An important and unresolved issue central to the study of government performance is how the actions of managers and the nature of organizations affect the cost of public services. This paper presents an empirical analysis of fire departments that estimates the influence of managerial choices on per capita spending within a simultaneous public…

Over the past 20 years, the number of patents assigned to universities has increased dramatically. This increase coincided with several policy initiatives, such as the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, designed to foster technology transfer between universities and the private sector. This paper examines the effect of such policies using an institutional…

In the United States of America, access to educational opportunity is widely viewed as a fundamental human right. The author explores the origins, content, and intended function of the controversial No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (PL 107-110) which was enacted by the Congress of the United States of America in the hope of closing the achievement…

Along with the efforts to increase the competitiveness of universities in Korea, one of the foci of higher education reforms initiated by the Korean government in 1995 was to diversify its higher education system. However, it is commonly believed that its attempts to diversify its universities system have not been successful. By examining the…

The United Nations Children's Fund has rapidly gained prominence as a UN agency promoting educational development. Detailed analysis is presented of UNICEF's transition from being a supplier of emergency goods and services, to a humanitarian role that has diversified to embrace development assistance and promoting the rights of children and women.…

The paper poses the following research question: Does the existence of statewide articulation agreements increase the probability of vertical transfers from two-year to four-year colleges? Stated differently, is there a difference in transfer rates between those states with statewide mandates versus those without such policies? Additionally, this…

Time limits represent a substantial departure from previous welfare policy. Theory suggests that their effects should vary according to the age of the youngest child of the family. I test this prediction using data from the Current Population Survey and find that time limits indeed have larger effects on families with younger children. I further…

In 1983, Burton Clark published a study that was to become a classic work on the organisation and government of higher education systems (Clark 1983). He constructed three "ideal types" of system--state system, market system and professional system, and summarised the way that national systems of higher education are dependent on the…

Learning and understanding more about sustainable development had become a feature of policy initiatives and programmes by a number of countries prior to the decision at the Johannesburg Summit to promote a Decade on the subject. But research and evaluation of programmes on sustainable development education over the past 10 years have, in the…

Who should be accountable for what beginning teachers need to know? This article first explains and illustrates three sets of knowledge and skills beginning teachers should have acquired in their preparation programs: academic knowledge needed for teaching the field of their license, generic professional knowledge and skills needed for teaching…

In this article, the author discusses Iowa's deference to local autonomy. Unlike most states, Iowa continues its long history of local independence by allowing districts to set their own goals. In the late 1990s, when the nation's governors and business leaders threw their weight behind the push for statewide academic standards, Iowa begged to…

Decades following Brown v. Board of Education (1954), issues regarding the effects of skin color, poverty, and racial differences in the availability of protective factors persist. For a multiethnic sample of mainly African American (56%), female (69%), and high-achieving (65%) youths, a dual-axis model of vulnerability is used to compare four…

China is the world's largest market for solar water heating systems, installing 13 million square meters of new systems in 2004, mostly in large cities. Municipal authorities, however, are sensitive to quality and visual impact issues created by this technology deployment. Therefore, there is currently a trend toward developing building integrated…

The policy priority of management development in the past 20 years appears to have been overshadowed since the new millennium by the goal of widening participation in learning of low-skilled and excluded groups. This change of emphasis could potentially be damaging if efforts to increase management participation in learning are relaxed, because…

This article deals with a particular "best practice" in Mongolia (boarding schools) that neither traveled elsewhere nor was rescued from the socialist past and adopted in the post-socialist present. The boarding schools accommodating children from nomadic herder families have experienced a long decade (1991-2003) of neglect. The boarding…