When Alex Tabarrok effusively praised my interview with Effective Altruist Rob Wiblin of 80,000 Hours, I got a little nervous. Me:
And again, Washington state from what I understand, now allows kids to use a computer language in place of foreign language.
Why nervous? Because I’ve mentioned Washington’s foreign language policy in several interviews, but never verified my claim. When I write, I check any fact I’m less than 95% sure of. When I speak extemporaneously, however, my standards are admittedly lower. Yes, adding “from what I understand” acknowledges my lower confidence level. But what’s really going on in the state of Washington?
Answer: the Washington legislation did indeed consider a bill along these lines, known as HB-1445 2015-2016. The gist of it, courtesy of Ars Technica:
Two Washington state legislators have recently introduced a bill that
would allow computer science class (e.g., programming) to effectively
count as a foreign language requirement for the purposes of in-state
college admissions. On Wednesday, the bill was presented before the
Washington State House of Representatives Committee on Higher Education.House Bill 1445 would
amend current state law, which only recognizes “any natural language”
that is “formally studied… including a Native American language,
American Sign Language, Latin, or ancient Greek.”
Contrary to what I told Wiblin, however, the bill still seems to be stuck in committee three years after its proposal. A similar 2015 Kentucky bill failed, too.
In sum, I erred. One of the few bright lights of reform that I thought I saw in the current educational landscape was a mirage.
READER COMMENTS
Rob Wiblin
May 23 2018 at 3:03pm
I just wanted to note that I brought up a substantial number of questions in the interview which I haven’t heard Bryan answer in other pieces about the book, which should make it of interest to the serious economics aficionados who typically read this blog. E.g.
“…isn’t the kind of group that drops out just before the final class, or before final year, kind of an odd group, right? Because they were so close to getting this enormous award, and they decided not to.”
“So sticking with the sheepskin premium. You did a debate a couple months ago at the American Enterprise Institute with Eric Hanushek, who’s an education researcher. And he put up figures in his presentation for the sheepskin premium which suggested it was a lot smaller than the estimates in your book. I think your response was just, “I’m a bit baffled about where these numbers could be coming from.†Have you had a chance to look into those and figure out why they differ from the numbers in your book and figure out which ones are more trustworthy?”
“…one is, if the signal about learning is imperfect than all our sequels, students will under invest in education since they’re unable to provide a fully informative signal of their achievement to employers or their actual education to employers. If so, a correctly specified signaling model might predict under-investment in human education. Does that sound plausible to you?”
“… another objection that Quiggin raised is pointing to these studies showing when the number of years of compulsory education has increased in some countries, that you can look at the people who just got the extra year of compulsory education and the ones who didn’t, who just missed out because of their date of birth. That seems to show a small, but statistically significant gain in earnings. What do you think about that line of research?”
“… here’s another objection from Quiggin, he points out that in the signaling model, a student with a bad or poorly resourced system should be off at a higher wage than a student from a good system with the same measured level of performance. Since the implied ability level of the first student and higher. And then he refers to two papers that say in fact the opposite is true. What do you think of that?”
“…this kind of has the perverse implications that it’s good for education to not actually show people’s ability, because that’s one way that rich people can distinguish themselves, just by… Yeah. Is that what we should think, that the more accurate education is as an indication of how capable someone will be in a job that we should be unhappy about that?”
“I put up at a link to a meta-analysis showing that one year of education raises measured IQ by 1 to 5 points. What do you think about that kind of line of research?”
Plus a few others.
Rob Wiblin
May 23 2018 at 3:04pm
I just wanted to note that I brought up a substantial number of questions in the interview which I haven’t heard Bryan answer in other pieces about the book, which should make it of interest to the serious economics aficionados who typically read this blog. E.g.
“…isn’t the kind of group that drops out just before the final class, or before final year, kind of an odd group, right? Because they were so close to getting this enormous award, and they decided not to.”
“So sticking with the sheepskin premium. You did a debate a couple months ago at the American Enterprise Institute with Eric Hanushek, who’s an education researcher. And he put up figures in his presentation for the sheepskin premium which suggested it was a lot smaller than the estimates in your book. I think your response was just, “I’m a bit baffled about where these numbers could be coming from.†Have you had a chance to look into those and figure out why they differ from the numbers in your book and figure out which ones are more trustworthy?”
“…one is, if the signal about learning is imperfect than all our sequels, students will under invest in education since they’re unable to provide a fully informative signal of their achievement to employers or their actual education to employers. If so, a correctly specified signaling model might predict under-investment in human education. Does that sound plausible to you?”
“… another objection that Quiggin raised is pointing to these studies showing when the number of years of compulsory education has increased in some countries, that you can look at the people who just got the extra year of compulsory education and the ones who didn’t, who just missed out because of their date of birth. That seems to show a small, but statistically significant gain in earnings. What do you think about that line of research?”
“… here’s another objection from Quiggin, he points out that in the signaling model, a student with a bad or poorly resourced system should be off at a higher wage than a student from a good system with the same measured level of performance. Since the implied ability level of the first student and higher. And then he refers to two papers that say in fact the opposite is true. What do you think of that?”
