Freakonomics Radio - 29. Smarter Kids at 10 Bucks a Pop

Episode Date: April 6, 2011

It won’t work for everyone, but there’s a cheap, quick, and simple way to lift some students’ grades.

You know the story. Schools in this country and many other countries, they just aren't so great at teaching kids. Why not? What needs to improve? Now, you've heard the answers, too. Some experts say it's all about increasing teacher skill. And others say it's the pedagogical approach or the curriculum.

Unless it's classroom size or maybe dollars spent per kid or we need more computers. What do all these answers have in common? They all represent the supply side of the education equation. But what about the demand side, the students themselves? Where are they falling down? Today, a story from China about a foolproof way to boost learning, at least for some students. It doesn't have a fancy name. You don't need a PhD to administer it. And it's almost comically cheap.

Here's Long Qingyi, an eighth grade teacher in China. Sometimes I have to call the students up to the blackboard in order to read. Sometimes it's a matter of having students who can see help those who can't. And other times I just have to walk over to the students myself to give them extra attention. Now, as you can imagine, a student who can't see the blackboard can't read the blackboard. And if you can't read the blackboard, that makes it pretty hard to learn your lesson. And a kid like that or a bunch of kids like that can start to drag the whole class down. Now, what if the solution doesn't have anything to do with curriculum or more computers? What if it had to do with... From APM, American Public Media, and WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio.

Today, smarter kids at 10 bucks a pop. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Gansu province in China is about a thousand miles west of Beijing. It's mostly rural, a lot of subsistence farmers, and very, very poor. For a kid growing up in Gansu, a good education is important. A few years ago, two Western economists, Paul Glevy and Albert Park, tried an experiment in Gansu to see if they could raise kids' test scores. Economists and other researchers don't have a good handle on what it is that it takes to increase learning.

Glevy, if you're looking for him on Google, that's G-L-E-W-W-E. He teaches at the University of Minnesota. He's been working on education research for years. But yet within China, there's enormous variation in the levels of educational attainment, especially in the poorer rural regions of the country. That's Albert Park, who spent most of his career studying China. He's at Oxford now. I spoke to Park and Glevy recently about a new paper they co-authored. You guys write in this paper that economists and others have figured out which policies are best at increasing school

enrollment, that you kind of know the levers to push, the incentives to use, the laws to pass to get a lot of kids in school. But that, and I'll quote from your paper, much less is known about what policies are most effective in increasing student learning. So how can that be? How can it be that we don't know at this point in history how to, quote, increase student learning? You know, what happens in schools is a very complicated process. There's the kid and their motivation, probably the parents and their motivation, the teachers, you know, what their motivations are, the principals. And there's a lot of variation on what you can do in a school. We have some data on these things, but when you try to do sort of a statistical estimate

of what explains test scores, you often find that lots of things you think would have an effect don't seem to have much of an effect. Class size, for example, sometimes it comes through, but often it doesn't. There's nothing that comes through really strongly across a variety of countries or contexts as, oh, this is the thing that matters. Like, you know, the level of teacher's education, sometimes that matters, sometimes it doesn't. It's quite frustrating, actually, to try to understand what's going on. It's pretty clear that it's complicated. But one thing that seems pretty obvious is if a kid can't see the blackboard because the kid has bad vision, then it's almost certainly going to make it harder to learn. So let's talk about that. You're the guys responsible for the Gansu Vision Intervention Project.

What was this? Go ahead, Albert. I've been talking enough. Right. Well, I was involved in a study of rural youth in Gansu province, which is a very remote, really one of the poorest parts of the country. And we were trying to follow a cohort of young people as they grow up to see what were the factors at the family level, at the school level, at the community level that were influencing educational outcomes. And we started working with the Gansu Provincial Center for Disease Control to help us identify the health issues facing children in this part of China. And when we talked to them, we asked them, what are the

health issues that you think are most relevant or most important to the children in rural Gansu? And they told us that vision was an issue, partly because of nutritional deprivation, lack of vitamin A will have an effect on vision. And once we discovered that so few children were actually wearing eyeglasses when they had poor vision, we thought it would be a really interesting opportunity to conduct a more in-depth, randomized trial to try to assess how important, in fact, vision was to students' educational attainment. What share did have glasses already? Well, it's kind of pathetic, but only 2% had glasses out of those kids. I mean, we had about 2,500 kids who needed glasses, and only 59 had glasses. These are kids in grades 4,

5, and 6. So that's about 2%, yeah. I'm guessing you're thinking, this is wonderful. There is a big problem here in front of us. It's pretty low-hanging fruit. We can just get in there and fix it. Was that what you felt? In ways, it was surprising that it hasn't been done before. I mean, whenever you write research or even research grants to try to get money,

you have to sort of say, well, what's been done before on this issue? And in this case, there was very, very little. And why do you think there had been so little done? I mean, it seems like a pretty simple thing to investigate and fix, right? I have a view on that. I think that a lot of the people going around trying to think, how can we improve education and learning tend to focus on how we can improve schools and teachers or textbooks, et cetera. And this problem is a little bit different because it's really about the behavior of students and their parents. And sometimes those just get simply overlooked in people trying to find solutions.

