Lunches

Well, we're very likely to be heading into another lockdown on the basis of a community case in Auckland.

Back in July, we found that the government had blown a pile of the emergency Covid money on the free school lunch programme. 

The free school lunches programme draws on special Covid recovery funds for another two and a half years, despite Treasury's misgivings about depleting the emergency money reserved against a resurgence of the virus.

The Covid-19 Relief and Recovery fund (CRRF) is a $50 billion pot of money that was established in the early days of the pandemic to respond to the health emergency and its economic fallout.

It's been tapped for a wide range of Covid-19 related expenses, but the Government has also used it for a range of increasingly tangential "Covid recovery" spending, and just $5.1b remained in the kitty at last tally.

Shame that the cupboard's a bit bare.

What did it the school lunch programme buy us? Last week Wednesday, Ministry of Ed dropped the evaluation of the school lunch programme. That evaluation has a cover dated May 2021, so draft findings would have been around before the budget was set.  

What did it find?

The programme had large effects on the proportion of lunches with at least one vegetable, and also reduced the proportion of lunches with sweet snacks. 

It provided a tiny and statistically insignificant decrease in the proportion of kids hungry after lunch. 

But kids who were often hungry after lunch, before the pilot, had larger increases in "being full", and in reported mental wellbeing.

And none of it cashed out into higher attendance rates at school. And improvements in school functioning (paying attention and such) were not statistically significant.

It's not immediately obvious that this pilot warranted expanding for broader rollout. There were existing food-in-school programmes before the government's programme, targeted at hungry kids. So effects weren't ever going to be huge: they'd have to come from kids that those programmes missed, or from improvements in what might have been on offer. 

And regardless of your views of the merits of scaling the thing up, I don't know what the word misappropriation even means when they're able to use emergency Covid spending on school lunch programmes. Might as well fund them out of the Defence vote if you're going to stretch things that far. I mean, some of those kids could be soldiers some day maybe. Is it more of a stretch than doing it out of the Covid budget? And what's the point of doing a pilot if you're just going to ramp the thing up to 11 regardless of whether the pilot shows it to be a good idea? Does anything mean anything anymore?  

Morning roundup

The morning's browser tabs:

