Markets vs. Monopolies in Education: A Global Review of the Evidence

Would large-scale, free-market reforms improve educational outcomes for American children? That question cannot be answered by looking at domestic evidence alone. Though innumerable "school choice" programs have been implemented around the United States, none has created a truly free and competitive education marketplace. Existing programs are too small, too restriction laden, or both. To understand how genuine market forces affect school performance, we must cast a wider net, surveying education systems from all over the globe. The present paper undertakes such a review, assessing the results of 25 years of international research comparing market and government provision of education, and explaining why these international experiences are relevant to the United States. In more than one hundred statistical comparisons covering eight different educational outcomes, the private sector outperforms the public sector in the overwhelming majority of cases. Moreover, that margin of superiority is greatest when the freest and most market-like private schools are compared to the least open and least competitive government systems (i.e., those resembling a typical U.S. public school system). Given the breadth, consistency, relevance, and decisiveness of this body of evidence, the implications for U.S. education policy are profound

The Fiscal Impact of a Large-Scale Education Tax Credit Program

In this paper we estimate the budgetary impact of the Cato Institute's Public Education Tax Credit model legislation on five states and present a generalized spreadsheet tool ("the Fiscal Impact Calculator") that can estimate the program's effect on any other state for which the necessary input data are supplied. It is estimated that, in its first 10 years of operation, savings from the PETC program would range from $1.1 billion for South Carolina to$15.9 billion for Texas. Illinois, Wisconsin, and New York are estimated to enjoy 10-year savings within that range. Public Education Tax Credits reduce the state and local taxes owed by anyone who pays for the private schooling of an eligible child. Parents can claim credits for their own children's educational costs, and other taxpayers (including businesses) can claim credits when they pay for the education of someone else's child, either directly or by donating to a nonprofit scholarship-granting organization

End It, Don't Mend It: What to Do with No Child Left Behind

The looming expiration of the federal No Child Left Behind Act has prompted a flood of commission reports, studies, and punditry. Virtually all of those analyses have assumed that the law should and will be reauthorized, disagreeing only over how it should be revised. They have accepted the law's premises without argument: that government-imposed standards and bureaucratic "accountability" are effective mechanisms for improving American education and that Congress should be involved in their implementation. In this paper, we put those preconceptions under a microscope and subject NCLB to a thorough review. We explore its effectiveness to date and ask whether its core principles are sound. We find that No Child Left Behind has been ineffective in achieving its intended goals, has had negative unintended consequences, is incompatible with policies that do work, is at the mercy of a political process that can only worsen its prospects, and is based on premises that are fundamentally flawed. We further conclude that NCLB oversteps the federal government's constitutional limits -- treading on a responsibility that, by law and tradition, is reserved to the states and the people. We therefore recommend that NCLB not be reauthorized and that the federal government return to its constitutional bounds by ending its involvement in elementary and secondary education

Housing policy and the social benefits of home ownership.

In the second article, "Housing Policy and the Social Benefits of Homeownership," Ed Coulson states that the major subsidies to homeownership arise from the U.S. tax code, and the costs of these subsidies are high. Coulson asks whether the social benefits from homeownership are sufficient to warrant such subsidies. To answer the question, he reviews the research on the social benefits of ownership and some related issues. The evidence indicates that homeownership does carry substantial social benefits, but their dollar value remains uncertain.Housing

A psychometric measure of working memory capacity for configured body movement.

Working memory (WM) models have traditionally assumed at least two domain-specific storage systems for verbal and visuo-spatial information. We review data that suggest the existence of an additional slave system devoted to the temporary storage of body movements, and present a novel instrument for its assessment: the movement span task. The movement span task assesses individuals' ability to remember and reproduce meaningless configurations of the body. During the encoding phase of a trial, participants watch short videos of meaningless movements presented in sets varying in size from one to five items. Immediately after encoding, they are prompted to reenact as many items as possible. The movement span task was administered to 90 participants along with standard tests of verbal WM, visuo-spatial WM, and a gesture classification test in which participants judged whether a speaker's gestures were congruent or incongruent with his accompanying speech. Performance on the gesture classification task was not related to standard measures of verbal or visuo-spatial working memory capacity, but was predicted by scores on the movement span task. Results suggest the movement span task can serve as an assessment of individual differences in WM capacity for body-centric information

A consistency framework for dynamic reconfiguration in AO-middleware architectures

Aspect-oriented (AO) middleware is a promising technology for the realisation of dynamic reconfiguration in distributed systems. Similar to other dynamic reconfiguration approaches, AO-middleware based reconfiguration requires that the consistency of the system is maintained across reconfigurations. AO middleware based reconfiguration is an ongoing research topic and several consistency approaches have been proposed. However, most of these approaches tend to be targeted at specific narrow contexts, whereas for heterogeneous distributed systems it is crucial to cover a wide range of operating conditions. In this paper we address this problem by exploring a flexible, framework-based consistency management approach that cover a wide range of operating conditions ensuring distributed dynamic reconfiguration in a consistent manner for AO-middleware architectures

Accounting for human rights : doxic health and safety practices - the accounting lesson from ICL

This paper is concerned with a specific human right - the right to work in a safe environment. It sets out a case for developing a new form of account of health and safety in any organisational setting. It draws upon the theoretical insights of Pierre Bourdieu taking inspiration from his assertion that in order to understand the "logic" of the worlds we live in we need to immerse ourselves into the particularity of an empirical reality. In this case the paper, analyses a preventable industrial disaster which occurred in Glasgow, Scotland which killed nine people and injured 33 others. From this special case of what is possible, the paper unearths the underlying structures of symbolic violence of the UK State, the Health and Safety Executive and capital with respect to health and safety at work. While dealing with one specific country (Scotland), the analysis can be used to question health and safety regimes and other forms of symbolic violence across the globe