Bottlenecks in the decentralisation of education funding in Poland

Ten years after delegating the responsibility for school management and operation maintenance to local governments, the education funding system in Poland still faces open challenges of fundamental importance. Although the decentralisation of education is commonly considered a success, the particular mechanisms of funding and legal solutions are hotly debated and certainly far from perfect. The financial responsibilities of the central government and the local authorities are imprecisely defined, which provokes conflicts and tensions between the main stakeholders. Moreover, the Polish education system lacks even the basic standards describing an efficient way of service provision. The formula used to allocate the so-called education subvention to individual local governments is subject to endless political bargains and trades and hardly reflects any reasonable policy. Recently, several ideas have been raised in the public debate in Poland on how to reform the funding of education. However, it seems that these heavily ideologised projects go far beyond the necessary changes and do not take into account either the complex context of decentralised education system or the experiences of other countries.edcation finance; decentralisation; Poland

Human Capital Formation In Poland. Where Does Educational Quality Come From?

Theory and empirical literature relates educational quality to four main explanatory factors: intergenerational transfer of human capital, quality of schools, school composition and economic conditions. Based on these findings a model explaining territorial differentiation of educational quality is proposed. The dependent variable is test score of 6th grade students, averaged at municipality level. As it turns out, educational outcome is highly conditioned on school composition, most likely as a result of high vulnerability to inequalities in school community. Of great importance is also local human capital stock. The role of traditionally meant school quality is minor (although higher in rural areas than in cities), partly because of decreasing returns to scale of school resources. Average school outcome differs significantly along historical divisions of Poland, not only in levels, but also in parameters of determining function. Legacies of the past and related socioeconomic processes have a substantial impact on the sensitivity of educational quality to different explanatory factors.

International Laws of War and the African Child: Norms, Compliance, and Sovereignty

The Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989 is one of the most prominent international humanitarian treaty in world history. It entered into force quicker than any other treaty and currently only two countries (the United States and Somalia) have not ratified it.1 Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF, says that the Convention has become “the centerpiece of a global movement, a movement that reflects a growing awareness of the importance of safeguarding human rights—and child rights in particular.”2 Similarly, Lisbet Palme claimed, after travelling to some of the worst conflict zones in Africa, that, “For many of the children I have met and talked with, the Convention takes on a very meaningful reality.”3 Yet, during the 1990’s, more children in Africa became victims of, and combatants in, war than at any time in history. Partially as a result, a bitter Human Rights Watch Report assessing the state of children’s rights ten years after the Convention on the Rights of Children came into force was entitled Promises Broken.4 Indeed, to enhance further international humanitarian law protecting children during war, governments agreed in January 2000, after six years of negotiations, to an Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child that raises the minimum age of combatants to eighteen.

Convergent expansions in non-relativistic QED: Analyticity of the ground state

We consider the ground state of an atom in the framework of non-relativistic qed. We show that the ground state as well as the ground state energy are analytic functions of the coupling constant which couples to the vector potential, under the assumption that the atomic Hamiltonian has a non-degenerate ground state. Moreover, we show that the corresponding expansion coefficients are precisely the coefficients of the associated Raleigh-Schroedinger series. As a corollary we obtain that in a scaling limit where the ultraviolet cutoff is of the order of the Rydberg energy the ground state and the ground state energy have convergent power series expansions in the fine structure constant $\alpha$, with $\alpha$ dependent coefficients which are finite for $\alpha \geq 0$.Comment: 37 page

Smoothness and analyticity of perturbation expansions in QED

We consider the ground state of an atom in the framework of non-relativistic qed. We assume that the ultraviolet cutoff is of the order of the Rydberg energy and that the atomic Hamiltonian has a non-degenerate ground state. We show that the ground state energy and the ground state are k-times continuously differentiable functions of the fine structure constant and respectively the square root of the fine structure constant on some nonempty interval [0,c_k).Comment: 53 page