For nine months each year, Kathy Emory spends her days standing before a classroom of Sacramento high school students, trying to help them grasp the basics of supply and demand. This summer, though, she spent a week on the other side of the desk—as a student in a free-of-charge Stanford workshop for high school economics teachers.
Economics professor John Shoven and others at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research started the teachers’ program 15 years ago, after California mandated economics education for all high school students. The Stanford professors, Shoven says, thought the state didn’t have enough qualified high school economics teachers. Their aim isn’t to review Econ I, but to examine the real-life issues and current topics that are behind all those graphs and charts and curves. “This is not remedial,” Shoven says.
Rather, top professors dissect subjects the teachers might read about in the Wall Street Journal. Roger Noll talks about the economics of college and pro sports, Shoven about entitlement programs and Frank Wolak about the California electricity market. Between sessions, the 43 teachers meet to discuss pedagogical issues and challenges.
The sessions include a mixture of lecture and give-and-take with the teachers. During a class on antitrust issues, for example, Journal of Economic Perspectives managing editor Tim Taylor talks about companies ranging from Standard Oil to Microsoft. He sprinkles his presentation with history, current headlines, statistics and law. The teachers seem engaged. Emory points out that the popular video-game consoles Xbox and PlayStation 2 sell for the same price. “I thought they did that on purpose, that it’s obvious,” she says. “Obvious and provable are different things,” says Taylor, MA ’84—in other words, a court may not find an antitrust violation. “None of these issues are new,” Taylor tells the group. “There are no easy solutions. That’s why competition is a hard issue. That’s why economics is interesting.”