• Newsroom picks up on BusinessDesk's prior reporting on MIQ ghost rooms. Much credit goes to Cameron Conradie's constant reporting on the numbers. BusinessDesk pointed out that the MIQ system is constantly overwriting its own data so that it is impossible to get, from them, the prior track. I wonder what the Archivist would make of this because it sounds like deliberate destruction of Official Information which may have to have been backed up by a Disposal Authority. Anyway we're losing skilled migrants who rightly view there as being no chance that the government will fix the system, because the government starts by hating migrants and viewing allowing any of their families in as actually being a bad thing. While it is still good to live in NZ as a permanent resident, I could not recommend that anyone try moving here, unless their utility enters negatively into my utility function - and I don't have that kind of utility function. 
• The government is going to run into real problems in maintaining nursing staffing. If I've understood the state of play correctly, nursing salaries in NZ are similar to salaries in the UK but Australia has some of the highest pay rates going for nurses. Training nurses here in a common labour market with Australia can result in outflow. NZ has made up the gap by importing nurses - some from the Philippines, some from the UK. But while there's provision for entry through MIQ for nursing staff, it's still a big constraint. Australia is far richer than NZ and can afford to pay more. It's entirely plausible that the government here is behaving as monopsonist in keeping nursing wages down, but even if that weren't the case there would still be a problem. 
• NZ is importing and burning a lot of coal currently. In one sense, this is not a problem at all: the Emissions Trading Scheme sets a binding cap, the current ETS price roughly doubles the cost of using coal, so any coal that's used is very likely in spots where it would be real expensive to substitute away from. But there are still two more substantial problems. First, some of the coal burning is because Megan Woods banned gas exploration in Taranaki, reducing capacity in those fields. So we're being forced to use a worse alternative because the government set very bad policy. Second, optics. While all that coal is accounted in the ETS, nobody understands the ETS, and seeing coal imports makes people think the ETS isn't working. And that builds pressure for even worse interventions. I wish that National would aim for less political point scoring here and instead be looking to underlying causes. 
• The government is going to be having an inquiry into crypto. I kinda knew what was going on in crypto 3 years ago; that tech is moving crazy fast and keeping up with it would be a full time job. I hope Auckland's Alex Sims helps them out a bit, and I also hope they seek some of the expertise over RMIT. Parliament's Select Committee couldn't figure out how the Uber app works a few years ago. This won't end well unless they get some serious help. 
• NovaVax also looks pretty good. Seems futile to hope it will get evaluated and considered for roll-out here, where dose availability is a binding constraint. We are sitting ducks here if Delta gets out. 
• Environment Minister Parker is holding off on nitrate limits on waterways - for now. I still think cap and trade solutions can get that job done. Report on that will be out soon. 
• The government's reluctance to have effective vaccine mandates for border workers - it's just incomprehensible. There can be practical difficulties that need to be overcome; sending nurses out to worksites over a few shifts could make a lot more sense than trying to get all those workers separately to make long commutes out to places where they can be vaccinated. If compulsion is warranted anywhere in public health, it's in vaccination. There are very real and substantial negative externalities from not being vaccinated - and especially among workers who are at risk of contact. We wind up with a health system happy to ban soda in the hospital cafeteria but that can't manage to get workers vaccinated. It's nuts. 
• Another for the "is government actually evil?" file: The Ministry of Ed refuses to fund a teacher's aide for a special needs student (limited budgets; understandable) but also refuses to allow the parents to privately fund the aide. 
• Industrial policy as casino economics. Do you feel lucky?
• Cuba's health policy successes are wildly exaggerated and based on bad data. Here's hoping that the new revolution brings down the communist dictatorship. 
• Remote work won't work for everything. Face-to-face still matters. Planet Money interviews Enrico Moretti. 
• Not crazy to worry about inflation. But if you have strong opinions about it and you think you're right, well, here's the data series on nominal bonds and here's the series for inflation-protected bonds. If you think inflation is going to go through the roof, make the appropriate play. If you think that everyone else is just way too worried about inflation, take the opposite appropriate play. 

Much Ado About Nothing - Partnership Schools edition

So I put in an OIA request for the Martin Jenkins final evaluation report on partnership schools performance back in February. The government looked set to be shuttering the things and I was keen to see what evidence was out there. I should have gotten the request in earlier, but I was expecting that somebody else would already have been on top of this one. Guess not.

I made my request on 19 February, splitting it into three parts to make it simpler.

The first part asked for the terms of reference, timelines, dates, correspondence and briefings on it, and expected publication date for the final report.

The second one asked for any preliminary drafts of the final reports, in case there were holdups in getting the final report.

And the last one asked for the final report.

Simple enough, right? Delays in the final report should have at least gotten me the drafts.

A phone call from the Ministry suggested a down-scoping that might hurry things along. They wanted to restrict the dates to after 1 March 2017 and exclude correspondence. Smelling something fishy, I said "Now wait a minute. Sometimes Ministries seek a clarification so that they can re-start the OIA clock. You're not doing anything like that are you?" And the Ministry assured me they weren't. I made clear that I wouldn't agree to any changed wording if it meant they were going to restart the clock. And then I sent them a note agreeing to the clarification on the condition that it wouldn't change the dates. The correspondence would have been nice, but even nicer to just get the report.

The OIA clock had it all due on 19 March.

I received an extension letter on 26 March telling me that they'd restarted the clock because of the clarification of the date. Nice. After they told me that they totally weren't going to do that. The Ministry replied they could do that at their sole discretion so nuts to me. More the fool me for believing what the Ministry told me on the phone. I'm told that it's odd for the Ministry to push an extension after having already secured an agreed down-scoping.

