School Vouchers and Student Attainment: Evidence from a State‐Mandated Study of Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program

In this article we examine educational attainment levels for students in Milwaukee's citywide voucher program and a comparable group of public school students. Using unique data collected as part of a state‐mandated evaluation of the program, we consider high school graduation and enrollment in postsecondary institutions for students initially exposed to voucher schools and those in public schools at the same time. We show that exposure to voucher schools was related to graduation and, in particular, to enrollment and persistence in a 4‐year college. These differences are apparent despite controls for student neighborhoods, demographics, early‐career test scores and—for a subsample of survey respondents—controls for parental education, income, religious behavior, and marital status. We conclude by stressing the implications for future scholarship and policy, including the importance of attainment outcomes in educational research.     

Our Schools,Our Country: American Evangelicals,Public Schools,and the Supreme Court Decisions of 1962 and 1963

American evangelicals have long maintained a tense and paradoxical relationship to mainstream American culture. This article explores the effect of the 1962 and 1963 United States Supreme Court school decisions on that perennial tension. Unlike many conservatives, conservative evangelicals greeted the court's 1962 Engel decision to ban state‐written prayer in public schools with cautious approval; however, evangelicals saw the 1963 Schempp decision to ban Bible reading and the Lord's Prayer from those schools as an affront. The unique relationship between evangelical belief and America's public school system forced evangelicals to reconsider their special place in both schools and society as a whole. They concluded with surprising unanimity that those school decisions had done more than forced evangelical belief out of America's public schools; the decisions had pushed evangelicals themselves out of America's mainstream culture.     

Does Diversity Matter? Measuring the Impact of High School Diversity on Freshman GPA

At the heart of arguments for affirmative action in university admissions are various claims about ethnic diversity. One assertion is that a diverse student body improves the quality of the educational experience: all students learn more. Further, a diverse educational experience better prepares students for the pluralistic society in which they will live. Previous studies examining these issues have been based on informal and survey methods. To better assess the impact of diversity we utilize a data set that allows us to measure student performance at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) as a function of the diversity of a student's high school. Do students from diverse high schools do better in the ethnically diverse environment at UIC? After controlling for other factors that affect GPA, such as ACT, high school rank, and high school quality, we find significant diversity impacts. Depending on the diversity measure, a student from a very diverse high school has an expected first semester GPA that is a one‐fourth to one‐half point higher than a student from a nondiverse high school. The diversity impacts tend to be greater for students in the lower tail of the GPA distribution. There are also large gender differences with females helped most by diversity. Although the results represent outcomes at only one university, they nevertheless serve as a starting point for quantitatively assessing the impact of a diverse learning environment.     

Heroes and the renegotiation of national identity in American history textbooks: representations of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, 1982–2003

ABSTRACT. American history textbooks for the USA's public schools act as quasi‐official loci for the renegotiation of national identity and are, as such, subject to much controversy. The choice of heroes and the way in which textbooks depict them display the interplay between competing visions of popular ethno‐history and scholarly historiography. This article examines contemporary renegotiation of the national narrative through an analysis of the evolving representation of the USA's two most prominent traditional national heroes – George Washington and Abraham Lincoln – in history textbooks for elementary‐school students published from the early 1980s to 2003. This period marks the development of the multiculturalist movement and its subsequent conservative backlash, with debates intensifying in the wake of the events of 11 September 2001.     

试论日本华侨学校的法律地位及其所带来的问题

作为日本华侨社会的主要教育设施,华侨学校不仅为华侨子弟的教育做出了贡献,也为整个华侨社会的统合和稳定发展以及中日文化的交流立下了汗马功劳。华侨学校具有持日本国籍的学生增多、学生总体趋向多元化,毕业生去向以升人日本学校为主流,以民族教育和升学教育为两大教学目标及注重培养学生的国际化观念等特点。但由于华侨学校长期处于边缘化的法律地位,故在学生入学、升学及学校财政等方面都受到了极大的限制。这也直接影响到了华侨学校教育活动的实施。     

Crossing disciplinary boundaries: On Gutorm Gjessing's archaeology and his conversion to ethnography