“…this kind of has the perverse implications that it’s good for education to not actually show people’s ability, because that’s one way that rich people can distinguish themselves, just by… Yeah. Is that what we should think, that the more accurate education is as an indication of how capable someone will be in a job that we should be unhappy about that?”
“I put up at a link to a meta-analysis showing that one year of education raises measured IQ by 1 to 5 points. What do you think about that kind of line of research?”
Plus a few others.
Thomas Sewell
May 23 2018 at 8:28pm
Georgia seems to allow a computer language to fulfill the language requirement since 2015. See WABE radio and Inside Higher Ed
Florida has apparently also almost passed a similar proposal every year for the last few years, but it seems to be expected to pass and be signed, only to get killed at the last minute.
Alan Goldhammer
May 24 2018 at 3:11am
Professor Caplan should read Jim and Deb Fellows new book, ‘Our Towns: A 100,000 mile journey into the heart of America.’ Unlike his screed against education, the Fallows book is real field research. Caplan would do well to stop reading so much and see what is happening in a lot of different parts of this country, he would learn what does and doesn’t work.
DougT
May 24 2018 at 5:17am
If the purpose of a foreign language requirement is exposure to a non-US culture, computer programming languages don’t fit the bill. I studied German for five years in high school and three semesters in college, and my appreciation of Europe and European issues is better for it.
I’ve never lived in Germany, nor used German in my job. I can’t read the Frankfurter Allgemeine, although their iPod app is visually beautiful. I *am* able to follow the German dialogue in old WW2 movies, which I often find to be ironic. But my computer programming skills did nothing to advance my cross-cultural understanding, although I use computer programming every day, now.
Understanding digital logic isn’t a substitute for understanding another culture. I don’t see how encouraging such a logical fallacy is a “ray of hope” for any institution.
robc
May 24 2018 at 8:59am
DougT,
If the goal is exposure to a foreign culture, that could be taught in English. And students would probably learn more.
I work in IT and find the idea of allowing a computer languages to count silly, but I can’t explain why, so I am just assuming I am being over-traditional and reluctant to change until someone explains why.
Larry Wall, the creator of PERL, went to one of those colleges that allows you to create your own major. His was something like “Natural and Created Languages”. It was a combo of linguistics and computer science.
Natural and created languages really aren’t that different.
Alan Goldhammer
May 24 2018 at 12:28pm
@DougT – Had all the countries adopted Esperanto, the foreign language argument would be irrelevant.
Matt Skene
May 24 2018 at 12:40pm
The governor of Colorado suggested changing the high school graduation requirements in this way in January. Colleges going along with it could be difficult to find, though.
Lance
May 24 2018 at 2:56pm
Brian,
I’m curious what you think of Bruce Baker’s (Rutgers) work and whether there has been any approach about a dialogue regarding your book.
Radford Neal
May 24 2018 at 6:03pm
I would second DougT’s comment. Natural languages and programming languages have basically nothing to do with one another.
Now, it might indeed be better for some students to study programming (that is, programming as a skill, not just a programming language) rather than study a foreign language, but to allow that by declaring the two activities to be substitutes just propagates ignorance. It also is an inadequate substitute for a more fundamental reform, to generally allow students more freedom to study things that are actually useful or interesting to them.
Glen Raphael
May 27 2018 at 6:40pm
DougT:
Every state requires Foreign Language instruction yet only a very tiny fraction of Americans even claim to be able to speak a foreign language. The studying doesn’t work; it fails at the most basic stated goal. We spend what – a thousand hours? – teaching kids how to speak a language who do not thereby acquire the ability to speak a language.
That makes it a waste of time – any benefit you get is indirect at best and might plausibly be provided more efficiently in other ways or on your own time.
On the other hand, computer language familiarity is a currently-useful job qualification. Even if your job doesn’t directly involve programing it’s likely to involve dealing with programmers or programs in some way; having written programs makes it easier to talk to programmers and help them improve the programs you use to do your job. Thus, letting people substitute a computer language for a human language is a “ray of hope” in that it lets some kids evade a requirement that is useless to >95% of students in favor of one they might plausibly find less useless.
Glen Raphael
May 27 2018 at 6:44pm
DougT et al:
Every state requires Foreign Language instruction yet only a very tiny fraction of Americans even claim to be able to speak a foreign language. The studying doesn’t work; it fails at the most basic stated goal. We spend what – a thousand hours? – teaching kids how to speak a language who do not thereby acquire the ability to speak a language.
That makes it a waste of time – any benefit you get is indirect and might plausibly be provided more efficiently in other ways or on your own time.
On the other hand, computer language familiarity is a currently-useful job qualification. Even if your job doesn’t directly involve programing it’s likely to involve dealing with programmers or programs in some way; having written programs makes it easier to talk to programmers and help them improve the programs you use to do your job.
Letting people substitute a computer language for a human language is a “ray of hope” in that it lets some kids evade a requirement that is useless to >95% of students in favor of one they might plausibly find less useless. It’d be a tiny step in the direction of making school more about providing useful skills and less about pure signaling.
Comments are closed.