirely obvious Nobody would have necessarily felt the need to be labor a sort of larger argument about the necessity of civic education But I think it's fair to say that today civic education is under pressure from two rather different angles The first one is simply that plenty of people it seems to me are always ready to say, yeah, of course This is important stuff. Of course, it's basic for democratic citizenship but Given all the other stuff we have to worry about given the importance of STEM fields given the importance of competing with China and So on and so forth. There's always a temptation to say, well, let's cut Whatever we can sort of still sort of shave shave away and that's particularly concerning Because if you go back to John Dewey and others who really saw the school, you know as the site where you learned Basic skills for democratic citizenship was clear that this was gonna take time. I mean to basically Treat others respectfully in a certain way while at the same time engaging in conflicts Maybe a little bit along the lines. I was trying to make plausible to you on the first day So again, democracy is not about consensus. It is about conflict But conflict conducted in a particular way such as you do not denigrate Your adversaries such that you do try to hold on to a shared set of facts. That just takes time and My sense is that more and more people are willing to say, well, you know, it's too bad But we just don't have the time for these sorts of for these sorts of exercises The other pressure on civic education is maybe more particular to the United States I think there's a fair amount of evidence that in an age of high polarization Many people and perhaps in particular teachers shy away from really political Education because they are worried that things might get out of hands amongst the kids themselves or of course I don't need to tell you this in great detail amongst the parents because as we've seen in particular in the last couple of months Curricula questions about what's included what happens in the classroom can very easily Be weaponized in our in our day and age So I worry that this particular anxiety has led to a sort of tendency to make civic education Education basically about road learning of facts. How many branches are there? You know, how does this work the mechanics of government here and there which to be sure we shouldn't denigrate? I mean, I'm sure you've all seen surveys which you know empirically very powerfully demonstrate that many many more people know the judges of American Idol then know the judges who sit on the Supreme Court So I'm not denigrating this kind of factual knowledge But it's also not really civic education in the sense of how do we really deal with deep disagreements in our in our democracies So I think that's a concern that certainly is also present in schools. I Dare say it now extends into colleges as well I think the argument has been powerfully made most recently by Ron Daniels The president of Johns Hopkins who actually wrote a very worth worthwhile very good book called what universities owe to democracy? Where among other things he points out that of course the increasing emphasis on community service is a very good thing I mean the fact that people go out there and volunteer and do something real for the local communities great at the same time It's of course in a certain way also curiously apolitical It kind of displaces more directly political engagement because community service is kind of safe And plus, you know not to be too cynical about it's you know yet another thing you can add to your CV You know in addition to the three NGOs you founded Indonesia already in your teenage years and so on So it's sort of a safe way of basically bringing in something that looks political But isn't really Political and I worry that the more we go down this path the less we prepare young people For the basic requirements of Democratic citizenship. That's the first point One question that's sort of particularly to Carol and I suppose I'm when I thought about especially what you said yesterday About how you talk to policymakers how you try to feed your findings into a policymaking process You know it was it was hardening to hear that there are people who are ready to listen who are basically willing to engage in experiments The question that occurred to me was well what kind of potential possible? Institutional obstacles are or where does the counter pressure come from exactly and by? Institutional obstacles I'm sort of referring to the question basically whether a given institutional infrastructure in the country might sometimes make certain policy Directions proposals very very difficult to implement even if many people are on board in theory I'll just give one brief example to illustrate this point I think this is by now long forgotten But basically after having destroyed a large part of British manufacturing the factor government actually had the idea that you know Actually manufacturing wasn't such a bad thing and now the trade unions have been crushed. There should be more emphasis on what? basically the Germans were doing and So many people among that government actually look we should have more vocational training more apprenticeships I mean we've heard arguments from Eric why this isn't you know in our day and age necessarily such a great idea But the interesting thing is that this clearly didn't work because very soon people realize okay to actually Bring about an outcome like this. You do need a particular set of institutions Including fairly strong trade unions who are willing to work with employers who are willing to put together a system where young people do Get these apprenticeships in a way that actually allows them them to join companies do certain kinds of work and so on and As many of you probably remember sort of only after this failure Get the British government then basically okay screw it basically we're gonna try to do something different We are trying to push as many young people into universities That's also the moment when British polytechnics became universities all of a sudden and they said we want as many young people as possible To acquire some skills which may or may not be useful later on I mean I'm caricature a little bit, but there was a sort of sense at the time that look They can all become programmers at least you know because they will somehow know something about how to do something with computers so just to illustrate the point that you know sometimes you do need a particular interest in structural infrastructure to Implement certain policies, so I'm wondering how this kind of question plays out in the United States one other question That's Well, it's not really meant to be provocative, but might might introduce a tiny bit of dissensus Which I think we need to generate because otherwise especially people at home are gonna say look it's liberal elite sitting there again They agree about absolutely everything they keep saying nasty things about Appalachia, you know, etc. So you know where is the disagreement here? So here's one question We've been sort of treating the economy Almost as a given and there are these new challenges and they have to do with globalization and a shift away from manufacturing And I'm not disputing the basics of the story But of course on one level the economy is not just objectively given there are political choices and Maybe less obviously and here you at last maybe can hear the normative theory speaking a bit more There is a need for capitalism to justify itself. It's not self-adjustifying and One of the I find most interesting maybe most important theories in the last 20 30 years that have looked about changing Justifications for capitalism emanate from two French sociologists Maybe some of you may remember reading this book That's called the new spirit of capitalism and it's Luke Bolton ski and FK a pillow who basically say Capitalism today really does look very different and has something to do with the requirement of advance cognitive skills But the way it looks different also has something to do with how capitalism came under under pressure After the 1960s after the student movements after many people basically said it's not just social security That matters for us as participants in the economy. We also want autonomy. We want self-government We want self-realization and so this is what Bolton ski and capital famously then called the artistic Critique of capitalism as opposed to the old and also social critique Which was more about security and which was certainly very fitting for a Fordist H But which in a post-fordist age all of a sudden became something that revolved much more about demands for autonomy They sort of tried to illustrate this shift by looking at French management manuals, you know What is actually taught in business schools where they basically said look it was sort of the end of a certain type of hierarchy Managers became much more like facilitators of teams. They weren't traditional bosses work itself became a succession of projects as opposed to a Predictable sort of career path over over many decades and for many people. This is an entirely empirically plausible argument But it also introduces a wrinkle into the whole story of you know Is the economy just given or is the economy also a site where different moment of justifications possibly clash and we're you know It's always worth asking the question. Okay, so then why did this happen exactly? Maybe to some degree. Yes, it's to be technological change and globalization But there also is a story about how people are basically convinced that this is something that's worthwhile that's ultimately jittered in certain ways and I don't think I need to point to Places not too far away from here where you know, especially these especially this overall vision of an artistic critique has Seemingly been overcome or has as as Bolton skin capillary would put her the critique has been recuperated Because hey, who wouldn't love free espresso all day? You can bicycle in you know in your in your workplace You can wear a hoodie and so I'll spare you all the rest of the case You will know all this much much better than I do and then I do actually so that's another question So what we make of this more normative side last point so We've been talking a little bit at least about economic fatalism and about the dangers in particular of right wing authoritarian populism so forgive me if I close by Just very directly Confronting the whole question. What is to be done? Because I suspect most of you would tend to agree with me that we do still live in politically incredibly Parallelist times and many of us are asking the question. What can we what can we do under these under these circumstances? So if I may I'll leave you just with two thoughts in this in this in this in this regard the first one is simply That you know ideally especially you know Predictably professor doing democratic theory would say that wouldn't he that ideally of course all citizens are always Democratic theorists on some on some level always could recite the basics of what democracy is about but that's become particularly important now and In addition to ideally all citizens being able to do that. It's also become particularly important for certain professionals such as journalists for instance One of the I think real in a sense also cognitive challenges We've seen in recent years is that very often it's become very difficult to tell the difference between normal run-of-the-mill policy Disagreement and situations Where democracy itself is all of a sudden at stake and again some of you may disagree I mean may actually agree with me when I say that journalists have sometimes done a particularly bad job of Bearing that distinction in mind. There are plenty of journalists out there who still pretend that we have two normal poker parties That all we ever see is normal run-of-the-mill policy disagreement when in fact One of these parties in certain regards has decisively turned against some of the basics of democracy And it's an art not so much a science maybe to kind of bring out this distinction Such that you do not look like a partisan hack that as a journalist you cannot simply be accused of all but you're always