Gutorm Gjessing was one of the most influential investigators in Norwegian archaeology. He is particularly known for his monumental works on the Arctic Stone Age, which proposed an alternative to south‐north diffusionism. In 1947 Gjessing suddenly left archaeology in favour of ethnography at the Oslo Ethnographic Museum, which also led his carrier in a downhill direction. This article is partly biographical and partly analytical and claims that Gjessing's archaelogical works and theories in the 1930s ‐ 40s were only marginally non‐conformist, since they largely reflected current viewpoints in European culture‐historical archaeology. Gjessing's view of culture is located in culture‐historical archaeology and American cultural anthropology and it is compared with the anthropology of the “British School”. Also analyzed is how Gjessing in some respects placed himself on the fringe of the establishment. It is not pretended to give any definite answers, rather it is focused upon questions which can be raised and provides a more nuanced picture of” the mythology which has surrounded Gutorm Gjessing, both as archaeologist and anthropologist.     

Mapping schools' NAPLAN results: a spatial inequality of school outcomes in Australia

This article identifies spatial dimensions of educational outcomes using maps of the 2016 Grade 5 reading results for Australia's National Assessment Program–Literacy and Numeracy for all Australian schools. A geographical information system (GIS) was used to overlay schools' results onto suburbs' advantage or disadvantage to visualise spatial patterns. We then examined the extent to which school results “cluster” in socio‐economically advantaged and disadvantaged suburbs and considered the consistency of spatial patterns for results across major cities. That work illustrates both how GIS can foreground educational inequality and how “the spatial” is more than corollary for student socio‐economic status. Results show substantial differences between urban and remote areas and towns of different size. Maps of cities visualise spatial “clustering” patterns of school results, with most schools in advantaged suburbs having high results and almost no schools in disadvantaged suburbs having high results. Educational outcomes strongly align to local socio‐demographic characteristics, and parallel host communities’ levels of advantage or disadvantage. Differences between public and private schools are less significant than within‐sector differences for schools in advantaged or disadvantaged locales. Patterns in all cities are consistent—schools in advantaged suburbs predominantly have high results, whereas non‐government schools generally perform better than government schools in disadvantaged suburbs. Most concerning is the persistent and increasing trajectory of results in advantaged, and more so in disadvantaged suburbs, of all cities since the first National Assessment Program–Literacy and Numeracy in 2008. Ameliorating spatial inequality between primary schools is one of the greatest challenges for Australians.     

Flexibility Meets Accountability: State Charter School Laws and Their Influence on the Formation of Charter Schools in the United States

Using an original and unique database of state charter school laws that we have developed, we analyze how state policymakers have incorporated two key values into state charter school laws: flexibility and accountability. We supplement this database with other state‐level measures to answer two specific questions: What factors influence the degree of flexibility and accountability in state charter school laws? How does the content of state charter school laws, and the different values those laws embrace, affect the formation of charter schools in the United States? Overall, we show that state political and contextual factors help account for the degree of flexibility, but not accountability, in state charter school laws. Further, we show that the degree of flexibility, accountability, and political and contextual factors influence the number of charter schools that form in the states.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 27, Number 1. February 2011