Anyway, it's all sitting with the Ombudsman.

And then, on Friday, the report showed up on the Education Counts website. I found out about it by Twitter, when Seymour's office noted that it was out. And then when I went through emails I hadn't looked at on Friday, there was one from one of the partnership schools lauding how well it did in the report. So I guess I would have seen it Friday if I'd been a bit less busy Friday afternoon. Maybe it went up earlier than Friday - I couldn't tell.

So - the Ministry stonewalled the OIA request for the report, then never told me when it quietly went up on their website. I've still not heard back from them. I sent them an email this morning letting them know it's on their website in case they hadn't noticed it.

What's then the explosive stuff that the Ministry's been so reluctant to release? Nothing, really. Survey results from parents and students at some of the partnership schools with uneven response rates and that doesn't compare results with traditional state schools. They didn't compare outcomes because there was no comparison group available - I would have thought that you could put together a matched group of students through IDI.

They use anonymised student record data from the Ministry of Ed to look at student characteristics like:

• ethnicity and iwi affiliation
• proportion of students who had attended lots of schools prior to going to the partnership school (transience)
• proportion of students who had only attended a partnership school, who had shifted to a partnership school from another school, proportion that jumped around between other schools and partnership schools - but with nothing that would let us know whether the transitions out of partnership schools are high or low relative to other schools
• number of stand downs and suspensions - with comparison for those same students at their prior or subsequent non-partnership schools. Students at partnership schools look to have substantially lower numbers of standdowns while at the partnership schools - but you'd really want to check against other students who flip around among state schools and compare with their currently attended school.

The rest is all survey data from parents and kids about why they chose the partnership schools. The parents answering the surveys look pretty satisfied, but we have no comparison group of comparable students at state schools and little sense of whether the parents answering the surveys are representative. Parents generally find things at their current partnership school better than at their kids' prior school, but the same could easily be true of any other group of students who recently shifted from one school to another school - people change schools when they didn't like the last school (or when they move for other reasons). 

And that's about it. There's nothing really in there that would let you know whether the partnership schools are doing well or doing poorly. And since all the parents would have been answering the survey questions under the cloud of "You know, if the answers look bad, the government will likely close our school and you love our school right?, it's hard to tell what to make of any of it. Whatever your priors were about the things, there's no reason to change them. Folks like me who think parental choice matters won't have changed views about that, other than frustration that the prior government so completely screwed up setting an evaluation framework around the things that could have provided any kind of evidence as to effectiveness. It wouldn't have been that hard: baseline testing of all kids applying for partnership schools, randomised entry into oversubscribed schools, then annual testing of all the kids who applied regardless of whether they went to the partnership school. 

It all leaves me a bit baffled. Why stonewall a report that really doesn't have much in it? Why not just release the thing saying "Well, we don't really find any compelling evidence in this report either way, so we see no need to change our prior policy." 

I wonder if part of the problem was just that the report looks like it was delivered way late. All the prior stuff had suggested the report was due end-2017. The report on the website is dated March 2018. Why couldn't the Ministry have just said "Hey, the report hasn't been delivered yet" when we talked on the phone back in February? 

Maybe the stonewalling was less about avoiding embarrassing the Minister and more about having commissioned a report that really can't say much.

Update: Nothing in here should be read as damning any of those schools - as I understand some have read it. The evaluation framework is the problem.

From the response rates, it looks like one of the schools took the evaluation more seriously than did the others and worked harder to get responses back. But even if there were 100% response rates, without comparisons over in state schools, it's hard to say what any of the parent satisfaction numbers would mean. Would a lot of parents saying that they're happier with their current middle school than with their prior primary school mean that there's something in particular that's better about that middle school - or about that parents are generally happier with middle schools? Impossible to tell without baseline data on how well middle schools (for example) generally perform.