writing bad stuff about Republicans how dare you you are just you know obviously partisan and biased and prejudiced and so on to basically get the point across that no We can have many many policy disagreements But sometimes it's not just a normal policy disagreement a red line has been crossed and that I think also has become a very important challenge for Opposition parties in countries where the government has been captured by right-wing Authoritarian populace including some of what we witnessed in this country in the last 405 405 years when an opposition that always Sort of takes it to the max and you know whatever happens is always a threat for democracy on a certain level It's going to lose credibility whereas an opposition that says look. We don't like it if the healthcare system is you know transformed again completely if the Affordable Care Act were to be totally Repealed in some form or another but that's ultimately Just a normal policy disagreement and any Republican president would have tried it Of course, it wasn't special about about Trump But going after inspectors general not accepting an election loss That is not a normal policy disagreement And I know that none of this is really news for people in this room But that in one on one level is well idea. I wouldn't say it's a skill But it's a kind of capacity for judgment that one needs to hold It's not always as obvious as I'm making it out to be maybe now and that's something that ideally I think young people would also pick up on a way in in such a form that they can take it into adulthood and can usefully Employ that kind of sense of judgment later on very last point in this in this regard. I think one of the dominant trends of our era in general in politics and not just in the United States is what some of our Colleagues tend to refer to as the mainstreaming of the far right that certain policy positions Which clearly used to be completely beyond the pale all of a sudden our adopted are legitimized by What are generally seen as respectable? Let's say center-right actors We've just seen a classic example of this in France Well, you basically had traditional center-right parties which nobody really suspects of beings of crazy right-wing author authoritarian populist basically have a candidate Who as some of you may recall in one speech? Basically repeated the conspiracy theory of the great replacement as in Muslims are being sent here to get rid of the real French Population that would have been unthinkable 10 20 years ago But it sort of slowly is happening and the reason I underline this point is simply that with these kinds of actors The actors who are still seen as centrist normal respectable mainstream and so on maybe Occasionally some of us have a chance to talk to them or to influence them if I tomorrow You know knock on the headquarters of the Marine Bapin campaign I don't think they're gonna give me a lot of time and they don't want to hear my lecture about populism and all this kind of stuff But if you talk to you know respectable conservatives if you can still find any here and there that can I hope Still make an enormous enormous difference and again, that's a question of judgment how one approaches this. It's not a science It's an art, but I think that's also the kind of thing that ideally we would acquire by way of basic political skills Forgive the sermon or maybe some even thought it was a rant But since you know since since the invitation was to be somewhat more riffing and free-flowing on this last day I hope you're forgiving. Thank you anyway for your attention Okay, so I'm gonna complement what yandid in in in one particular way, which is I want to think kind of where we go next and So if we believe that Investments in And in adolescence are going to have huge payoffs You know what is the margin and so we talked a lot about advanced cognitive skills And I want to try to separate that a little bit from just general Education, you know, is it really something about advanced cognitive skills or is it is something about just you know other types of skills that might also be accredited Through the process, so we're gonna talk a little bit about that and then as to redo I'm gonna show a little bit more about You know kind of inequality under a More socio-economic forces as opposed to just purely economic forces yesterday I talked a lot about you know kind of employment and wages and income and things I'm gonna try to talk a little bit more about inequalities in other Vectors that we've heard a lot about in in recent time periods and then want to end Kind of where yandid and just try to think then what does that mean for next steps in policy? So we have this information how to then we translate into Actions and part of what we're gonna think about and at least so that's what I do with a lot of my work is you know You know where why does policy needed any toy? Is there some sort of barrier that is preventing people from retrieving their best selves and if there is such a barrier We think there's a you know a land of opportunity and equality and if it's not that Can we then think about barriers and it might be you know the way we do public education? And we might have to change compensation in certain ways But how do we go from that next step to figure out? You know how do we take our insights and go a little bit further? So I'm going to I'm not sure this is working, but I could work from here. Maybe perfect Okay, so I'm gonna talk a little bit now about advanced cognitive skills versus just general Graduations like our bachelor's degree high school degree, etc And so this is Caroline's picture from her her talk yesterday about kind of where we see Places with less of this measure of cognitive skill This is a from a test that people put out and you could take the test and it kind of measures your I believe this one is the math Ability, there's reading ones You could see the lighter areas are where there is spatially Heterogeneity in lower amounts of these skills relative to the darker areas I'm just going to show you one other picture and this is just from the US census. It's different colors But this is now going to measure the fraction of the population with a bachelor's degree Versus not and so the darker the red areas that means those are the places with the lowest amounts of Citizens with a bachelor's degree those areas are nearly identical from what Caroline showed before so there is a strong correlation with the measures of advanced cognitive skills and just general measures of human capital in this case Completed years of schooling and so we might then ask ourselves. Is there something more? That about advanced cognitive skills that are important above and beyond just Completed years of schooling and I'm going to show you yes, there is and that the way Caroline has been pushing us There's something more above and beyond than just completed years of schooling I'm going to do that using a couple of descriptive statistics from a data set that we use as economists a lot It's called the the national longitudinal surveys of youths So what does that survey do it follows a cohort of individuals when they're like 14 years old ish And it takes those individuals when they're 14 and follows them over long periods of time throughout their life as far as they can go And so there's a cohort in 1979 and a cohort in 1997 and they follow those individuals with surveys Asking both economic and demographic questions in every year or every other year of their life going forward when they are 14 years old they were asked a set of questions about Cognitive skills and other types of skills, but they were asked Every respondent was giving the arms force qualifying test as a 14 year old to try to measure some measures of cognitive skills And this basically test measures, you know math and reading Skills kind of like a any standardized test us and so the higher your score The more of these types of skills you have and so now I'm going to ask What happens to people with high measures of this skill when they are 14 on? future outcomes in their life Above and beyond just being educated and so I'm going to show you a series of pictures like that now Just to get a sense of what the data looks like So the first thing I'm going to show you is is there a correlation between this test score and Your future education outcomes remember you're taking this test when you're 14 I could see you over your whole entire life, and then I could say when you're 30. That's what I'm going to measure you What is the highest degree of schooling you got when you're 30? And so I'm going to sort people by quartile of their AFQT score this test score when they were 14 So one means the bottom quartile four means the top quartile And then I'm just going to ask what fraction of people in those quartiles when they were 14 ends up getting Bachelors degree and so if you're in the bottom part of the AFQT this test score distribution when you are 14 Only 2% of you are going to end up with a bachelor's degree later in life If you're in the top quartile about two-thirds of you are going to end up with a bachelor's degree later in your life And the patterns are roughly similar over time. So this is the 1979 cohort This is the 1997 cohort and the patterns are also very similar For women as well as they are for men. So I'm going to focus on men kind of like I did yesterday But the patterns are very similar between between men and women. So the okay So AFQT this test score these advanced cognitive skills is strongly correlated with future education outcomes Exactly the way Caroline kind of forecasted yesterday. There's something tangible about the these skills the next thing I'm going to show you is What is the propensity? to work when you're 30 years old by these AFQT quartiles and so if you are in the bottom of this standardized test When you are 30 about only 82 percent of you worked in 1979 if you're in the top quartile About 96 percent of you. So again, these things have future predictive power for Your employment the thing I want to draw your attention to I got to keep walking back as my clicker isn't working is That the big decline in employment that I showed you yesterday that has occurred over this time period is Concentrated in particular in people with very low AFQT score and that includes even when I control for education So if I did this education group by education group It is really those with the lowest AFQT score that is going to be less likely to work above and beyond They're accumulated years of school. So there's something about these skills that this test score is picking up It's the same type of test scores that that Caroline was working with yesterday That kind of has predictive power of future outcomes above and beyond just education And I'm gonna do it one more time to actually show you wage effects So what I'm doing here is now you're 30 years old. I observe you when you're older in your life I Could imagine what you're earning when you're 30 I'm now going to project that in the regression sense on The AFQT score you had when you're 14 and these regressions are already controlling for your levels of human capital You're accumulated years of schooling So above and beyond your schooling when you're 30 years old if you happen to be 14 and have a really high AFQT test score again conditional on all that education you got Your wages are 26 percent higher Than somebody from the bottom AFQT group, which is the admitted group in this count in this thing. So again There's something about there's tangibles above and beyond schooling that is going to be predictive of people's future employment and End-wage outcomes again suggesting that it's not just measures of education per se. They're highly correlated with your kind of Advanced skills and by these kind of metrics, but it's got to be more than that at least the data says there's more than just years of schooling Because it's predictive of your 14 year old test score shows up with your wages two decades later Above and beyond your education and your employment propensities Let me just show one other thing that is on my mind for some time. It's other socio-economic Factors I'm gonna show you a few pictures on that right now. And so this is just when you're 30 again So you're 30 