New Wine in Old Bottles: Certificate of Need Enters the 1990s

Although state certificate- of-need (CON) programs have been the subject of intense criticism over the past decade, recent evidence suggests that CON programs may be more effective than commonly believed. While many state programs have yielded disappointing results, the CON process can also be used to achieve other important policy objectives, such as increasing access to care for the uninsured and increasing lay participation in health policy planning. In sum, rather than fading away after the termination of federal support for health planning in 1986, state CON programs are poised to assume new roles during the 1990s

Equity in an educational boom: Lessons from the expansion and marketization of tertiary schooling in Poland

The transformation of Polish economy toward a free market system and related changes on the Polish labour market released the demand for higher education, held for decades at an artificially low level. The impressive increase in enrolment was possible because the Polish government allowed the private sector to establish higher education institutions. This paper demonstrates how the probability of enrolment in tertiary schools evolves for different social groups in Poland over the period of educational boom. It also investigates how the socio-economic status influences the choices between full-time and part-time studies (the latter being of relatively low quality), and the probability of admission to subsidized, free programs versus programs requiring tuition. Between 1994 and 2008 Poland has undoubtedly improved the participation of students with low socio-economic status in the university education. However, if we look at the change in the ratios of enrolment probabilities for different layers of the social strata, we find that the improvement refers to those with low family educational background and living in small settlements, but not to individuals suffering from the low income. Further investigation shows that the policy makers should focus not only on ensuring equal access to tertiary education for the whole social strata, but on allowing the unprivileged groups access to education of acceptable quality.Higher education; equity; participation; transformation; Poland

Teacher Certification in Indonesia: A Confusion of Means and Ends

In 2006, Indonesia started implementing a nation-wide program of teacher certification with the aim to certify as many as 2.3 million teachers in 2015 with the budgetary cost of as much as US$460 million. Despite the magnitude and the importance of this program, there has been no quantitative study to evaluate the impact of such program on student’s achievement. In this study, we conducted a teacher survey in the Greater Bandung Area and collected the information on average national exam scores of the students of certified and not-certified teachers. We use two different impact evaluation techniques namely Propensity Score Matching (PSM) and Difference-in-Difference (DD) to evaluate the impact of certification. Both methods suggest that teacher certification has no impact on student’s achievement. The certification program may have improved teacher’s living standard as remuneration increase is an elemental part of it, yet its formally-stated goal to improve the quality of education as should be indicated in better students’ performance may not have been achieved. This program, being the largest in the nation’s history, may have confused means and ends.teacher certification, propensity score matching, impact evaluation, Indonesia