Analysing Choice in Australian Individual Funding Disability Policies

The Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) will allocate funding packages to people with disability who are assessed as needing paid support. The NDIS is an example of individual funding, which is currently not the dominant way of organising disability support in Australia. Individual funding aims to increase opportunities for personal choice. We present a framework for understanding current individual funding policies in each Australian jurisdiction according to two policy dimensions that potentially enable greater personal choice for people with disability: who holds their allocated funds and where support can be purchased. The findings show wide disparities in choice across the country, particularly due to constrained funds and the shortage of support to purchase in regional areas. The analysis demonstrates that NDIS implementation will need to consider that, while individual funding can be empowering for some people with disability, enabling choice can be challenging for administrators and service providers.     

Citizenship, Consumerism and Local Government in Sweden

Recent developments in Swedish local government and central-local government relations have been characterized by re-regulation and cut-back strategies on the one hand and decentralization and deregulation on the other. In this article these developments are analysed as a dynamic process with contradictory features. Swedish society is becoming more and more differentiated and specialized with fewer mechanisms of collective socialization, but with more economic and strategic calculations on the part of central and local authorities, interest organizations and individuals. New formal rules are developed in order to handle conflicts and enhance public sector legitimacy. In the communes we can identify an ideological shift from viewing the commune as a political institution to regarding it as a service-producing company. In addition, citizens are increasingly looked upon as individual consumers rather than political citizens. Corresponding organizational solutions such as depoliticization, privatization and freedom of choice have been developed. However, as a reaction to communal consumerism there is also a growing interest in communitarian values. There is an increasing number of examples of people participating in matters of common nature and expressing their belonging to a community. An interesting question for future research is whether the observed contradictory tendencies will increase or decrease the legitimacy of the traditional democratic institutions at the communal level.     

Childcare Policies and the Politics of Choice

Governments have intervened in two basic ways on childcare: via the provision of leaves to care (usually taken by mothers) and the provision or (often only partial) financing of childcare services. These policy options reflect the fundamental debate on how young children should be cared for. Labour has developed both policy areas since 1997, but there is a question mark over how far mothers and fathers have a ‘real choice’ to work and/or to care. Parents' choice in this policy area is a sensitive political issue and, this article suggests, requires a careful balancing of policy instruments. Policy goals may conflict with preferences and there is also the difficult issue that parents' choices may prejudice their future welfare in a work/welfare system that is tending to assume that there will be increasing capacity for self‐provisioning.     

Choice in Public Services: Crying 'Wolf' in the School Choice Debate

Choice, diversity and personalisation have been key to the New Labour project in public services. With the emergence of a reinvigorated Conservative party as a credible electoral threat, and the end of the Blair era, it seems appropriate to consider the continuing viability and longevity of the New Labour public service project. In this article, I approach the issue of choice in public services through an examination of the long-running controversy over choice in the English secondary school system. I argue that the opponents of choice have been reluctant to engage with the notion of choice in public services due to concerns over the supposed negative effect that consumer choice has on the equity and quality of service provision. This paper aims to challenge the claim that any element of choice in education necessarily has deleterious effects on social justice. I argue that the case against school choice has not been decisively made and that school choice can, in principle, form part of a socially progressive educational project by redistributing power to service users and helping to maintain popular support for public provision of education.     

Choice in a World of New School Types

As school choice options have evolved over recent years, it is important to understand what family and school factors are associated with the enrollment decisions families make. Use of restricted‐access data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study allowed us to identify household location from a nationally representative sample of students and to match households to the actual schools attended and other nearby schools. This matching is significant as previous research generally has not been able to link individual households to school enrollment decisions. Using these data, we examined the role that socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity play in school enrollment decisions. One of our more interesting results suggests that the newest public alternative, charter schools, attracts families with higher socioeconomic status than those that traditional public schools attract. The attraction of charter schools, however, unlike traditional public schools, appears to be racially and ethnically neutral. Families do not choose a charter school because of its racial or ethnic composition, nor do race and ethnicity within a household influence its choice of charter schools. Other socioeconomic factors influencing charter school choice are more similar to factors explaining private school choice than to those factors explaining the choice of traditional public schools. The findings suggest that policies governing the design of charter schools should focus on broader socioeconomic diversity rather than race only.     