Front and back cover caption, volume 27 issue 1 Front cover 25th South East Asian Games The 2009 Southeast Asian (SEA) Games in Vientiane, the first to be hosted by Laos in the event's 50‐year history, was widely experienced by Laotians as an unprecedented moment of national success, reinforcing national symbols and materializing national memory and ideology. In this picture two fans play giant khene, a bamboo free‐reed musical instrument distinctive to Laos and the ethnically Lao areas of northeast Thailand. Traditionally played to accompany courtship and folk songs, the khene is today considered the national instrument, and at the Games it complemented an array of other national symbols on display. Scenes such as these typify the ways in which the SEA Games engendered collective sentiments that were popular, participatory and joyous, particularly among Lao youth. The Games had also bolstered power and authority of the regime. The shared joy of the Games that momentarily united Lao people from across the country soon faded into the everyday realities of one‐party authoritarian politics in Laos, where the state's resource‐extraction policies often set ‘national interests’ against those of existing resource users. These two sides of the SEA Games reflect the contested nature of collective sentiments and, in particular, emphasize how these are aroused through public symbols and assembly. In a rather different display of collective feeling on the back cover, students in London protest government policies that threaten to turn tertiary education into an elite activity affordable mainly by the rich. Back cover UNIVERSITY FUNDING CUTS: AUSTERITY FOR ANTHROPOLOGY The UK faces austerity in public spending to a degree not seen in a generation. The back‐cover image shows students in London demonstrating in October 2007 against the top‐up fees introduced in September 2006, which allowed universities to charge variable fees. Demonstrations intensified in the closing months of 2010, when it was announced that fees would increase by up to three times because of the government's withdrawal of the teaching block grant from the arts, humanities and social sciences in England. In protest, students occupied dozens of universities. What are the implications for higher education and, in particular, for anthropology? In this issue, Hugh Gusterson casts a withering eye over the American precedent, arguing that high fees degrade the educational experience, cause grade inflation, and force indebted students to seek the highest paying rather than the most worthwhile careers. Similar policies applied in England may result in a brain drain of both staff and students. Richard Fardon argues that the proposed changes combine the worst of American and British models: indebted students and over‐regulated, under‐funded universities. It is not even clear that this policy will save money. Like other small disciplines, anthropology will struggle to retain a critical mass of departments, and it will be vulnerable to rises in fees as postgraduate study costs come into line with those for undergraduate study. What might tertiary‐level anthropology look like a decade from now? The number of departments is likely to have been reduced, and with it, academic job opportunities. Student populations will tend to represent the extremes of wealth and poverty, for whom fee remission is being touted as a gesture to fairness. Up to 30 years of debt will act as a deterrent to students between these extremes. As budgets are squeezed, and working conditions deteriorate, the best staff may choose to work elsewhere. Rather than putting UK higher education on a firmer footing, current policy may be a nail in the coffin of one of the few remaining areas of UK excellence internationally.     

Learning from Schools: School Choice,Political Learning,and Policy Feedback

This article investigates the policy feedback and political learning effects of school vouchers. Of particular interest is how market‐based policies affect the likelihood that program participants will connect their experiences with the policy to the government. I examine parent survey data from an evaluation of the Milwaukee school voucher program. I find that voucher parents are more likely than public school parents to perceive that the government has influenced their child's schooling and to believe that their experiences with their child's school have taught them about how government works. Further, voucher parents report that their experiences with the policy have made them more politically active. While majorities of voucher and public school parents support increased public school expenditures, there is some evidence that school vouchers may decrease support for public schools.     

School geography: some key issues for higher education

Abstract

Recent changes in the character and organisation of the school curriculum in England and Wales are making a direct impact on geography. Despite its place in the National Curriculum for 5–14‐year‐olds and its current popularity in public examinations at 16 + and 18 +, there are growing indications that geography may not be guaranteed security, status or quality in the long term. In particular, geography's position may be threatened in the 14–19 curriculum by its failure to be included in the statutory core, by increasing competition from vocational courses and by the possibility of further changes now proposed for the 16–19 qualification structure. There is also evidence of a growing discontinuity in content and approach between geography at school and in higher education. Threats to geography in schools are likely to have a direct impact on the supply of students to higher education and on the continuity of educational experiences. It is suggested that there needs to be a greater dialogue and joint school/higher education activity not only to ensure continuity and progression in the existing situation, but also to influence the next round of school curriculum change. Some areas for potential action are identified and these may have wider relevance to geography educators in other countries.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 34, Number 4. August 2018

