Paying to sit next to your children

Apparently, British Airways will now introduce a fee that allows you to specify your preferred seat on a flight in advance. This will be the only way you can be assured of sitting next to your family. Hmm. You know, normally when you set a price it is for something valuable. I have often fantasised about what might happen if I couldn't sit next to my children on a flight. Sure, they might be traumatised but still ...

Anyhow, guilt (particularly the costs on airline staff) has always kept those fantasies from becoming reality. But if the airlines are making it difficult with a charge, then surely all bets are off. Oh dear, I forgot to pay the fee. I guess you'll just have to take care of my child. Hard to imagine paying to stop that!

Up with Pixar

You know when we take the kids to see an animated movie, I'm not expecting to have my emotions manipulated. A few chuckles is a good outcome. A plot that makes sense leaves me satisfied. And avoiding of positions or morals that make me cringe can top it off. I am not looking for anything more.

Well, Up! -- this year's Pixar flick -- finally arrived in Australia this weekend and I can only warn parents out there: don't expect to come out of it with your emotions unscathed. It has sad, dare I say it, tear jerking moments, that make Bambi's mother getting shot a comparatively delightful event. You can't walk out of the theatre and leave this movie behind.

That said, apparently that view of the movie kicks in at around age 9. In our family discussion thereafter as to whether the movie was happy or sad (overall), the 5 and 8 year old saw it as completely happy while the 10, 39 and 41 year old called it anything but an upper. So this is a rare movie that gives adults and adult-response and leaves children thinking that it was just another, albeit very amusing -- let's face it, talking dogs are always going to be a winner -- animated movie. How Pixar did it, I have no idea. But I won't be going into any of their films so unprepared again.

The class matching problem

In Slate, Emily Bazelon talks about the class assignment problem. This is the annual task schools face in allocating students to classes. They need to do it on the basis of getting a good mix on classes and avoiding relationships with problematic external effects; for instance, separating out would-be bullies. The problem is that parental (and indirectly, child) preferences intervene. They have preferences for friends but also, and this is where it gets much stickier, for teachers. And that makes the whole class assignment problem far more complex.

Bazelon examines the moral issues here -- should a parent engage in what is essentially a zero-sum game? If you push to have your child in a class with a particular teacher, that pushes another out.

The school rules evolve as a response to this. One of my favourite games, is to "guess the incentive problem" when I see some sort of rule. For instance, in our school, class assignments for the next year are sent out on December 23rd (this is Australia, so the school year is the calendar year). This makes it impossible for anyone to actually receive them until well into the summer holidays when there is no one to complain to. Why this policy? It is clearly designed to put a lid on parental complaints and also it prevents aggregation of information as to who got into other classes.

But this is not to say that there is no input of parental and child preferences. This occurs earlier where children are invited to list four others they would like to be in a class with next year. They must include at least one child outside of their current class. They are not allowed to place a preference for children they would like to avoid. And then the list is sent home and must be signed off by their parent. This system is fine with us and we have not engaged in 'out of the game' lobbying.

I have long tried to implement a scheme when allocating students to syndicate groups for assignments. It looks pretty much like the one my school uses but on a smaller scale. I hadn't thought of getting parental sign-off for MBAs though. Next time perhaps.

It is interesting to see the diversity of approaches that are put in place across schools. For instance, from Slate,

At Orangewood Elementary, a public school in Phoenix, Ariz., parents are invited to request a class assignment ahead of time, so long as they follow an established set of rules. The principal, Andree Charlson, explained to me that she asks parents first to sit in on the class they think they want, to see whether the teacher's instructional method really appeals to them rather than going on vague hearsay. She honors requests only when they jibe with her own and her teachers' sense of what makes for a good class mix. That includes balancing the number of boys and girls, including a range of ability levels, and not putting too many kids with behavioral problems in the same classroom.

Ha! They impose signaling costs on the parents as to how serious they are. Not a bad approach but it is costly on the school too.

One suspects that there might be an actual solution to the class assignment problem. In economics, Al Roth and others have studied matching problems -- for instance, how interns are allocated to hospitals when the interns and hospitals have their own rankings. And New York schools are trying to work this out with respect to getting siblings into the same school. My guess is that this might be of use in coming up with a mechanism for class assignment.

Fairy Tale Economics

Ed Glaeser contemplates what fairy tales can teach children about economics. It turns out that they are not likely interested in economic nuance as opposed to what the authors likely intended.

Anyhow, if you want books where an economic message is tied in more explicitly, go no further than Anno's Magic Seeds. This book teaches the value of saving and compound interest without the need for subtlety.