Policy Cues and Ideology in Attitudes toward Charter Schools

Charter schools have generated support from politicians in both major American political parties while stimulating intense debate among interest groups. We investigate whether and how public attitudes reflect interest group polarization or politician consensus. Using an original survey, we find that charter school opinions diverge along ideological lines among high‐information respondents. With embedded experiments, we manipulate respondents' information using policy cues tied to opposing sides of the charter debate: We assess whether the role of private companies and nonunion teachers changes support for charter schools. We find that the public responds favorably to some informational cues; conservatives without prior information are especially persuaded by information about nonunion teachers. This explains how polarized opinion can develop even in the absence of strong partisan sorting among top political leaders and clarifies the partisan and ideological context of ongoing education policy debates.     

Coping With Competition: The impact of Charter Schooling on Public School Outreach in Arizona

Advocates of market-based education reform hypothesize that competition will cause traditional public schools to increase outreach efforts as they seek to market themselves. Advocates hope such efforts will result in more information on school activities and performance and thereby enhance accountability. We examine the effect of charter school competition on outreach efforts by a sample of 98 Arizona district schools, finding that charter competition is associated with a short-term increase in outreach. Organizational structure influenced school response, with more decentralized district schools responding more readily to charter competition. Competition modestly increased information regarding schooling in the short run, although long-term implications are less clear.     

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.     

Building Bridges Through Performance and Decision‐making: Schools,Research and Public Engagement

Abstract: This paper uses the impact agenda in the UK to realign debate about the relationship between schools, universities and (human) geography. It positions this debate in systemic tendencies within UK higher education. It argues that, whilst impact can be seen as a further instance of neoliberalism, emphasising the gap between accountability and accounting allows an identification with communicative and reflexive knowledge and, more broadly, critical praxis. The paper draws on a year‐long research‐based collaboration with school teachers and their students involving performance work and the development of decision‐making curriculum materials. It argues that working in these ways with schools can provide the basis for public engagement partnerships between schools and universities and a means to constitute diverse research publics. In these ways, it is argued, a wider sense of impact can be reappropriated, to reclaim the critical subject and to constitute academic value     

What Drives Charter School Diffusion at the Local Level: Educational Needs or Political and Institutional Forces?

While the number of charter schools has increased rapidly in the United States, few studies have examined whether charter schools are implemented in response to real and perceived educational needs or to political and institutional factors in the education policy arena. Unlike traditional policy adoption and diffusion studies that focus on the state level and use a dichotomous dependent variable—adoption or not—this article focuses on local school districts and uses the number of operating charter schools as the dependent variable. Accordingly, instead of applying event history analysis, this article conducts generalized event count regression to estimate models. Based on a data set that consists of Florida's 67 school districts across a six‐year time period, the results suggest that charter school diffusion is more heavily driven by political and institutional factors than by educational needs. The results also demonstrate a dynamic trend of charter school diffusion over time.     

Spelling correctness as a witness of changing documentary culture in Tuscia (eighth–ninth centuries)

This paper discusses the evolution of documentary culture in early medieval Tuscia by quantitatively examining the Latin spelling of charter scribes in relation to the following factors: time, the distinction between the formulaic and non-formulaic parts of the document, the scribe’s domicile, the scribe’s professional status, and the document type. The paper asks what the spelling of charters tells us about administrative and socio-cultural changes in charter production and in scribal education. The research data is 997 charters from the Late Latin Charter Treebank, and the approach that of philological corpus linguistics.     

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.     

Schools, Scapegoats, and Skills: educational Reform and the Economy

Much of the rhetoric concerning educational reform has focused on the role of education in improving economic competitiveness and productivity. This article notes some of the difficulties in assuming strong links between education and the economy, especially given our limited understanding of the relationship of education and job skills. These difficulties raise serious policy issues about the aims of public education and the relationship(s) of schools to other institutions.     

Strategic Alliances in Action: Toward a Theory of Evolution

The popularity and prevalence of strategic alliances for problem solving has been well documented in research on the corporate sector and public policy. However, there has been limited work to date on building a comprehensive theory about the evolutionary process of alliances. The purpose of this article is to synthesize current research on alliance development in order to develop a model of strategic alliance evolution. The theoretical model is built with ideas from prior research as well as findings from our own recent research on alliances in education. We conducted a national study of strategic alliances in charter schools focused on uncovering the process of evolution—including how alliances are initiated, operated, and evaluated—and the various internal and external factors that influence alliance development and progress. Our findings offer a model of strategic alliance evolution and provide direction for future research.     

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。     

从留根教育到综合素质教育:西班牙华文教育发展的新趋向

论文梳理了西班牙华裔子弟华文教育的发展历程,借助实地调研、问卷与访谈等手段对当地华文教育现状进行了考察与分析,并在此基础上,探索了西班牙华人社会发展新形势下的华文教育新趋向。研究显示,西班牙的华文教育具有起步晚、发展迅速的特点,并存在教育资源分配不均的突出问题。近年来,西班牙华人社会的高速发展及社会需求的转变,促使当地华文教育由传统的以教授华语为主要目标的留根教育逐渐向旨在帮助华人二代移民适应当地社会、提高群体竞争力的综合素质教育转型。华文教育的变革折射出西班牙华人社会的发展变迁,为二代移民建立跨文化视角下的双向族群认同创造了条件。     