Cover caption, volume 34 issue 4 Front Cover: INNOVATION IN A MEXICAN VILLAGE When Mexico's largest telecom companies refused to provide mobile phone service to the remote Zapotec mountain village of Talea de Castro, Oaxaca, residents responded with astonishing creativity: in March 2013, they built the world's first autonomous mobile phone network. The community‐owned network uses open‐source software to link mobile phones globally over the Internet using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). It was developed in collaboration with a non‐profit organization, hackers and sympathetic activists committed to the idea of mobile access as a human right. Centuries‐old practices, including tequio (communal work party) and the asamblea (citizens' ‘assembly’ or town hall meeting), played a central role in enabling Zapotec citizens to give life to the network. Today residents of nearly 20 Zapotec, Mixtec and Mixe villages throughout Oaxaca can send and receive calls and texts within their communities for free, while long‐distance and international calls cost a small fraction of what commercial companies charge throughout the country. The network has provided villagers with an affordable and reliable system for maintaining family relationships and cultural continuity across national borders. However, Talea de Castro's community‐owned network is now under threat because Movistar, a giant telecom corporation based in Spain, has aggressively moved into the community. The case of Talea de Castro raises important questions about the roots of innovation, creative problem‐solving and the existential threats facing autonomous technological systems. Image source: DANIELA PARRA/REDES AC Back Cover: NORTH KOREA North Korean students against the backdrop of a statue of Kim Il‐sung (1912–1994) in Mansudae, central Pyongyang, 2007. Kim was the founding leader of North Korea and commanded the country's People's Army during the Korean War (1950–1953). For a decade after the war, his charismatic leadership contributed to turning the war‐torn society into a strong industrial economy. The importance of the last legacy is strongly propagated by the country's current leadership. In his guest editorial in this issue, Heonik Kwon considers the possibilities of a rapprochment between North Korea and the USA. Image source: (STEPHAN) / CC BY‐SA 2.0C     

KOSELLECK,ARENDT, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

This essay is the first attempt to compare Reinhart Koselleck's Historik with Hannah Arendt's political anthropology and her critique of the modern concept of history. Koselleck is well‐known for his work on conceptual history as well as for his theory of historical time(s). It is my contention that these different projects are bound together by Koselleck's Historik, that is, his theory of possible histories. This can be shown through an examination of his writings from Critique and Crisis to his final essays on historical anthropology, most of which have not yet been translated into English. Conversely, Arendt's political theory has in recent years been the subject of numerous interpretations that do not take into account her views about history. By comparing the anthropological categories found in Koselleck's Historik with Arendt's political anthropology, I identify similar intellectual lineages in them (Heidegger, Löwith, Schmitt) as well as shared political sentiments, in particular the anti‐totalitarian impulse of the postwar era. More importantly, Koselleck's theory of the preconditions of possible histories and Arendt's theory of the preconditions of the political, I argue, transcend these lineages and sentiments by providing essential categories for the analysis of historical experience.     

Educating Citizens or Defying Federal Authority? A Comparative Study of In‐State Tuition for Undocumented Students

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of state government policies addressing immigration‐related issues. This article addresses an example of state policy regarding immigration: since 2001, 11 state legislatures have granted undocumented high school graduates in‐state tuition status should they wish to attend public post‐secondary schools, while 18 others have considered, and rejected, the same policy. We argue that these outcomes are largely explicable by the manner in which the policy is presented and debated within state legislatures, especially the terms in which policy targets are socially constructed and state jurisdictional authority is framed. We apply this framework to two states (Kansas and Arkansas) that, in spite of demographic institutional similarities, reached different outcomes on in‐state tuition bills. The different outcomes can be traced to the manner in which policy deliberations in Kansas focused on positive evaluations of undocumented high school students, portraying them as “proto‐citizens,” while in Arkansas debate became centered on the state's jurisdictional authority to enact such a policy, an issue frame that effectively killed the legislation. This article suggests the importance of both social constructions and issue framing when state legislatures become the lead actors in crafting immigration policies.     

Geographies of environmental learning: an exploration of children's use of school grounds

There has been limited recent geographic research on children's use of school grounds. This study explores the impact of school grounds on the play behaviours of children in primary schools. It examines the way in which some features of school grounds stimulate more of the type of play that is likely to produce environmental learning. The paper reports on research findings from two primary schools in Canberra, Australia. At each school, multiple research techniques were employed, including behaviour mapping of children's play, interviews with children, and analysis of children's drawings of their school grounds. Children's play in one school displayed high levels of interaction with the natural environment. The paper provides insights on the potential of school grounds as sites for environmental learning.     