So you just mentioned that there were a number of ways you could have set up this experiment. What you chose to do was to basically split the area in half and have a control group where you know there were some kids who needed glasses but weren't going to get them, and then a different group where kids who needed glasses would get the glasses through your largesse. I always wonder, when you're doing a study like this, you need the control group. I mean, you need the kids who need glasses but aren't getting them, so you can measure the effect of the kids who do get glasses against them. But what do you feel about not intervening with those kids as well?

Well, that's obviously very difficult. But at the same time, we really only have a limited amount of resources to provide a certain number of kids with glasses. So in any case, we're not going to be able to provide glasses to everybody. And so I think for the sake of research, I think we are hopeful that having a credible estimate of what the real impact is will actually have a much, much larger effect on many more children in China and maybe elsewhere than just the children we're choosing to treat in the specific experiment. So you've identified kids who have poor vision problems under this experiment that you're running. What are you going to do now? How are you going to help them? How do you get glasses to them? Well, the next thing we do is we identify the children with poor vision in the schools that

have been identified for treatment. And we explain that we're going to provide them with free eyeglasses. And then we have to, of course, get the permission of their parents and get their own agreement to participate in our program and to accept the glasses. So that was really the next step. And when we did that, we actually were pretty surprised that a fair number of the students and their families didn't even want the glasses. Maybe about 30% or so did not participate in the study when they were offered the glasses. 30% said no to free glasses? What? Coming up, we'll hear a couple explanations for this low take-up rate. And more important, we'll hear what effect the glasses

had on the kids who did take them. From WNYC and American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Most of us come from poor farming families. And our parents, many of our parents, didn't pay much attention to our eyesight. That's Guan Guo Pan. She attends the Datang Township No. 1 Junior High School in Gansu. I asked Albert Park why he thought 30% of the students didn't take the glasses. I mean, was there perhaps a – is there a large stigma against wearing glasses?

Do people think maybe glasses will make their vision worse somehow? They won't be so good at sports. They won't be good-looking anymore. Did they not want to take a handout from people like yourselves? Well, there is definitely a widespread perception that wearing glasses when you're young will weaken your eyes. And so I guess that may be an important reason, although the eyeglasses were free and would help them in the immediate term. I think for some of the children, certainly, especially boys, they feel very uncomfortable wearing glasses.

They don't want to be teased. And so that may explain the other part of the refusal. And what about the parents and teachers? I would think that the parents and teachers would apply an appropriate pressure to get these kids to accept something that's going to help them do so much better in school. They may not even be aware that their child has a vision problem. It might be a surprise to them. Although, you know, there are semi-regular checkups of children and parents should be told of problems.

That process works very imperfectly. I think there's also a sense that at the primary school level, it's just not that important how well they're doing in school, that things don't really get serious until you get to middle school. All right. 30% of those to whom the glasses are offered refuse them for reasons that we may never really be able to figure out. But what about the other 70%? How do they do in school? I think the best way to sort of describe the size of this effect is that these kids had worn these

glasses for basically one school year. And based on comparing how kids do just in terms of, yeah, your test score goes up if you stay in school longer, the improvement is something like one fourth and one half of a school year. So it's like adding another one fourth and one half of a school year. And we're talking about an intervention that was only for one year. So I guess you could say that that means like it's 25% to 15% increase in how much you learn from going to school for one year. The teachers who were in these schools really observed a very noticeable difference when we visited some of these schools and just talked to them and the students as well. And the students that we were able to visit some months after the

intervention started were really excited and really thankful. And, you know, it was very gratifying for us. You always like to do research where you can go visit the study sites and actually see that something you've done has actually improved the lives of the participants. What was it like when you discovered how much effect such a simple fix had? It was very gratifying to sort of see that this thing really works. And as you said, it's very simple. And the eyeglasses in these areas typically cost $10 at the time we originally did the intervention. Today would maybe cost closer to $15 at current exchange rates to provide a free pair of glasses to children.

At the same time, I wanted to kind of say that although there is a simple fix here, kind of thinking as an economist, it's also still very puzzling this behavior. Why, if there's such an easy fix, it hasn't happened. And there may be even cheaper policy interventions that could improve the willingness of parents to have their children wear eyeglasses. I wish I had a pair of little magic glasses. And here's Guan Guo Pan, the student we heard from earlier. She took the glasses. There was clarity in the world.