years old. This is the propensity to live with your parents by AFQT score When you're 30 years old? Okay, it's rare those numbers are smallish right if most people don't live with their parents when they're 30 however, even again conditional on education and those with the high AFQT score are Less likely to live with their parents Then people with low AFQT score this pattern holds for men for women within each education group So again, it's getting closer to yon's kind of points there There's other things that are changing besides just the economic forces in a socio-economic sense And I'm gonna show you a couple more pictures in my last thing and then I'm gonna conclude which is a couple of other metrics Oh, this is the last thing this is kind of just what yesterday we talked a little bit I forgot about this slide to apologize for my my narrative clunkiness But this last one is basically showing parental background and AFQT score So when you're 14 they ask hey tell me about your mom tell me about your dad And so now I'm correlating your mother's education with the propensity to be in different AFQT quartiles And so each one of these columns sum to a hundred and so having a mother with less than a high school degree Basically means 40% of their children conditional on a mother with less than a high school degree Show up in the lowest AFQT quartile The mothers with a bachelor's degree almost half of their children end up in the top quartile So there's this persistence at intergenerationally so when we start talking we talked a little about that yesterday About what is the role of persistence now some of it we talked about genetics need not be genetic as Caroline answered There's a whole bunch of things that causes persistence, but this persistence shows up strongly in the data And so how do we think about changing the system realizing that there's this persistence again doesn't need to be genetics but something that is strongly causing Socio-economic status to be perpetuated across across generations, okay last pictures and then That's a summary we're mocking I want to talk a little bit now about other Socio-economic trends, and I'm going to show you some pictures, and so this is kind of some work from some colleagues of ours at Princeton and case and Angus Deaton and they've been hit a nerve in the kind of the popular Discussions recently about this phrase deaths of despair so if you kind of Google deaths of despair I believe that's a recent term David Carilla that is kind of a recent or but it hit the lexicon pretty well, and in particular what it means is that in recent periods there's been declining rates of Increasing mortality rates declining length of life in particular For middle-aged individuals particularly white individuals relative to trend and so what I'm showing you here is The mortality rates this is from the book of of Ann and Angus Where you could see this is white non Hispanic men with less high school degree or less and their deaths per 100,000 individuals for 50 to 54 year olds has been rising in the last Few years and it certainly hasn't been declining over this time period and over decades. We tend to see death rates falling Particularly for advances in heart disease and such but we're not seeing that and if anything The deaths have been deaths of despair means what has been driving this increase in death rates hasn't been heart attacks it's been things like drug overdoses suicides and You know homicides and alcohols I'm gonna show you the stuff on drug deaths Over time and again, we could say whether this is judgment or not. I'm not trying to be judgment. This is data the places for which Drug deaths have increased the most are in those same kind of circles that Caroline showed us yesterday Over this time period so increasing deaths of despair is not spatially concentrated Spatially disperse it is spatially concentrated in some of the same places for which we have seen You know education levels being low Manufacturing jobs disappearing You see drug deaths increasing. I'm gonna show you one more and then I'll conclude this is just suicides again It's a little bit more spurs there, but you can see the deeper red is more concentrated in some of those places So we have again this inequality that's been rising the economic structure of the economy has been changing It is showing up in measures economic like wages and employment But we don't care so much only about wages and employment. It's showing up in lots of other components of socioeconomic well-being like suicides in drug overdoses Again, I care more about this a lot about the spatial components I mean Caroline's kind of kind of pointed us in that direction But a lot of my work is trying to explain this spatial variation. We all have the same political system We all have the same institutions We all listen to the same have access to the same types of information But yet outcomes are diverging spatially within the United States Which tells me that there is some role for some of these these economic forces potentially to explain some of these aggregate trends the last picture and this is just a version of What? Caroline showed the other in her first lecture. I've done it a little differently so what I've done here is the propensity for participants in a given county in 2016 to vote Republican Normalized how they've done in the past so normalized how they've done relative to 2012 this one's 2012, but I've done it 2012 or a whole bunch of other people so this is where the political shifts have occurred relative to trend in the United States Shifting towards voting for one party in this case the Republican Party and you can see a lot of the red is in the upper point it's not just This little region where those shifts have been these places vote Republican in almost all you know many elections But the shift has occurred here and the last thing I'm just gonna show which makes me think there are these economic forces is if you take a look at this picture and Then remind me where I showed you those manufacturing declines were For my lecture yesterday. They correlate a lot stronger together. So again this the weakening of the economic Situation might be moving us towards some of these political shifts that were worried about and it's not spatially Again disperse it spatially concentrated in where some of these shifts occur and that is all I have so again There's a lot of Things I just love all of it. I do want us in our open time together to talk a little bit about what is the policy? What's next we take this and where do we go from here? perfect, that's all I got This thing doesn't work Yeah Okay, it's on Maybe okay, great Okay, thank you to both of our discussions has been fantastic So yesterday I talked about the cognitive and neural underpinnings of advanced cognitive skills Particularly reasoning and then I provided an overview of brain plasticity. I showed that Abstract reasoning begins to plateau around age 12 Although there's a lot of individual variability And I also showed that the strength of this frontal parietal brain network the white matter connections at this time predict Not only concurrent reasoning but also the growth of reasoning over time So a question at hand then is whether providing students with the opportunity to practice reasoning in this middle school kind of Early adolescent period it can strengthen that underlying brain network Making it then easier to tackle other novel challenges in the future So I should note that this is not a foregone conclusion and this comes back to some things that Jan Verner was talking about as well So on the one hand our current Western educational system has its roots in ancient Greece Where Plato and Socrates argued that future rulers of the country should receive extensive training in mathematics And and other skills as well to prepare them to reason through moral and political problems And to this day our investment in education is based on the idea that formal schooling hones these general Skills that help students to become productive members of society as we were talking about however, the possibility of transferable domain general cognitive skills has been hotly debated for over a hundred years and I would say that Most cognitive psychologists and many education researchers believe based on research from pretty targeted focused interventions That learning is highly context and content specific that basically this is a fool's errand So on the other hand to paraphrase some of my colleagues Asking whether learning can transfer is like asking whether medicine cures disease. Well, it depends, right? So I've argued that high-quality schooling that's immersive multifaceted and protracted Learning experiences are more promising than the kinds of short-term focused interventions that have been studied predominantly especially in cognitive psychology So for this reason, I'm really intrigued by the data that Caroline showed us regarding the effects of SAT scores of changing a Changing a statewide assessment to one that placed greater demands on reasoning or more generally was just more cognitively challenging That surely prompted changes in teaching practices to teach to the test And she found that students who had undergone the new more challenging test early from grades five to eight Perform better on the SAT later on than those who had not had this kind of curriculum geared towards this test until high school I think it would be interesting to follow up on these promising findings by comparing the reasoning skills of students exposed to STEM curricula that do or do not really adequately meet the current very rigorous u.s Science standards called the next generation science standards that focus very much on critical thinking skills So now I want to shift gears and speculate as to what drives the findings that Caroline showed us regarding teacher value added She asked at what point in a student's education high quality instruction maximally benefited Academic outcomes. So this is a really tough problem since it's almost never the case I'm gonna turn that off. No, okay. It's almost never the case That the same educational intervention can be applied at different ages That's like comparing apples and oranges as Caroline mentioned And in all honesty, I've really spent years scratching my head trying to figure out exactly how to do that So, you know and and as Caroline also noted these sort of small intervention studies are not scalable So looking at the effects of teacher quality on student outcomes is a brilliant approach It's really a meaningful natural intervention at all grade levels Now the inverted u pattern of responsiveness to teacher quality that Caroline finds across the grades is really striking Right. I mean students capabilities and their life circumstances change over time. So one would probably expect That let's see why is this not working. This is no longer working. Oh Thank You Eric So one would probably expect that you'd be best able to predict student outcomes if you look at more recent performance metrics Right a year or two beforehand as opposed to several years later, but that's not at all the case So what's special about early adolescence? They could explain these findings Eric, I'm gonna need you as Caroline notes endogenous skill growth is Is not gonna be able to account for this, right? If it's simply that skill begets skill and just builds on each other compound interest over time then Then basically you would see this critical foundation being laid down earlier and you would see this kind of decline So teacher value added effects would be greatest in the early grades and then lowest in high school And in fact, of course, this idea has been used as justification for investing in the early years Can you press again? So but maybe middle school is just a precarious time when the curriculum picks up speed and it's harder to catch up if You fall behind that's something we talked about The first day that would also be compatible with an endogenous skill growth account just on a different time frame Now the second graph here overall brain plasticity also cannot account for this inverted you because overall it is Highest in early childhood and so you'd expect to see the same pattern as you see for a pure early endogenous