试论西部大开发的政策选择及实施

１９９９年６月江泽民总书记发出了西部大开发的号令 ,给西部各省（区）市人民以极大的鼓舞。西部大开发战略表明党和国家把西部地区经济的发展摆到了更加突出的地位。这次大开发的最大特点就在于它的社会主义市场经济这个大背景 :这次大开发不是在指令性计划下进行的 ,而是靠市场机制发挥作用 ,采用宏观调控下的市场机制来推进的。这一机制就是要在社会主义国家的总体部署和以间接手段为主的宏观调控下 ,以市场作为在西部大开发中资源配置的基础性手段 ,使各种生产要素自由流动和重组 ,实现提高劳动生产率和经济效益的目的。为真正实现社会…     

An Examination of Local Climate Change Policies in the Great Plains

As the United States struggles with national solutions to address climate change, state and local governments have become leaders in both mitigation and adaptation policy. Although a significant and growing body of research targets these policies, most studies have assumed common factors motivating both adaptation and mitigation policy adoption. There remains a need for more research on cities of all sizes, their adoption of specific local policies, the factors motivating those choices, and whether the influences for mitigation differ from those that motivate adaptation. The paper uses data from a new survey of over 200 local governments in eleven states of the Great Plains region, including measures distinguishing between mitigation and adaptation policies. These data are employed to test the relative influence of factors from three areas: the policy environment, the attitudes of governmental actors, and community atmosphere, in explaining observed variation in the adoption of climate change policies.     

What Research Can Tell Policymakers about School Choice

American school systems have implemented several different kinds of school choice policies, and most of them are controversial. The research literature on various forms of school choice reveals some areas of consensus, but other areas where the results of studies diverge. Consensus results show that parents are more satisfied with choice, that they report using academic preferences to make choices, and that they tend to be more involved with their child's education as a consequence of choice. There is some, though mixed, evidence of improved test scores for children involved with various forms of choice. Actual parental use of choice and gathering of information, however, show some evidence of stratification, not always by race or income, but often by the level of parental involvement and motivation. These results provide considerable evidence about the effects on students whose parents have made an active choice, but more policy research is needed on the effects of competition on students in schools that have not been chosen. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

明代地方学校生员考试制度考述

学校生员学业，可分课、试二法。本从学校教官的日课、月考，府、州、县提调官的季考，提学院道官的岁考、科考、类考或吊考等几个方面，对明代地方学校的考试制度给以综合的考辨与梳理，藉此说明明代建立了一套相当完善的地方教育与考试制度，进而指出自明代个期以后，这套考试制度已逐渐流于形式。     

Policy Innovation of Local Officials in China: the Administrative Choice

Local policy innovation is considered one of the major drives for China’s rapid economic development, especially during the first 35 years of reform in China. Given the new central policies and constant anti-corruption campaigns under the Xi administration, this article examines a timely question of why and how local officials continue to develop new innovative policies and projects. Based on previous theoretical building, the article analyzes such key institutional factors as new rules of game and their impact on local officials’ competition for survival and career advancement. Selecting cases across all the districts from a typical city in China, this article compares and identifies the changing patterns in local policy innovation. Policy innovations are administrative choices made by local officials in response to new and changing institutional opportunities and constraints. The discussion in this article makes significant contributions both theoretically and empirically to the China studies.

     

School Choice and the Creation of Social Capital Reexamined

Scholars have argued that by spurring parental involvement in school activities, school choice creates social capital. While government policies may be able to create social capital, we doubt that school choice is such a policy and argue that participation in school activities is largely determined by individual-level attributes and the school context, rather than choice per se. To assess this claim we use the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study data. Unlike most school choice studies, this data set has a large, representative national sample. More importantly, the panel structure of the data allows us to examine the same parents both before and after the school choice decision has been made, permitting a true dynamic analysis. The results demonstrate that actively choosing a child's school does not make parents more likely to participate in school activities. Some institutional attributes of schools do appear to increase parental involvement in school activities, however.     