House prices and school choice: Evidence from Chicago's magnet schools’ proximity lottery

Studies of open school policies predict house prices to rise in areas that gain access to high-quality schools. However, excess demand may limit access to high-quality schools. We take advantage of changes in Chicago's schools’ admissions policies to test whether a higher probability of admission to magnet schools for students living within 1.5 miles leads to higher house prices. Results indicate that the 1997 and 2009 reforms increased house prices for homes within the 1.5 mile radius by about 4% and 12.6%, respectively. The higher probability of admission for black students after a consent decree was vacated in 2009 led to a significant increase in prices in predominantly African-American areas on the south side.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 34, Number 1. February 2018

Cover caption, volume 34 issue 1 Front Cover Anthropologists have long ignored or criticized mainstream popular culture, so we have not always realized that something as seemingly mundane as a Hollywood film could contain valuable insights for teaching and thinking about the issues that matter to an anthropological perspective on the contemporary world. Given science fiction's intersections with anthropology in using other ‘worlds’ to gain perspective on our own, science fiction films could be particularly good resources for engaging wider audiences with anthropological insights. While there have been occasional examples of such cross‐fertilizations, such as the writings of Ursula Le Guin, the potential of science fiction as a source for anthropological thinking has been by and large neglected. In this issue, David Sutton shows how the recent film Arrival provides one striking example of the overlap between science fiction, anthropology and popular culture. Films such as this, offer much food for thought and for engagement with anthropological understandings of topics ranging from linguistic relativity to culturally constructed temporalities. At a time when anthropology itself has gained increased visibility in popular culture, it behoves us to think through, rather than reject out of hand, the ways that we might highlight these increased opportunities to promote anthropological understandings. Back Cover: ‘WE ARE ALL POLICE’ A scene from the taxi station at Ataturk Airport, Istanbul, December 2016, after several deadly attacks against police and military members. Turkish flag stickers read as: ‘We are all police; we are all soldiers’. Scholars across disciplines have recently expanded state‐centred understandings of security (i.e. national security) by looking at the human and non‐human elements of security, including everything from food and ecological systems, to political economy, poverty and even everyday life itself. What kind of critical tools do we need to develop in order to understand our increasingly ‘securitized’ world infused with a growing (and increasingly repurposed) police force that includes both human and non‐human agents of policing? In this issue, Hayal Akarsu focuses on the technicalization of police violence through reform and the expansion of police power into unconventional domains. She shows how the very practice of reforming expands the contours of not only policing practice but also the boundaries of police violence – ostensibly what such reforms are supposed to restrain. While her research remains contextualized within the specific histories of the Turkish police, it has relevance beyond Turkey, as many practices once considered as ‘harsh policing’ have increasingly enjoyed the support of the public in different parts of the world. In such a milieu, an ethnographically nuanced analysis can provide us with a more subtly attuned vantage point, enabling us to understand how technologies of security and policing with seemingly liberal genealogies like community policing or broad democratic police reform can coexist or be aligned with ‘non‐liberal’ and even authoritarian modalities of government.     

CANDID DISCUSSIONS ABOUT FIELDWORK: The New Ethnographer pre-field training workshop

In this conference review, the author reviews the first The New Ethnographer (TNE) pre-fieldwork training workshop for doctoral students that took place over two days at the London School of Economics and Political Science in February 2020. TNE's approach to pre-fieldwork training runs counter to institutionalized approaches of risk management: it acknowledges fieldwork's inherent messiness and ethnographers’ emotional and embodied entanglements, while inviting participants to rethink the language of ‘risk’ and ‘danger’. TNE's contribution lies in facilitating frank and experimental conversations between early career researchers, first via its digital platform, and now through scenario-based learning in the classroom.     

General Social Capital,Education‐Related Social Capital,and Choosing Charter Schools

Proponents of charter schools credit them with many advantages over traditional schools. One claim is that school choice yields increased parental participation in voluntary school activities—which we shall call education‐related social capital. In this article we test for the independent effect of school choice on education‐related social capital, controlling for general social capital and other potentially confounding variables. Studies of school choice invariably show that choosing parents have a greater level of general social capital than non‐choosing parents. Consequently, any increase in education‐related social capital could be spurious—due to the fact that choice parents start with atypically high levels of general social capital. We find under controlled conditions that school choice has a small but statistically significant effect on education‐related social capital. However, its effect is considerably smaller than for general social capital, as well as for other traditional predictors such as parental education and the school‐related home resources that parents may provide.