skills account on the other hand if a neural system is in the process of undergoing major Reorganization at the time of an intervention. It might not stick any changes could be overwritten by continued maturation as I mentioned Yesterday the frontal pridal network that supports reasoning and these abstract skills Mature significant significantly throughout childhood and this could explain the problem of fade-out that Caroline was talking about So essentially so early adolescents shown in pink here could then be a sweet spot In which this brain network is sufficiently developed that it isn't gonna undergo a major Reorganization after that but at the same time it's still more malleable than later in adolescence or in adulthood my professor My colleague professor Linda Wilbrecht here at Berkeley has recently shown in rodents that if you if you shift around the timing of The onset of pubertal hormones sex hormones you can shift around the maturation of frontal cortex So if you shift pubertal hormones early you see them the frontal cortex is maturing earlier and the sensitive period starts to close earlier So middle school may be this time when the window is starting to close And there's something else we can talk about which is the relation between pubertal onset and socioeconomic status Which is something that that actually is is worth discussing But anyway, all of this is probably not the whole story either and here I want to challenge I want to channel my colleague Rondal here at Berkeley and also Larry Steinberg who was supposed to be here in my place And they would highlight that adolescence is a period of transition between childhood and adulthood Not only physiologically regarding sex hormone rise But also in terms of social changes including increased freedom reduced reliance on caregivers An increased orientation towards peers caring what your peers think about you And it's a time when your self-concept is still under construction Teens are figuring out who they are whom they want to affiliate with what their goals are what they want to spend their time on and At a time when grades start to matter and students are becoming more aware of their ranking in a class as we talked about They're figuring out how much of their self-concept is actually wrapped up in school that is their level of academic orientation and Research on self-efficacy and on implicit theories of intelligence Show that if older children struggle they're more likely than younger children to internalize ideas like I'm not very smart or I suck at math So this could help explain why Caroline is finding that early adolescence is a time when a good teacher Might matter the most someone who can spark curiosity and motivate students and build up their self-confidence a Single inspiring teacher could make all the difference in terms of the path a student decides to take and the very act of deciding to Engage more intensely with difficult material could as we were talking about hone Advanced cognitive skills leading to a positive feedback loop that could be supporting academic achievement Now these ideas need to be tested empirically What's the secret sauce of value-added teachers in middle school that leads to these positive outcomes like signing up for AP? classes or enrolling in college is it simply that they explain concepts more clearly Does the way they teach for students to think more critically and or do they elicit the motivation and self-confidence that students need to Stay engaged do they help students build these advanced cognitive skills Psychology and neuroscience can help to elucidate these mechanisms underlying the effectiveness of middle school interventions How much of it is due to canalization? That is the narrowing of opportunities for a student if they're poorly equipped for entry to high school And they get tracked into regular classes, and they start to fall behind and how much is due to sensitive periods for brain plasticity? Now I actually want to make clear that we don't know very much at all about the timing plasticity for these higher level Skills in humans both because the intervention studies have been really hard to pull off I can talk to you for ages about how Frustrating that's been and also because of this issue of comparing apples and oranges across grade levels So this is important. We tend to infer potential for malleability That is experienced dependent brain plasticity based on age-related differences in the observed magnitude of change Okay, that is normative development So we we tend to conflate plasticity and development And so an important challenge is to really directly test this hypothesis that middle childhood is an important period of plasticity For the brain network that supports advanced cognitive skills Although I've shown some evidence that we think this is mostly happening around early adolescence the period is starting to close I do want to stress that it is at least still somewhat malleable in adulthood And I want to give you two pieces of evidence for this Okay Okay, great So this shows you a composite measure of a number of cognitive skills here including abstract reasoning as well as working memory And this is over the decades And we know that these types of so-called domain general skills They peak in early adulthood and then sadly they decline Okay, the Grim Reaper comes for all of us And in one study we asked whether the timing of this decline actually, oops, sorry actually depends on the level of formal education completing the time at which people are challenged most Perhaps in their lives so their challenge stretched in many ways while they're continuing their education And so I want to stress that we're not comparing level of cognitive functioning Across people who've attained different levels of education Instead what we're asking is among people within a given educational bracket How old were the best performers? Where's the age of peak cognitive functioning? So this is from a sample of over 200,000 participants and we find that indeed the age of peak functioning does Relate to the level of education completed controlling for other variables including socio-economic status and gender And so we see here peak cognitive functioning at around age 17 or 18 for people who didn't go beyond high school 19 to 24 those for those who earned a bachelor's and 26 to 32 among PhDs So in other words the hard work of going through higher education may delay the Inevitable decay that comes with aging and by the way once we start declining all these would show the same slope of decline So more direct evidence comes from some studies We did in which young adults engaged in intensive reasoning practice over the course of a number of weeks or months In the form of preparation for the law school admission test So the LSAT is very heavily focused a two-thirds of it is focused directly on on abstract reasoning skills and people are very motivated to pursue it something like 150,000 adults prepare for the LSAT every year And so does it in any way change their cognitive abilities and their brains at least for a short period of time This is really proof of principle of plasticity in young adulthood And so we did collect a number of different measures over several studies and what we find is the first of all this This intensive practice in reasoning led to increased strength in the frontal pridal white matter I'm showing you this in a different view for but this at the frontal cortex. This is pridal And that's the increased strength of the white matter We also say increased network traffic as I was talking about before so the increased coupling between these distantly Located brain regions we also saw more efficient task-related activation where people were performing a cognitive task and I'm not showing you Oh, and then and then we also saw increased performance on a variety of unpracticed tests of reasoning now The LSAT is all verbally based. It's all verbal problems and we see transfer of learning to these really you know symbolic kind of abstract tasks and the thing I'm not showing you here is we also did an eye tracking study because Eye tracking is a really great way to understand where people's attention is focused and how long it takes them to process certain information And we did this when people were solving a transitive inference Problem and we saw with eye tracking that people who had gone through the LSAT Training again on these verbal things and now they're given this abstract task They're more efficient with their eye movements and it takes them less time to abstract the relevant relations So really really interesting stuff we thought so these and other studies suggest that it's not that we're Incapable of building cognitive skills in adulthood But it is more effortful and on top of that as adults were operating under a lot of life constraints that make it much Harder to set a time set aside time for this And so it makes sense as Caroline is saying to invest more heavily in Time when we have a captive audience of students a critical time for endogenous skill growth and Potentially a chance to get in the foot in the door before the period of maximal plasticity closes So to conclude I want to come back yet again to the issue of polarization which has come up several times Stephen Pinker argues in a new book on rationality that tools of formal rationality need to be taught Explicitly in school as the fourth are and they need to become second nature So a burning question is whether middle school is also a time when students are most amenable to learning to think critically about what they encounter Not only in school, but also in their eventual jobs and in their daily lives and when they're engaging with media So thank you So we'll take a brief break of Ten minutes, so we'll reconvene at 517 so now we'll hear responses from our Tanner lecturer Caroline Hawks be Sound like it's on. Yes. Okay, great So I'm going to take my slides out of order in order to try to respond In a useful and meaningful way to each one of the commentators and I want to just thank them very very much again for their Amazing commentary. I want to start with an idea that I really got from Jan And if his commentary has really helped me solidify what I was thinking about when I was thinking about how The divide in cognitive skills in a place like the United States, but it could be any place cognitive skills are kind of universal Has led to polarization Because what did I really mean by polarization? What I meant essentially was that people with higher cognitive skills and people with lower cognitive skills Did not have opportunities to encounter one another anymore that they were in some sense segregated and so they're not having those conversations whether it's the conversations about Civics or democracy or policy or anything else They're just they're they're living in somewhat separate worlds now We can think about that in terms of geography and I'll come back to geography a little bit later But I was inspired to go to a big survey called the general social survey Which asks a lot of questions about the environments in which people live who they talk to Their expectations their attitudes things like that The general social survey does not have a particularly good cognitive test on it it has a vocabulary test and it has Occasional math problems and it has some problems that are about science But it does at least have some cognitive testing and I wanted to look Over time to see whether in the general social survey where we can see not just someone's educational attainment or their earnings, but we can see some of their attitudes and who they talk to and who they How they think about things whether I could learn something from that. So that's why I said I'm going to go out of order here Don't worry. I will come back Okay Whoops, here we go So the first chart that I'm showing you is the correlation between Vocabulary scores those just happen to be the ones that are best on the general social survey and income from 1974 To 2018 So if for instance if we start with this the left-hand side the correlation in 1974 is about 30% so if you score highly on this vocabulary exam Your the correlation between that and your income is about 30% and you can see that it rises over time There's a