Local Government Complexity: Consequences for County Property-Tax and Debt Policies

This article examines the consequences of local government complexityon county revenue decisions in fourteen Texas counties comprisingthe Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston metropolitan areas. Thereare significant differences in the configuration of local governmentsin the two areas traceable to when cities, school districts,and special districts were created. County revenue decisionsare also affected by the different configuration of governmentsin the two areas. These findings challenge the conventionalwisdom that states create local governments. Local choices areinstrumental in shaping local government complexity. What government-typesare chosen, and when, produce distinctive patterns of governancefrom one metropolitan area to the next, even in the same state.Consequently, reforms aimed at making the county the "localgovernment of the future" would require perhaps insurmountablechanges in state and local structures     

Takeovers of Local Governments: An Overview and Evaluation of State Policies

This article examines state interventions, sometimes amountingto nearly total takeovers, into the affairs of financially distressedlocalities and "academically bankrupt" school districts. Drawingon several examples, this study suggests that state legislatorsand administrators have been cautious about intervening in theaffairs of specific local governments. However, the decisionsmade by state officials on how to approach intervention, particularlywhether to be reactive or proactive, and the assumptions theymake about the nature of the problems to be remedied, help determinewhether takeover is friendly or hostile and its effectiveness.     

地方政府治理现代化的价值定位与路向选择

将社会主义核心价值观融入地方政府治理现代化,是新时代推进国家治理体系和治理能力现代化的必然选择。社会主义核心价值观对地方政府治理现代化具有重要的导向价值、凝聚价值、协调价值和教育价值,但限于多元价值观念的冲突、法律和制度规范的不健全、碎片化的培育和践行,使得这些价值功能的发挥面临诸多困境与挑战。因而,在多元价值观念中寻求价值最大公约数,以社会主义核心价值观为共同价值追求,完善相关法律和制度规范,充分培育和践行,化价值观念为治理实效,才能将社会主义核心价值观真正融入地方政府治理现代化中。     

School Bureaucracy and Student Performance at the Local Level

A major debate in American education centers on the role bureaucracy plays in shaping educational performance. Proponents of school choice argue hat large educational bureaucracies have contributed to dramatic performance shortfalls in America's public schools. Other scholars view educational bureaucracies as beneficial because they manage a wide range of problems and thus make it easier for teachers to focus on the core task of teaching. This study examines these competing claims about the impact of bureaucracy on student performance using district level data from Texas public schools. The findings from several regression models reveal negative relationships between bureaucracy (measured both at the central and campus administration levels)and student performance across several different grade levels.     

The State-Local Nexus in Policy Innovation Diffusion: The Case of School Choice

Our knowledge of how policy innovations diffuse in federal systemscould be enhanced by paying greater attention to the behaviorof policy entrepreneurs. This study shows how policy entrepreneurshelped stimulate the diffusion of state school-choice plansby collecting and generating evidence of workability of thisinnovation. Importantly, these policy entrepreneurs have oftenused evidence from local experiments to promote state policychange. Thus, a state-local nexus exists in the diffusion schoolchoice. This analysis suggests that there is value in conceptualizingpolicy innovation diffusion a federal system as both a horizontal(that is, state to state) and a vertical (that is, state andlocal) phenomenon.     

循环经济背景下的地方政府行为选择

循环经济作为一种新的经济增长方式,对传统的生产经营、社会管理、消费方式等诸多方面提出了革故鼎新的要求。综观循环经济取得成效的西方发达国家,其政府无一例外发挥了积极的推动作用。我国政府应当通过实施一系列引导和迫使企业转变经济增长方式的政策,建立完善资源环境合理有效利用的制度以及产业发展的环境评价机制,促进循环经济的快速健康发展。