Why Our Kids don't Study: An Economist's Perspective.

• Author: Brown, Douglas M.

This is an interesting book that social scientists, policymakers, and all present (or prospective) parents of young school children should read. John Owen uses economic analysis (without graphs, charts, etc.) and empirical evidence to analyze why our public school students in grades K-12 won't study. He draws on the European school system and our private K-12 schools to help us understand our existing problems, as well as to propose solutions to these problems. Owen notes in his Preface that labor economists have emphasized human capital in their research and policy, i.e. keep kids in schools or training so that they will be more productive. An implicit assumption of the human capital model is that students study and learn in school. Owen shows that in our public school system, students have strong incentives to substitute the duration of schooling for effort in school. Accordingly, achievement and thus increases in human capital are limited. Clearly effort in school is an important topic which has received little attention by economists.

Part I of the book addresses the supply of effort. In Chapter 1, Owen cites evidence that public school students only study an hour per day or less. This evidence is based on asking students how much they studied, instead of observing how much they studied. If students feel that studying is not the "in" thing to do (as Owen repeatedly argues in the book) then self-response estimates are highly likely to be biased downward. The question of how much study effort exists is important to answer if we are to find an optimal policy to solve the problem. Chapter 2 provides an explanation for why students don't study. Besides the obvious (over half of them have part-time jobs, and many watch a lot of television), Owen cites evidence of motivational problems due to teaching skills out of context. He correctly argues that we can't blame television and parttime work for our relatively poor performance in public education, because other countries have television and working students, yet their educational systems produce students with skills. In Chapter 3, Owen uses the labor-leisure choice problem to explain the lack of study effort. Increases in family affluence and high rates of student time preference lead to less studying. In the labor market, adults receive monetary rewards almost weekly, while students won't receive monetary rewards from studying for a decade or more. Family conflict theory is used to explain...