little bit of bumping up and down, but by the end it's over 40% So there definitely has been an increase and the degree to which if you have cognitive skills That are higher you're more likely to meet another Set of people who have the same income that you do a higher income And if you have cognitive skills that are lower you're going to meet other people who have a lower income somewhat like yours, so that's vocabulary and income This is vocabulary and occupational prestige, so let me explain the concept of occupational prestige essentially the Bureau of Labor Statistics is trying to Construct a measure of how prestigious each occupation is and that's somewhat taken from things like what your income is But it's also taken from other things that might make you you're more likely to be a manager You're more likely to be in charge of other people and occupational prestige score has not it's not just the same as saying You have a higher income. It's also about other attributes of your occupation that might make it prestigious So for instance, we academics like to think that our occupations are prestigious even though We wish universities would pay us more. Okay, so this again goes from 1974 to 2018 and you can see again there it bumps around a bit, but there is an increasing correlation over time So the people with the same level of cognitive skills end up in occupations that are more similar and have similar Occupational prestige and the correlations throughout here are higher so they start out around a little over 35 percent And then they rise to about 45 percent So generally speaking we're having more more segregated amongst other people who have the same sort of occupations that we do and a final one where I look over time is the correlation between This vocabulary score and considering yourself to be a liberal. So I showed it They actually ask on the general social survey. Do you consider yourself to be a liberal? Do you consider yourself to be a conservative? I really don't like this question very much Because I don't think that it's quite the same as the previous two occupational prestige or Or your income, but it is picking up something about are you around a lot of other people who probably have the same political views that you have and This question gets asked basically every time they do the general social survey Whereas some of the other questions that are interesting about Political beliefs don't get asked as often. So that's kind of why I picked it not that I think it's a Perfect question. It actually started out extremely low in 1975 in fact it dipped below zero That's why I have on the vertical axis negative five percent for the correlation. So that in the early 1970s Your vocabulary score and the general social survey did not predict very well at all whether you considered yourself to be a liberal or a conservative, but by the end of the period of time 2018 the correlation although still not very high is Considerably higher. So again, we see more we're going to see more segregation of people Based on their well based perhaps on their cognitive skills But that may lead them to spend a lot of time with other people who have similar political beliefs I looked at some other interesting Correlations and a most of these there it isn't worthwhile showing the time pattern because the general social survey doesn't ask the same Questions every year. So for those three it basically asks them all the time, but it doesn't always do that so I'm just going to tell you about these correlations which it asks at some point in time and I'm going to always try to say them in a sense like if your score was higher What would you what would we see was correlated with that? Positive you're more likely to have family members or close friends who are lawyers I didn't pick out lawyer. They actually ask about a whole bunch of different things. Do you have a family member? Do you have a close friend? Do you have an acquaintance? Do you know no one who's a lawyer and they ask it about a lot of different professions as well But lawyers happens to work particularly well because it exemplifies a group of people who tend to have quite a lot of education Negative you're less likely if you have a higher cognitive score on the GSS to have family members or close friends who are mechanics hairdressers people who are Clean houses or offices their whole array of other Jobs that they act ask about and I thought that was important because what it's saying is essentially You don't even know those other people with such a high probability Once your cognitive skills are different and so that's going to lead to you're not having a conversation with someone Who might have different political beliefs who might have a different income or who might have an occupation? That maybe your children would like to aspire to but you just don't know anything about what lawyers Do they also ask a bunch of very similar questions about do you know what this type of person does? Like what is what is the job description one of them was an economist and Everyone did so badly on that that I didn't show that as one of the correlations. Okay another positive correlation If you have higher cognitive scores, you have more confidence in the scientific community And you have more trust in science so you presumably are reading more Scientific publications or you pay more attention when a scientist Says something again. This is an issue on which we know we're Increasingly polarized right that some people believe in science and say medical science Climate science other types of science. Yes. I believe that and other people say no I never talked to the people who believe in that sort of stuff You're less likely to think that government should support declining industries This gets to some of the stuff that Eric was talking about yesterday Especially because people with higher cognitive skills see the people in declining industries and probably think those people don't look very much like me Right and instead they're in industries that are not declining If you have higher cognitive skills, you think that the US benefits from NAFTA the North American Free Trade Agreement As opposed to thinking that NAFTA is just causing us to lose jobs to other countries So again, that's kind of an economic Polarization And the next one is you're more likely to think if you've higher cognitive skills that it will be easy to find a new job As good as your current one that speaks to economic fatalism or worrying about being in a declining sort of job or industry And then again people with higher Cognitive skills are more likely to get political information from what I'm just calling the legacy news media This is newspapers magazines political magazines things like that as opposed to radio or television So that's it to me this sort of goes back to Jan's point about not having Civic conversations and about people not having spaces in which to have civic conversations Because in order to have those conversations you need to encounter the other people You need to find them around you and so geography gets in the way in some ways But also, you know, none of this is about geography. This is just about Do you know these people because they're your neighbors? You know them because you meet them at work or or something else? So those are the GSS correlations now let me move on and talk a little bit about I'm going to talk in a couple of different ways about What Eric talked about and one thing that he began with was this idea that Education or degrees your educational attainment was not necessarily the same as your aptitude or your cognitive skills Looking at the armed forces qualifying test from the national From the NLS why the National Longitudinal Survey of youth Two different cohorts there and one of the reasons I think this is true or increasingly true that the two things are different educational attainment and Your cognitive skills is that Educational attainment in the United States has been changing a lot in recent years Both K-12 but also especially post-secondary education and that's where a lot of the action and educational attainment is whether you're a High school graduate or whether you have some college or whether you have a bachelor's degree or something like that So what I'm just showing you here is the boom in online post-secondary enrollment Starting in about 1998 And going up until 2014, and I'm sorry. I didn't it's from an older paper of mine I didn't have the most recent numbers. It's basically continued to go up But around 600,000 students each year are now enrolled in online post-secondary education So they're getting college degrees or they're in college But it's a very different college than the college that people went to in the 1950s or in the 1960s And we can't expect them to necessarily pick up the same set of skills and that would start to break the break the relationship between I have higher cognitive skills when I'm tested on the AFQT at age 14 and I end up having higher Educational attainment the more we have a situation like this where we have very non-traditional post-secondary enrollment the more that relationship might break down Now this is from a study of mine of online enrollment And I just wanted to show you what post-secondary online schools are like so across the bottom here This is the length of the enrollment episode in other words How long are you actually enrolled and then on the vertical axis? It shows you how what percentage of people are enrolled for how much time so the first thing that you'll note is that Most the modal number here is the modal category is one in other words people are enrolled in online Post-secondary education for one year often. It's amazingly short. It's when you look at the data. It's six weeks It's eight weeks. It's 12 weeks, and that's it. Okay, so Most people are enrolled for a very short period of time 38.1% of them. I shouldn't say most the modal person is enrolled for a very short period of time and Then the next two categories are both reasonably big as well. I get enrolled for two years I get enrolled for three years But you'll notice that hardly anyone is enrolled for four years or five years where they might Logically be able to get a bachelor's degree and that those very short periods of enrollment Mean that they probably will have picked up quite limited skills in online post-secondary education because they just aren't really there Okay, they're not really they're long enough to pick up anything if you do a Calculation this is from the same study and it's just showing you Wages before during and after a two-year calendar a two calendar your episode of post-secondary enrollment That is online and so this is coming into this period of enrollment. Your wages are rising slowly like Everybody's wages rise This is the period of enrollment in the middle So you're enrolled here for two years I didn't I didn't use show the one-year enrollees because they're enrolled for such a short time That seemed a little unfair to me and then here are their wages and earnings after they're enrolled and When I draw if I were to draw a line through that I would say there was no effect of there having been enrolled in post-secondary education for two years none whatsoever the only effect that you really notice is while they're enrolled They have slightly lower income probably because they're enrolled so they have to work a few fewer hours Although frankly if you look at how many fewer hours they work they can't be Terribly, you know terribly invested in their enrollment period Which is maybe why they don't seem to pick up very many skills But I think again this is kind of breaking that relationship between Cognitive skills and educational attainment so that increase and this is part of why I've been very interested in going what I think of As back to basics and looking at cognitive skills and saying well I can always look at educational attainment, but it's nice to be able to look at actual cognitive skills and then a final oops, uh, what did I do here a Shouldn't have pressed that. Thank you. Thank you Jane. Oh Well, I'll tell you what was on that last slide I don't want to have to go all the way back to the end again. It just shows you what was the return on society's investment from