Doing Well and Doing Good: Pioneer Employers Discover Profits and Deliver Opportunity for Frontline Workers

A new study of business practices reveals powerful ways to create strategic and financial gains. Lower-wage workers, when supported by effective policies, boost productivity, quality, innovation, and revenues from new markets. In the process, the value added by frontline employees rises and they garner significant and sustained wage gains and career advancement. The successful formulas of these firms are models adoptable by thousands of similar businesses

Abortion Legalization and Child Living Circumstances: Who is the "Marginal Child?"

We estimate the impact of changes in abortion access in the early 1970s on the average living standards of cohorts born in those years. In particular, we address the selection inherent in the abortion decision: is the marginal child who is not born when abortion access increases more or less disadvantaged than the average child? Legalization of abortion in five states around 1970, followed by legalization nationwide due to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, generates natural variation which can be used to estimate the effect of abortion access. We find that cohorts born after abortion was legalized experienced a significant reduction in a number of adverse outcomes. Our estimates imply that the marginal child who was not born due to legalization would have been 70% more likely to live in a single parent family, 40% more likely to live in poverty, 50% more likely to receive welfare, and 35% more likely to die as an infant. These selection effects imply that the legalization of abortion saved the government over $14 billion in welfare expenditures through 1994.

A Study of Perceptions of Teachers and Teacher Educators of Current Educational Issues as Identified by North Dakota Public School Teachers

Problem: This study examined the mutuality of perceptions on educational issues of public school teachers and full-time members of the teacher education departments in North Dakota colleges and universities. The purpose of the study was to determine if public school teachers and teacher educators perceive educational issues in a like manner. The study examined if the number of years a person has taught in public schools will make a significant difference in perceptions of educational issues. This study examined if certain variables related to past and present field experience of teacher educators have an effect upon their perceptions of educational issues. Procedure: An opinion questionnaire was sent to a randomly selected sample of 300 public school teachers in the state of North Dakota. This questionnaire asked them to identify educational issues that were of concern to them, and how teacher education programs in North Dakota were responding to these concerns. The data supplied by the returned questionnaires were extrapolated into a second questionnaire utilizing the Likert Scale. This second questionnaire was mailed to a second randomly selected group of 300 public school teachers. The questionnaire was also mailed to all 116 full-time members of the departments of teacher education in North Dakota. In order to gain a greater understanding of their responses to the second questionnaire a selected sample of both groups of respondents were interviewed. Statistical treatments included the use of the t test to determine significant differences in perceptions between public school teachers and teacher educators. A one-way analysis of variance was used to measure the differences in perceptions among public school teachers with varying numbers of years of experience. This was determined using the F test. Correlations were determined on six variables relating to past and present field experience of teacher educators and how these variables relate to their perceptions of educational issues. Findings: Significant differences, concerning mutuality of perceptions, were found on 32 of the 73 questionnaire items. Significant differences were found on 20 per cent of the items where the competency of neither group of educators was questioned. When the competency of either or both groups of educators was questioned, significant differences increased to 45 and 46 per cent. The results of the study show that increased experience of public school teachers does significantly alter perceptions of educational issues. Significant differences were found on 30 of the 73 items. Teachers with one to two years experience were found to have significantly different perceptions from the other groups of teachers on 28 of these 30 items. Fourteen items have significant correlations with the variable of the number of years since previous public school teaching experience. Other variables that concern the teacher educators\u27 previous public school teaching experience also reach significance. The variable of supervision of student teaching correlates significantly with six items. Four of these six items have negative correlations. Only one item correlated significantly with the variable of other types of field experience. No items correlated significantly with the variable of whether other types of field experience were meaningful or not. Conclusions: Based upon the data collected for the study, the following conclusions seem appropriate. 1. Public school teachers and teacher educators in the state of North Dakota do not share similar perceptions of educational issues. 2. Beginning teachers in the state of North Dakota have significantly different perceptions than do teachers with more experience. 3. Role theory may be used to explain the results of some findings of this study. 4. Previous public school teaching experience, and particularly the amount of time since this experience last occurred, will positively influence perceptions of teacher educators. 5. Supervision of student teachers has a slightly negative effect upon the perceptions of teacher educators

Land Use and Transportation Alternatives: Constraint or Expansion of Household Choice, MTI Report 01-19

Transportation and land use research that considers such alternatives as New Urbanist development, jobs-housing balance, transit villages, or “smart growth” most typically tests the capacity of such physical forms to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) or bring about other desired outcomes in the modification of travel behavior. Establishing such causality is broadly seen as a precondition for the urban planning interventions that are presumed to be necessary to bring these forms about. But such a view neglects the extent to which current interventions—notably zoning and transportation regulations—tend to preclude the development of such innovations in areas of high accessibility where they can potentially be of the greatest benefit. Payoffs in VMT reduction, though desirable, are hardly the necessary precondition for the relaxation of such regulations. Instead, the increased land use and transportation choice that such liberalization can engender is self-justifying in that it allows households to forge a closer link between their land use and transportation preferences on the one hand and their actual choices on the other. This framework is examined here through a comparison of two metropolitan areas: Boston, which offers its residents relatively rich opportunities for residence in transit and pedestrian friendly areas, and Atlanta, which offers many fewer such opportunities. The study is based on three principal components: A clustering of neighborhoods throughout each metropolitan area according to their transit and pedestrian characteristics; an urban design analysis of selected neighborhoods in each region; and a survey of 1600 households regarding their preferences for neighborhood environments. The study concludes that while residents of Atlanta are considerably less interested in transit- and pedestrian friendly neighborhoods than their Boston counterparts, the difference in preference is insufficient to explain the difference in the transit- and pedestrian quality of the neighborhoods the two groups inhabit. The neighborhood choices of the Boston residents was, as a consequence, considerably more sensitive to their transportation and land use preferences than the choices of their Atlanta counterparts

CRT-based dialogs: Theory and design

CRT (cathode ray tube) based, direct selection dialogs for computing machines and systems were apparently a cure for issues like ease of learning and ease of use. But unforeseen ~ and probably unforeseeable problems arose as increasingly sophisticated systems and dialogs were developed. This paper describes some of the emerging problems in CRT-based dialog design, develops theories about why they occur, and discusses potential solutions for them as a basis for future research. This investigation also provides a survey of the research into what makes programming and programming languages difficult, and what makes them simple

Combining education and politics

Hunter College has a new program giving students the opportunity to learn campaign techniques and get college credit for it

Abortion and Selection

The introduction of legalized abortion in the early 1970s led to dramatic changes in fertility behavior. Some research has suggested as well that there were important impacts on cohort outcomes, but this literature has been limited and controversial. In this paper, we provide a framework for understanding the mechanisms through which abortion access affects cohort outcomes, and use that framework to both address inconsistent past methodological approaches, and provide evidence on the long-run impact on cohort characteristics. Our results provide convincing evidence that abortion legalization altered young adult outcomes through selection. In particular, we find evidence that lower costs of abortion led to improved outcomes in the birth cohort in the form of an increased likelihood of college graduation, lower rates of welfare use, and lower odds of being a single parent. We also find that our empirical innovations do not substantially alter earlier results regarding the relationship between abortion and crime, although most of that relationship appears to reflect cohort size effects rather than selection.