论清季学堂奖励出身制

科举制是古代中国之抡才制度,而新式学堂体制则是近代育才制度,两者在性质及功能上存在很大差异。清季科举制废除前后实行的学堂奖励出身制,将传统科举制之抡才制度与近代学堂之育才制度简单地作了错位嫁接。它实际上是传统的“学而优则仕”观念之延续,滋生并助长了“以学干禄”风气,强化了“官学一体化”格局,故受到有识之士的猛烈抨击。本文在考察清季学堂奖励出身之制度设计与具体实施情况的基础上,分析科举与学堂在性质及功能上的差异,揭示“学堂与仕进混合”、“抡才与育才并一”之制度设计的内在冲突,进而说明从传统科名奖励制经过学堂奖励出身制之过渡,而转向现代学术奖励制度的复杂性与必然性。     

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.     

Aboriginal Performance on Standardized Tests: Evidence and Analysis from Provincial Schools in British Columbia

Many indigenous populations are experiencing rural-to-urban migration. In making this transition, indigenous peoples are entering industrial societies where most income derives from wages or salaries, and formal educational achievement is crucial in determining economic prospects. This research analyzes the gap in test score results between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students in public schools in the Canadian province of British Columbia. It finds a strong effect of school quality, as measured by non-Aboriginal achievement, on Aboriginal achievement. It also finds a nonlinear negative relationship between Aboriginal achievement and the number of Aboriginal students in a school over the empirically observed range. It thus suggests a possible trade-off and dilemma between, on the one hand, policies that enable Aboriginal students to concentrate in a few schools able to provide a culturally sensitive curriculum and, on the other, policies to maximize Aboriginal academic achievement.     

Going to a home you have never been to: the return migration of Mexican and American-Mexican children

Focusing on children's experience-driven cosmologies revealed through interviews and survey responses, this article seeks to analyse and interpret the way children explain their migration from the USA to Mexico within the context of increases in both voluntary and forced return migration of Mexicans since 2005. It draws from representative samples of students (aged 9–16) enrolled in both public and private schools in several Mexican states, which are complemented by data drawn from in-depth interviews that complicate the sociological typologies about migration, motives for migration, and returnees. The goals of this article are as follows: (a) to illuminate and value children's own narratives about their migration experiences and (b) to discuss the contribution of diverse and apparently contradictory micro-, meso-, and macro-level approaches in studying migrant children.     

THE IMPACT OF COMMUTING TIME ON YOUTH'S SCHOOL PERFORMANCE

Using Brazilian data, we estimate the impact of commuting duration on students' performance using distance to closest schools as an instrumental variable. In addition, we also use identification through heteroskedasticity, which does not rely on exclusion restrictions, and estimate bounds for the treatment effect in case there is remaining bias from unobservables. We find strong and consistent evidence that duration of commuting has a negative causal effect on academic achievement. Moreover, the relatively small heterogeneity across quantiles of test score makes us believe that public transportation policies targeted at students can promote education not only for those less well‐off.     

Legislation and Liberalization: The Debate About Corporal Punishment in Schools in Postwar West Germany, 1945--1975

Between 1945 and 1975 West Germany became modernized and liberalized.School education was one of the key fields in which this processwas played out. Methods of school discipline, corporal punishmentin particular, were the subject of heated public debates, reflectingthe broader political and moral issues of West German postwarreconstruction. The article examines the debate and its conclusionin the 1970s by focusing on Hesse, the only Land that bannedcorporal punishment in schools completely in 1946, and Bavariaand North Rhine-Westphalia, which both allowed it under restrictions.Proponents of corporal punishment pointed to the problems withdeviant youth in the postwar years and declared the use of thistype of sanction to be a right given to teachers by customarylaw. Opponents, however, put forward pedagogical, psychological,political, and moral arguments and called for a clear breakwith authoritarian methods of the past as necessary for rebuildingdemocracy. The pace and character of change, however, was determinedin the field of law. While a Supreme Court ruling in 1954 supportedthe opponents' position, a 1957 ruling by another Chamber ofthe same court reaffirmed the traditional customary-law viewof a teacher's right to wield the cane. Customary law couldonly be superseded by written law, but when most Land governmentsfinally abolished corporal punishment in schools in the early1970s, they did so, following Hesse's example, by administrativedecree only. While teachers who violated the ban therefore werenot automatically subject to criminal proceedings, courts remainedreluctant to uphold the ban. The abolition of corporal punishmentin schools, which also came at the price of an increase in bureaucraticregulations about school discipline and school life, can thusbe seen as reflecting the ambivalence of modernization and liberalizationafter 1945.     

明代都匀卫学、府学建置背景探析

明初,诏令天下府、州、县、卫、司建立学校。终明之世,明王朝相继在都匀设卫置府,建立卫、府学,开办儒学教育,培养才俊。本文对明代都匀卫、府学建置背景进行考察,旨在从教育这一视角了解明代都匀地区概貌。     

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.     

抗战时期的黄埔军校与贵州

抗战时期的黄埔军校情况复杂,不仅分校众多,且不少军校生由军校委托各专门军事学校代训,仍属军校建制。抗战时期,黄埔军校四分校及为军校代训的三所专门军事学校迁入贵州。贵州为军校的发展提供了相对稳定的环境,培养大批基层军官,有力地保存了抗日力量。军校也对当地教育等方面产生了积极影响。