your going to Post-secondary school and for many many schools it is now negative in other words you put in This much money of your own money You're obviously putting in society's money too because you're using your Pell Grant or you're using federal student loans or For many schools. It is a negative earner It's like you invest in the stock market and you keep losing money at around, you know 3% a year instead of ever gaining any money So I think that's what I just wanted to show in that in that final slide again saying that economic outcomes Maybe it may be more important to look at your actual cognitive skills than just look at your educational attainment All right now I'm going to Mention something that relates to what Sylvia was talking about It's a great puzzle That When we think endogenous skill growth should matter a lot that children who get Investments in their education as very young people do not have as much growth as we expect them to have and in fact Their advantages vis-a-vis other children seem to really fade out. So I'm just showing you a slide here from the Randomized control trial conducted by Mathematica is a very big randomized control trial that either assigned children to a Head Start Center or Randomly did not assign them to a Head Start Center and we happen to be looking at the results I know you can't see them. That's not going to matter for what we're going to do For we're looking at the results for students who were assigned at age three So they were in Head Start for age three and four and then they would have gone on to kindergarten grade one and grade two Okay, so this is what you often see in studies like this This is the column for grade three and everything that is has a dark Shading to it means that they were actually improving on that skill when they were enrolled in Head Start at age three So I can read these things better than you can but they're things like emergent literacy skills Letter naming being able to name your letters. They also have one for being able to name your numbers Receptive vocabulary letter word identification Things like that in math the problems at that age are more like counting problems and applied Problems where you would do something like that But you do see effects on them when they're in Head Start in as three-year-olds By age four you'll notice that the shading the darker shaded squares Are kind of dropping off and we have more just clear empty squares and by Kindergarten we actually see one positive effect and one negative effect that's one with the little stripes in First grade we see only one positive effect and in third grade. We only see one negative effect So that's that kind of drop-off of what looked like an advantage when you were at age three And I think it is it's a serious puzzle and I think it's a puzzle You know that people like Sylvia have to help us all because it is about brain development What would cause a child to learn these things better as a three-year-old and then somehow I'd not exactly Unlearn them but not be able to build on that set of that set of skills that set of wiring So what I wanted to show you just to follow up on that is The stubborn persistence of relatively low achievement in the United States And I think it does relate to Questions that people have been asking all along. What do we do about this? So even though we've been through a lot of different reform movements in the United States Including a much greater emphasis on early childhood education over relatively recent years Achievement is not very high in the United States and remains stubbornly persistent. So the blue line is for age nine The red line is for age 13 and the green line is for age 17 And this is the national assessment of education progress It's called the long-term trend assessment and they give this every few years To students in the United States. I happen to be showing you reading here goes from about 1970 to 2020 so up until very very recently and What am I showing you? It's the percent who are scoring at the level that they call proficient or above So you can they have proficient and then they have advanced and these are children who are scoring proficient or Above proficient and you can see that the numbers are first of all very low for all of the categories of students So the age nine year olds about 15% of them are scoring proficient or above in 1970 about 10% of the age 13 year olds and The age 17 year olds are the least likely to be proficient or above They're sort of hovering around seven or eight okay in 1970 now the thing that so first of all this pattern Of the age nine year olds always looking a little better than the age 13 year olds who always look a bit better than the age 17 year olds is Absolutely persistent in the national assessment of education progress over time But the thing that I want you to also notice is there's hardly any movement over time This is a long period of time 1970 to 2020 we've been through lots and lots of different things. We've had lots of socio Economic and demographic changes over this period of time and yet we still have about 15% of nine year olds being proficient about 10% of 13 year olds being persistent and something around 7% of 17 year olds being persistent and given the fact that being proficient or advanced on this test is a good predictor of whether You're going to thrive in college. These are very low proficiency rates In reading math looks a little better You can see that the nine year olds and the 13 year olds have seen some improvements in recent years especially since about 1995 But notice that when they turn into 17 year olds, which they inevitably do They are not the 17 year olds are not only not improving in math proficiency They're actually getting worse in math proficiency slightly very very slightly over time So we should have started to see an uptick already for the 17 year olds. We just haven't seen it So this pattern of the 17 year olds being worse Is there I'm not going to bore you so much with the next or bore you I hope with the next two graphs, but they're just here to show you that I just by focusing on the proficient and advanced I'm not hiding something about the students who score lower than proficient or advanced So for instance, if you look at this chart These are what are called the scale scores on the reading test over time and you can see that they're absolutely flat The fact that the 17 year olds are now on top is just an artifact of the way the test is scored Don't worry about that. All you're really looking at is that they're very very flat over time And the same thing is true for reading for mathematics so there is this we clearly there is some barrier to our making much more progress and to our getting a bunch of 17 year olds who are really capable of Doing advanced cognitive skilled work or thriving in college or university and then in my final minute I'm going to go back to some of the maps that Eric used just to point out one thing that I think is quite important This is the percentage of adults who have at least somewhat advanced numeracy. So they're only in the top 37 percent This is not you do not have to be a brilliant mathematician here at Berkeley To get to be in the very darkest color blue in this you just have to be in the top 37 percent and You'll notice this pattern that Eric pointed out several times of certain areas like Appalachia the Ozarks and some of the south But I also want to emphasize I think I skipped something Okay I also want to emphasize the areas where we do see a lot of adults with advanced cognitive skills And they're exactly where you think they would be. This is San Francisco. That's Los Angeles This is San Diego. We can see Seattle and Portland up there. This is Salt Lake City You can of course see that Boston, New York and Washington DC show up in Chicago You can easily pick it out from from other places. Okay, so we know that that's how adults look if we look at Also, notice that what's called the famous Lutheran belt in the United States where people have advanced cognitive skills but don't often have jobs that are you know, Silicon Valley types of jobs or High-tech sorts of jobs. It's just a it's just a phenomenon in the United States On the opposite end of the spectrum. I already showed you Appalachia. That's the Ozarks and this is what I call the inland south Okay, if you look at 12th graders, you can see the same patterns So even though they're not fully adults yet The patterns are already showing up for the 12th graders, but interestingly enough If you look at third graders the patterns don't look all that similar So the patterns are definitely emerging over time if you have very little kids You would not say oh, I can see the same geographic patterns and I'll just point out one example to you here Remember that California was looking pretty good for the adults cognitive skills, right? But for third graders cognitive skills does not look good at all. In fact, the only county in the state of California that looks at all good is Santa Clara County Sorry guys I'm Santa Clara County and also for instance, Florida looks pretty good and advanced cognitive skills But when you get to adults It's going to turn out that Florida does not look particularly good So different patterns do emerge over time and this tells me that third graders are not yet set on some Trajectory where if you don't have them at this age, you're never going to get them Otherwise, California would look quite different. I will emphasize I won't show you the another chart But I will emphasize that in this same study I do look at migration from one state to another one county to another and you do see people who have higher advanced cognitive skills Migrating towards areas where there are other people with advanced cognitive skills, no surprise there But migration does not account for most of the difference between what you see for third graders 12th graders and adults Migration is a phenomenon, but it is not It is not that pervasive I want to end here and thank my commentators again I learned such a lot from all of them and I really look forward to Working with them on a Tanner Lecture's book based on this series and thank you all for coming And I think we have a Q&A period now Hi, is this working? Yeah Yeah, I had a question or two. I guess they're almost like suggestions You know, we've seen this map a lot of times of the Appalachia and Mississippi Delta and For let me start off. I really have enjoyed the series elections lectures Professor Hawksby. They've been very enlightening for me particularly because I'm a humanist and your use of data to tease out, you know salient Differences in ages and so forth has been both precise and sort of revelatory for me So I want to thank you I Want to suggest though, you know, everybody in here is A in Berkeley and probably has advanced degrees or maybe does and I really think you would gain a lot that the Host of you if you haven't already go to Mississippi go to Louisiana go to Missouri to to spend time there I've been there and and some of what you'd find is It's cotton growing territory, right that Mississippi was and is cotton today so I was there in a professional role worked for a professional development Non-profit And I work in that area fantastic, but I'm in a little town called Lake Village, Arkansas and I'm standing there with about 15 to 16 African-American women who teach grades one to six And so I'm trying to break the ice and and you know, they know that I flew in there that morning from Atlanta, Georgia They can probably tell from my accent that I'm not a southerner. I'm a Californian So I said to them. I said, uh, who who else in the room has lived somewhere else? And it was complete silence And you know southerners they they want to be they want to be gracious so everybody they kind of look one to their Finally one woman raises her hand me clean. She says I lived in Udora Udora was five miles from where we are standing so my my point is is that A big developmental fact in my own history and yours is that we move to different places and we have different experiences The I think the upshot of the lectures has been a policy recommendation But I hope you all realize that k-12 education is extremely local Extremely diverse and the teachers