My grades suffered before I got the glasses. Now they're slowly improving. And I could see if I'll be walking down that road with you. All right, so that was China, where we heard there seems to be a stigma, at least among some kids or their parents or their teachers, about wearing glasses. What about here in the States? What about in New York, where I live? I wear glasses. I've worn glasses since I was, I don't know, 12, and I never really thought that much about it until my

kid, one of my kids, started wearing glasses at about eight, and it definitely was kind of a hard sell for a little while until he realized that he could see, and then it wasn't such a hard sell, but I want to know how people here in America think about eyewear and if it's got some significant downside to it or maybe an upside. So I'm here outside of a famous New York City optician shop called Mascot. Hi, my name is Dr. Harvey Mascot. I'm a fourth generation Mascot here in New York City, downtown Manhattan. I'm president of the company. So what would you say if I told you that some do-gooders, along with some research scholars, went to China, saw that many, many kids in China,

very few young children in poor rural China were wearing glasses, and they decided to try to introduce free glasses to them, made free glasses available to these kids. And indeed, those who took the glasses did much better in school the following year, but a pretty significant portion of them, about 30% of the kids rejected the glasses for reasons that are a little murky, but mostly having to do with some kind of stigma. Does that surprise you that the number could be so high? It doesn't surprise me. I don't think the fashion aspect of eyewear in China has taken place like

it has in America. Famous Chinese icons probably are not wearing their glasses like they are in America. In America, eyeglasses are the coolest thing you can put on your face right now. Eyeglasses, the coolest thing you can put on your face. That. Eyeglasses. The coolest thing you can put on your face. That's not exactly how I felt when I was 12. Our relationship with glasses has come so far that one of Moscots' most popular models, a big and chunky

rectangular frame, is called the Neb. That's short for Nebish, an ode to the less than glamorous history of optical fashion. Makes you wonder what's next. the schlemiel, the schlub. But here's what's even stranger. Every year, Moscott sells more than 300 pairs of vanity glasses with clear plastic lenses for about $225 a piece. In the industry, these glasses are called planos.

According to one estimate, some four million Americans wear plainos every day. Not to see better, just to look better. I asked Moscow, how can it be that school children in China who need glasses won't wear them even when they're free? Whereas his customers will pay good money for glasses they don't need. I think first you have to realize glasses traditionally have always been somewhat of a utilitarian item. And in the past 10 years, fashion has crept into the optical business.

And it's the first thing you put on in the morning, the last thing you put on at the end of the day for most people who wear a prescription. For those who do not, it's a fashion accessory. It could project a different image. It's a pretty cheap pick-me-up. It sure is a lot less expensive than a facelift or a wardrobe overhaul. And it can affect one's ability, self-esteem, how they project, image. As word travels around Gansu province in China, that the kids who get glasses do a lot better in school, I'm guessing that more families will want to get glasses for their kids,

even if it means buying them out of pocket. One interesting detail from Park and Glevy's study, the kids who needed glasses were more studious than the kids who didn't need them. All that reading was probably how they came to need glasses in the first place. So once those studious kids got the glasses, they were ready to soar. A few academic superstars were probably created, all for $10 a pop. And did you hear from any of your colleagues who were helping run the study about the moment when the kids – because I remember when I got my first pair of glasses, I remember walking out on the street and saying, oh, my God, you can actually read these signs everywhere. The world is much, much more interesting.

Did you hear anything about the kind of first response from any of these kids? I think they were very excited. I actually remember visiting – we actually went to a couple of the homes of some of the children who had gotten glasses. And, uh, I remember visiting one girl. I think we have pictures of this Paul where, uh, we asked the girl, Oh, does she like the guy? She said, Oh yeah, I'm so happy. I can see everything. And then she said, and then she kind of pulled us over and whispered to us, uh, do you think you could get a pair of glasses for my sister? Because the sister was very jealous of her. And so we said, well, we'll see what we can do.

Freakonomics Radio is a co-production of WNYC, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Chris Neary and mixed by Dylan Keefe. Our staff includes Susie Lechtenberg, Sean Nguyen, Bray Lamb, and Diana Nguyen. Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes and you'll get the next episode in your sleep. You can find more audio at Freakonomicsradio.com. And as always, if you want to read more

about the hidden side of everything, go to Freakonomics.com. I like to hide behind my glasses Go to Freakonomics.com. When I'm tripping in the strong light. Hide behind my glasses. So I can give you all dirty looks. And you won't know what I'm thinking. Like I hate you. Incompetent.

Morons. Son of a, son of a, son of a jerk.