Do school accountability systems make it more difficult for low‐performing schools to attract and retain high‐quality teachers?

Administrative data from North Carolina are used to explore the extent to which that state's relatively sophisticated school‐based accountability system has exacerbated the challenges that schools serving low‐performing students face in retaining and attracting high‐quality teachers. Most clear are the adverse effects on retention rates, and hence on teacher turnover, in such schools. Less clear is the extent to which that higher turnover has translated into a decline in the average qualifications of the teachers in the low‐performing schools. Other states with more primitive accountability systems can expect even greater adverse effects on teacher turnover in low‐performing schools. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Regulatory budgeting: A bad idea whose time has come?

Advocates of regulatory relief propose a budget that would annually cap regulatory costs. But emulating fiscal budgeting would be much more difficult than they envision. An arbitrary macrobudgetary constraint would have to be selected, and the potential scope of the regulatory budget would be vast. The process of regulatory budgeting would be very-time consuming, and could increase micromanagement by the Congress. Estimating regulatory costs would be challenging, and ignoring regulatory benefits would be unfair and inefficient. A preferable alternative to regulatory budgeting would be to expand the Government Performance and Results Act to include cost-effectiveness reviews for regulations.     

Local Context and Democratization in Mexico

While democratization is often seen as a national-level process, we argue that there is important scope for local effects. Through analysis of Mexican public opinion data collected on the eve of that country's historic 2000 elections, we demonstrate that local context greatly affects evaluations of the legitimacy of the system, and these evaluations, in turn, help to shape the willingness of citizens to engage with the system. Citizens are more willing to participate in politics if they think the process is fair, and direct evidence of the fairness of the system is provided by the local political context. This local connection, then, becomes critical in the process of individuals becoming, in Almond and Verba's classic term, "participatory" citizens (1963).     

Demographic change and industrialization in germany, 1815–1914

This article analyzes demographic change in Bremen 1815–1914 against the background of changing employment opportunities. Within the pre-industrial employment structure, which still prevailed in the decades after 1850, in-migrants were particularly disadvantaged. When modern industries developed, the situation changed. At the beginning of the twentieth century both male and female in-migrants benefited from a higher life expectancy than the city-born population had. The strong sectoral changes in employment opportunities in Bremen at the turn of the century reinforced the trends towards family limitation. More skilled in-migrants felt the need to adapt their reproductive behavior to facilitate upward social mobility. The article argues for a wider use of archival data, like those used in their study, to explore issues relating to urban demographic change in German cities during industrialization.     

List of Contributors

Events in eastern Europe have changed the forms of British assistance to other parliaments. Instead of taking advantage of the links of the Commonwealth, the British government now uses the Know How Fund to give non‐partisan assistance to legislatures in the former eastern bloc, and funds the Westminster Foundation for Democracy to help parliamentarians from other countries and to advise political parties. British political parties determine a proportion of the Foundation's activities. Aid to legislatures is part of a general policy for promoting democracy, an important aspect of bilateral assistance and an element in the reorientation of Britain towards Europe. British efforts in this field have been overshadowed by better funded competitors from other countries. But they have nevertheless helped to develop fresh conceptions of ‘political aid’.