probably in those classrooms probably grew up within 15 miles of where the classroom is so I'm not sure how the sociologists describe professionalism, but being a a college faculty member is a professional Undertaking being a third-grade teacher really is not And that that was one other thing though that I wanted to it's totally different. This was actually for professor Hurst I I liked your slides that were about uh people of employment age who don't have jobs and um I'm getting the sense that A reality maybe for another ten or lecture series will be what are we going to do When many many jobs that today are respected Uh, not necessarily advanced cognitive skills jobs, but they're gone. They're redundant as the brits say Um, I personally think we got to go to a universal basic income, but that's a whole ball of acts and and uh, you know, so Read Edward Bellamy's looking backwards if you haven't or reread it if you have Well, I did want to comment especially on um Education is very local in the united states. We have a much less centralized system than most other country systems and teachers If you ask them where are you most likely to end up as a teacher? The answer is in the same school that I attended Either in elementary or middle or high school And some of that is sort of people call it the call of home that they just feel comfortable in that community But it does mean that we don't have a system like france has kind of the opposite end of the system system Everyone is supposed to be taught the same national curriculum And if you do really well when you're young then they try to feed you up the system and move you to paris frankly Right and move you to paris. I'm not sure we want to have all the central centralization of the french Doesn't seem somehow not faintly un-american to me, but um But still I I agree with you that if you go to mississippi or arkansas or Or all kinds of places what you're going to find is a lot of um Locals there and many americans are less mobile than they probably should be this is more eric's territory than mine But when I lived in massachusetts Something I could never understand was why was it that people who lived in western massachusetts? And across the border in upstate new york who lived only two hours from boston Would never have visited boston Right and would never even think of interviewing for a job in boston, which didn't make any sense to me You could drive out there in the morning But in fact, they were very immobile and it's even small distances can matter a lot Right, okay, so I think we have another question from my david ron Um, so I first I want to echo this is just utterly fantastic and mind expanding for for all of us And I think the format with the with the main lecturers and the and the commentators is just just amazing I want to sort of ask caroline Sort of a broad question that's related to something that came up in in many of the comments, which was So your emphasis is on sort of we need to invest in out of us in education without saying Quite as much about well, what kind of education would be in the investing in So So silvia said there's you know the fourth r should we be explicitly teaching people Not math reading but abstract reasoning skills and my anecdote here is when our kids were in middle school They had 45 minutes of thinking skills every week Which one of my colleagues commented well, what are you teaching them the rest of the time if not if not thinking Um Second picking up on yan's comment. So one of the underlying concerns here is poor polarization Should we be teaching civics and in that case? It's not as obvious that your evidence, you know We would why why middle school for that went out earlier or later? And then conrad miller raised the issue of kind of soft skills I'm a not a consumer. I'm not a serious participant in that literature in any way So I say I have seen papers Suggesting that soft skills can be taught Early some of the head start stuff on the soft side seems to last longer Their programs in chicago or you know inner city children or you know high school kids are taught things like anger management And there's at least one paper on Really when we're seeing the return to education It's not the coder for google or for google who can you know do math problems faster than anyone else It's the history major that people can think broadly you can manage and and pick up new skills and and so on so soft skills civics Just reasoning as a course would be three particular areas. I just love to hear your thoughts Well, I agree with you we have one of the things that has been hard to show is For a long time it was very hard to show that teachers actually mattered. Okay, so that was kind of When I first started working in this area You everyone would try running a regression on your later outcomes And then the qualifications of your teacher Something about your teacher's education, whether they had a master's whether they had master's degrees things like that Um, how much they were paid all of those types of things You just couldn't it was very difficult to show that those things mattered now on the pay issue It's they since they were all paid pretty much the same thing and part of the problem was there's just no variation in pay But in in an education there there was variation It didn't seem to make very much difference But then when we started to instead estimate teacher value added We realized oh wait these teachers vary tremendously And so there is something that they're doing differently. It's been I think the work of the last I'd say Seven ish years that once people realized that teachers vary a lot and not just varying in terms of teaching Cognitive things but also in teaching soft skills They went into classrooms and tried to observe what are the teachers who are more successful doing differently If we know that this teacher is a high value added teacher What is it about her usually that makes her a high value added teacher and I think that Effort has I don't want to say it's ground to a halt But somehow it wasn't as Easy as people thought it would be they thought they would go into mrs. Smith's classroom And then they would see that she divided the time up very differently than mrs. Jones Maybe she spent more time on reasoning skills or something like that Um, and it's I think it's proven to be challenging for people So I'm not it hasn't stopped the gates foundation has actually sponsored A tremendous amount of work along these lines with people spending a lot of time in classrooms Trying to understand what more successful teachers are doing differently There is also some work that suggests that you can train teachers to be significantly better teachers But it's usually through having A mentor who is another teacher And so it's not necessarily going back to education school or going back to school for something It's often being mentored by another teacher who's a very successful teacher And she sort of teaches you some set of some set of skills And by the way the 45 minutes on reasoning skills that doesn't surprise me at all There was this wonderful reform in the united kingdom studied by steve machin And it was called the the reading hour And all they said to parent all they said to teachers there were no increases in school spending No nothing like that no reorganization of schools They said you must spend at least one hour on reading related activities per day And it worked so well without having their spend any more money that then they said we have to have a math hour too So it does it does go to show that you know schools can be using their time in a way That's not necessarily on the things that you think you want them to to teach But it's a great idea Thank you very much for your question I just want to ask a follow-up based upon some of the questions we heard now So sometimes when i'm thinking about these inequalities I put myself in the mind of a benevolent dictator. I do that a lot sometimes So if you were the benevolent dictator and we had to do some policies now What would you be you know recommending in terms of Tangible things that we could be doing to to capture some of this low-hanging fruit So I think um, I always answer this question the same way. Okay, because the one thing I know is that um Teachers matter a lot and having more people who are good teachers in schools would make a difference So some other types of things might be promising, but you can't say for sure I know that this would make a big difference if you do calculations just sort of back of the envelope calculations on teachers value added, let's say we um You get a teacher who's one standard deviation above the median on teacher value added Okay, and you say what if my child could always have a teacher who's one standard deviation above the median Or we can think about it more realistically as a policy where we try to make the medium The median what is now one standard deviation above the median? That pans out to be worth so much in terms of later lifetime earnings For the people whom you teach part of it is the numbers matter too, right? You have higher value added each one of your children has slightly higher earnings But you teach 20 children a year and you might teach, you know In multiple different classes. We should probably be paying teachers more like 300 000 a year or 350 000 a year if If we could get them to be the higher value added teachers So I I'm not making the claim that Let's just take the body of teachers who we have right now and raise all of their salaries for 350 to 350 Because that would not achieve the same effects. In fact, some people Are unsuccessful teachers really ought to leave teaching and so if we went and paid them a whole lot more It's not obvious that they would suddenly decide Oh Now I'll leave okay now that you started to pay me so much more But if we were to change the way teachers were paid so that we could get higher quality teachers But and have to pay them more so that they didn't want to do some alternative job That's probably the most obvious type of reform to have because it doesn't require us to know much beyond what we already know So that means getting communities to willing to to have resources to do those those payments But also at the same time getting the school districts to reward different teachers differently I'm trying to think so. What is the next step? So that sounds perfectly say so, how do we then go to get the school, you know, the citizens to pay that extra for the teachers and the and The the unions and the teachers to allow differential compensation So I once tried to convince the commissioner Education commissioner of the state of florida. It was a very super smart guy Very data oriented to devise two different payment systems for teachers in florida And when you came in as a teacher, or I don't know But let's just say when you came in as a teacher, they would say hey, you can stick with the old payment system Which is lockstep pay But by the way, your pay is not going to be very high Or you can take up this new system But there's more risk in this system because although you can achieve much higher pay If you're not a good teacher in this new system, you're not going to get paid as much as the ones who stuck with the lockstep pay Right and then just run the two systems parallel to one another And over time you would expect that the people who would select into the higher pay But You know, you have to actually be good at it in order to get the rewards that they would Turn out to take over more and more of the of the state school So that was kind of the transitional idea. It wasn't you get rid of the union. It was rather you just let people choose between the two systems He didn't take me up on it I Yeah, um Echo all the comments about how stimulating these days have been. Um, I guess I just want to come back to to Our contemporary political predicaments and and the connection between what you've been talking about I mean, it seems like to me it sounds like there are various points of connection between the points you've been making about Um cognitive skills and the contemporary political situation one of them goes by way of of You know economic fatalism and if you're you're your economic prospects your ability to meet labor market