Raj Chetty: recommendation

Transcript context

…It’s like a Giffen good. It’s more of a signal then. Some European systems such as Germany, they have much more extreme forms of tracking than we do. So you get put on an on-college track. You are evaluated early. What’s your opinion of those systems? My feeling is too much tracking at an early age is detrimental because children bounce around. Test score measures are imperfect. There is no way you can perfectly gauge a person’s trajectory at a very young age. However, I think there’s some exceptions to that. At the very upper end of the distribution, gifted and talented programs, I think there is good evidence suggesting that they can be extremely effective in promoting those kids. Learning and getting them on a path to be kind of the superstars in the economy who are starting the new companies, discovering the new drugs, and so forth. So, while I would not advocate tracking at the broadest level across 95 percent of the distribution, I think there can be a role at the very top to give attention to gifted and talented kids, especially, I would say, from disadvantaged backgrounds, where often you don’t have the stimulation and the resources, if you’re a very smart kid at an early age. Is there a tension here with your own work? Because part of what you are doing is trying to explain, or you could almost say predict, the mobility children will experience. And that’s fairly well predicted. We might think it’s wrong that it can be predicted as well as it is, but people actually don’t move to better neighborhoods as often as we would like. Isn’t, in a sense, that work potentially a rationale for tracking? Not a normative — this isn’t the way the whole world should look — but in the sense of we can identify these children, run them through the Chetty equations, and then track them. Yes, no?…

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