The value-added of primary schools: what is it really measuring?

This paper compares the official value-added scores in 2005 for all primary schools in three adjacent LEAs in England with the raw-score Key Stage 2 results for the same schools. The correlation coefficient for the raw- and value-added scores of these 457 schools is around +0.75. Scatterplots show that there are no low attaining schools with average or higher value-added, and no high attaining schools with below average value-added. At least some of the remaining scatter is explained by the small size of some schools. Although some relationship between these measures is to be expected – so that schools adding considerable value would tend to have high examination outcome scores – the relationship shown is too strong for this explanation to be considered sufficient. Value-added analysis is intended to remove the link between a schools’ intake scores and their raw-score outcomes at KS2. It should lead to an estimate of the differential progress made by pupils, assessed between schools. In fact, however, the relationship between value-added and raw scores is of the same size as the original relationship between intake scores and raw-scores that the value-added is intended to overcome. Therefore, however appealing the calculation of value-added figures is, their development is still at the stage where they are not ready to move from being a research tool to an instrument of judgement on schools. Such figures may mislead parents, governors and teachers and, even more importantly, they are being used in England by OFSTED to pre-determine the results of school inspections

Earnings and labour market volatility in Britain, with a transatlantic comparison

We contribute new evidence about earnings and labour market volatility in Britain over the period 1992?2008, for women as well as men, and provide transatlantic comparisons (Most research about volatility refers to earnings volatility for US men.). Earnings volatility declined slightly for both men and women over the period but the changes are not statistically significant. When we look at labour market volatility, i.e. also including individuals with zero earnings in the calculations, there is a statistically significant decline in volatility for both women and men, with the fall greater for men. Using variance decompositions, we demonstrate that the fall in labour market volatility is largely accounted for by changes in employment attachment rates. We show that volatility trends in Britain, and what contributes to them, differ from their US counterparts in several respects

Probability, Econometrics, and Truth: The Methodology of Econometrics. By Hugo A. Keuzenkamp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. ix, 312. $69.95.

Richard von Mises (1883 1953), the younger brother of Ludwig, had an Apollonian genius. He was a leading probabilist and statistician of the world, a leading engineer and designer of airplanes for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and a leading philosopher of positivism. Von Mises was rational and measured, a man of observations and proportions. Though too modest to say so, he was a hero in his own story of scientific philosophy. A Harvard professor, von Mises was also learned in the humanities: his Positivism: A Study in Human Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939 [1951]) is painted with images from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Goethe, and in equal proportions with the positivist icons of Mach and Comte and Kant (pp. 401 04). Von Mises owned and loved the world s largest collection of Rilke poetry before bequeathing the collection to Harvard s Houghton library. But von Mises believed his Dionysian self to be rhetorically separable from the positivist-scientist self, and lower. He tried to peel rhetoric away from science and gaze at its logical and empirical clarity. Abraham Wald was his student. His theory of collective probability influenced the econometrics of Trygve Haavelmo. Yet econometricians and philosophers younger than Arnold Zellner have never heard of Richard von Mises.