demands and so on and Uh in in your economy You know, if you're you're not doing well and the that will lead to a sense of anatomy and alienation And resentment of elites and so on that feeds into these processes That's kind of an indirect contribution of these processes to Some of our contemporary political ailments today you were talking about segregation not meeting, you know And that seems like a a parallel part of the story if you're not interacting with You know, you know people whose uh life prospects are are different from yours I guess that makes it easier to see them as another to develop resentments toward them to to Feed into processes of negative You know group identity formation and so on Um, but then there's the third element. I think uh, jan was talking about it today about a democratic education And I just wanted to hear a little bit more about this third element Jan was talking about civic education in particular and and evoking Dewey and it almost sounded like that was going to be something separate from development of higher-order cognitive skills But it seems to me there's a different story One could tell where development of higher-order skills is actually a central It's not the totality of civic education, but it's a central part of education for democratic citizenship Insofar as it presupposes capacities to evaluate complicated processes, you know policies to reason critically about you know information that you're presented to to You know to engage In democratic processes on a basis of rational reflection and so on and I'm I'm a philosopher. So of course, I'm I guess I'm attracted to this view of I Very idealized view of democracy and what education for democracy would look like it seems to me it fits into your story We're not really educating You know a lot of our citizens are not really equipped to to function And I highly have complicated democracy because they lack the some of the cognitive skills that are necessary If not sufficient for that and that that itself if that's a deficit is going to contribute at least as one factor to kind of the contemporary political problems that we're all worried about And Yeah, so I'm You know that goes together with I guess a certain conception of what democracy is kind of a deliberative conception where It's not just a forum for expressing Your preferences whatever they are in some sense, but but but somehow Something that's more based in reasoning and capacities to assess critically arguments and so on a picture However, that seems pretty attractive to me. And anyway What do you think about that that that kind of connection between development of cognitive skills and And a democratic citizenship and I so that's a question for caroline and for yan How does yan see the relation between cognitive skills and in what you are calling civic education today? Well, let me um say just a few words and then we'll I'll turn it over to yan One result that I I don't know if you've noticed that I've emphasized throughout Is that math skills cognitive skills do not better predict future outcomes than reading cognitive skills? In fact reading cognitive skills are slightly more predictive of later Adult outcomes and you can think that a lot of what you need to do in order to be a good Civic person Participate successfully in society is be able to read and be able to reason Critically with the things that you read and that's that's it's really that Development of those reading related cognitive skills and and writing skills as well because writing is a very integrative Synthetic process that helps you think through All kinds of issues so I would emphasize that fact that it's not all about getting everyone to just do math that it's also reading Is really important also for instance? Uh the experiment that sylvia was describing today with the um Elsat students or the students were studying for the elsat That's a perfect example, right? That's a that's cognitive reasoning. That's almost entirely text I think it is entirely text space entirely text space. You need to be good at reasoning You need to be good at understanding what somewhat the problem that someone is trying to get you to solve And lawyers are inherently part of our civic Um society, right? That's why we they serve in courtrooms. They do things like that they try cases And I think it's that's a very good example of how when we train a lawyer We know that it's not just we don't just put them through math glasses We put them through a type of training that is very text based and reading based But still is requiring them to develop critical thinking And so that's those are the two things that I that I would emphasize Yeah, I love that question. Um, so there are several things you need to be able to do right to engage with people You disagree with you have to be able to understand a nuanced argument You have to be able to integrate different people's viewpoints You have to be able to inhibit your own kind of reactive tendencies to try to And cognitively, you know be cognitively flexible and update your views as you get more information all of that Um, there's actually a really interesting study that came out of stanford this past year. Um, russ poldrack and colleagues And they took a lot of data from Just like online data from people who had had a number of cognitive tests And we also knew a lot about their political ideology And they found just these differences in cognitive styles between people who were you know who self identified as more conservative or more liberal And so there was a difference for example in a speed accuracy trade-off So the liberals tended to be more fast and loose responding to very basic cognitive tasks more quickly And the conservatives tended to be slower. I'm talking about super simple tasks that have nothing to do with politics or anything like that So there were differences also in cognitive flexibility and the more liberals were more likely to be able to update based on Simple rules like press for color or press based on shape or something like that Just really powerful stuff. I think So if I may I'll make one meta comment again in the hope of provoking more disagreement on this panel Then say sorry about democracy and then maybe one word of a polarization Which has obviously played an important role in our conversations over the car last couple of last couple of days So the meta comment just for your consideration is that Of course political science um Is sort of driven by deep insecurities about its own status as a science And I think for the longest time We clearly had mainly economics envy So this was obviously the thing to do the more mathematical the more scientific the better as of late I think it's been much more psychology envy And especially in the light of what has been happening in the last six seven years or so It's clear that people are just rushing towards explanations that basically tell us look people are just so damn irrational You know, even if you explain to them patiently that you know, something is wrong They're going to double down on their beliefs because they're so ideological and and so on Um, and I think we have a lot to learn from all the different disciplines But sometimes I think we also then tend to overlook basically the autonomy of the political and I'll try to come back to that In my third brief brief remark On what on your main question So clearly democracy is neither just the periodic registration of given given preferences Nor is it epistocracy or technocracy It is again referring on Dewey a communicative constructive ongoing process Where something like a political will is created in ongoing exchanges amongst people Exchanges of reasons, but even emotional exchanges can, you know, play an entirely legitimate role Given that emotions also have cognitive cognitive basis um I think one of the fateful things that has happened again in light of in light of certain developments in the last five six years or so Is that A certain type of liberal if I may generalize Has sort of retreated to the safety of technocracy, you know If you care about the truth subscribe today Uh democracy dies in darkness and the darkness is all these irrational people out there And of course that's sort of faithfully wrong because again democracy is not about technocracy There is usually not a singularly correct rational answer for political challenges And what is then often developed is a sort of fateful vicious circle Where basically technocrats assert there's a uniquely rational answer if you disagree you basically reveal yourself to be irrational That has been hugely helpful For a certain type of populist who says what do you mean democracy without choices democracy without the people If then a certain type of populist wins an election Technocrats are going to say look you give power to the people, you know, they elect Trump They elect Duterte they elect Bolsonaro and so on so these sort of two seeming extremes tend to strengthen each other over time And even though they look like extremes that are opposed to each other They also have one thing in common because they're both forms of anti pluralism technocrat says only one correct rational solution You disagree your irrational populist says only one authentic will of the people only we represented if you disagree You're a traitor. You're an american, you know, take your take your pick And and all what we should think of as sort of pluralistic democratic engagement then disappears between these these two two extremes last brief thing polarization So I think we've heard a lot of important important A lot of important evidence of how certain factors can certainly facilitate Polarization a certain type of geographic segregation. You never meet a certain type person You're more likely to think that they're evil. They will destroy the country and and so on But I would insist that ultimately it's still a political project It's not new that we have deep divisions. There are plenty of other countries where you could have similar findings and yet they don't have crazy sorts of politics as as an outcome necessarily So you still need polarization entrepreneurs and that's not a new insight like in the old days You know, you're a worker But a socialist party needs to tell you that you're actually part of the working class And what that means and how you should think about certain other actors in democracy And last thing I'll say before God forbid switching into lecture mode again Is that really one peculiarity of the united states alas? And this will not really surprise you as a finding Is that unlike in many other countries you do have a completely self-enclosed right-wing media Sphere as a number of distinguished colleagues at Harvard in particular have shown empirically Yes, you have you have crazy conspiracy theories on the left too But eventually they're going to get corrected because people are in touch with whatever the time is the washing post and so on within this self-enclosed world News is simply about political self validation These people are not going to read the wall street journal online or something that could actually suggest to them No, this is not true about what you've heard about this pizzeria in Washington And so on and that's a peculiarity and that is a huge part of the kind of polarization we have ended up with And You'll be surprised to hear that I don't have a panacea for that or you know here my five Policy points how to how to tackle that But I think any sort of serious engagement with that predicament sort of has to factor the same So I partly say the same response to eric's point. We have access to the same information true in theory But de facto there is something about this self-enclosed world and last footnote to that It's not the internet This was created in the 1980s 1990s has much more to do with radio cable tv and so on We're not fated to live in this world simply because we now have new technologies Well, I'm afraid we've reached the end of our time. Um, there will be a reception. Is that right? Um We'll open the doors and food and drink will appear But before we do that, let's uh, thank our panel yon verner muhler Eric hers of the bum gay and especially carolin hawksby. We're a wonderfully Stimulating series of lectures and discussions