Article
Организация и правовое регулирование школьного образования: опыт США
Author discusses the most important and controversial issues associated with the project of educational standards for high school: a paradigm shift from "vseobuch" to "actionism", the need for teacher retraining, the changing nature of public control over the school and also the question of when new standards should be the implemented. Special attention is paid to the basic curriculum: subjects studied at a basic or advanced level; the need to reduce the number of existing subjects; rationality of the choice of subjects, which are assumed to be compulsory by the standards. Author also notices that one of the strengths of the new standards is moral and personal development of students.
In this article we are talking about the early development of the educational process in one of England's North American colonies. Pennsylvania attracted many immigrants from Europe by its religious freedom. Moving to a new land, Europeans from different countries brought their way of life, including various systems of education. Therefore, at the end of the beginning of the XVII-XVIII centuries there were several different types of schools. The national education system, which appeared only in the XIX century has absorbed much of the colonists created.
Recently there have been widely spread models (classifications) of educational institutions (schools) based upon regularly collected statistical data and a presupposition that all the standard indices incorporated in those models have the same meanings concerning to every possible school. The article questions this presupposition.
Institutions affect investment decisions, including investments in human capital. Hence institutions are relevant for the allocation of talent. Good market-supporting institutions attract talent to productive value-creating activities, whereas poor ones raise the appeal of rent-seeking. We propose a theoretical model that predicts that more talented individuals are particularly sensitive in their career choices to the quality of institutions, and test these predictions on a sample of around 95 countries of the world. We find a strong positive association between the quality of institutions and graduation of college and university students in science, and an even stronger negative correlation with graduation in law. Our findings are robust to various specifications of empirical models, including smaller samples of former colonies and transition countries. The quality of human capital makes the distinction between educational choices under strong and weak institutions particularly sharp. We show that the allocation of talent is an important link between institutions and growth.
We address the external effects on public sector efficiency measures acquired using Data Envelopment Analysis. We use the health care system in Russian regions in 2011 to evaluate modern approaches to accounting for external effects. We propose a promising method of correcting DEA efficiency measures. Despite the multiple advantages DEA offers, the usage of this approach carries with it a number of methodological difficulties. Accounting for multiple factors of efficiency calls for more complex methods, among which the most promising are DMU clustering and calculating local production possibility frontiers. Using regression models for estimate correction requires further study due to possible systematic errors during estimation. A mixture of data correction and DMU clustering together with multi-stage DEA seems most promising at the moment. Analyzing several stages of transforming society’s resources into social welfare will allow for picking out the weak points in a state agency’s work.