Diversity, choice and the quasi-market: An empirical analysis of secondary education policy in England

This paper investigates the extent to which exam performance at the end of compulsory education has been affected by three major education reforms: the introduction of a quasimarket following the Education Reform Act (1988); the specialist schools initiative introduced in 1994; and the Excellence in Cities programme introduced in 1999. We use panel data for all state-funded secondary schools in England over 1992-2006. Using a panel of schools for all state-funded secondary schools in England (1992-2006), we find that about one-third of the improvement in school exam scores is directly attributable to the combined effect of the education reforms. The distributional consequences of the policy, however, are estimated to have been favourable, with the greatest gains being achieved by schools with the highest proportion of pupils from poor families.

Diversity, choice and the quasi-market: An empirical analysis of secondary education policy in England

This paper investigates the extent to which exam performance at the end of compulsory education has been affected by three major education reforms: the introduction of a quasi-market following the Education Reform Act (1988); the specialist schools initiative introduced in 1994; and the Excellence in Cities programme introduced in 1999. We use data for all state-funded secondary schools in England over the period 1992-2006. The empirical analysis, which is based on the application of panel data methods, indicates that the government and its agencies have substantially overestimated the benefits flowing from these three major reforms. Only about one-third of the improvement in GCSE exam scores during 1992-2006 is directly attributable to the combined effect of the education reforms. The distributional consequences of the policy, however, are estimated to have been favourable, with the greatest gains being achieved by schools with the highest proportion of pupils from poor families. But there is evidence that resources have not been allocated efficiently.

Funding, school specialisation and test scores

We evaluate the effect on test scores of a UK education reform which has increased <br/>funding of schools and encouraged their specialisation in particular subject areas, enhancing pupil choice and competition between schools. Using several data sets, we apply cross-sectional and difference-in-differences matching models, to confront issues of the choice of an appropriate control group and different forms of selection bias. We demonstrate a statistically significant causal effect of the specialist schools policy on test score outcomes. The duration of specialisation matters, and we consistently find that the longer a school has been specialist the larger is the impact on test scores. We finally disentangle the funding effect from a specialisation effect, and the latter occurs yielding relatively large improvements in test scores in particular subjects.

Ariel - Volume 8 Number 5

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Integrating Ecological and Engineering Concepts of Resilience in Microbial Communities

Many definitions of resilience have been proffered for natural and engineered ecosystems, but a conceptual consensus on resilience in microbial communities is still lacking. We argue that the disconnect largely results from the wide variance in microbial community complexity, which range from compositionally simple synthetic consortia to complex natural communities, and divergence between the typical practical outcomes emphasized by ecologists and engineers. Viewing microbial communities as elasto-plastic systems that undergo both recoverable and unrecoverable transitions, we argue that this gap between the engineering and ecological definitions of resilience stems from their respective emphases on elastic and plastic deformation, respectively. We propose that the two concepts may be fundamentally united around the resilience of function rather than state in microbial communities and the regularity in the relationship between environmental variation and a community\u27s functional response. Furthermore, we posit that functional resilience is an intrinsic property of microbial communities and suggest that state changes in response to environmental variation may be a key mechanism driving functional resilience in microbial communities