Choice Debate Research Articles

Private Citizenship and School Choice

The fuzzy nature of the current debate over choice may not be terribly new, reflecting inevitable tensions between private and public goals for education. The dramatic social geographic shifts since World War II, though, may have changed what is now designated "private " and "public" to such an extent that a new public-private arrangement has evolved. This "private citizenship"provides a needed context in which the choice debate can be better understood and productively redirected. The article suggests the origin of private citizenship in recent historical developments, identifies some of its key characteristics, and begins to evaluate its application to school choice.

Choice Orientations,Discussions, and Prospects

An examination of the contemporary choice discussion yields four somewhat distinct choice orientations and cases: an education-driven argument for choice; an economics-driven argument; a governance-driven argument; and an argument from particular national policy concerns of the past several decades. Each of these cases is sketched. Some logical and other features of the choice discussion are noted, andfinally some predictions are offered about the likely course of the choice discussion over the next several years.

Strategy and Time-Dependent Failure Probabilities: Experience, Obsolescence, and Strategic Change.

A learning formulation is used to integrate strategic choice arguments and the inertia and newness liabilities of ecological theory. Market participation models for 1461 electronics firms indicate ...

Social critique or social control: Some problems for evaluation in environmental education

AbstractEnvironmental education is often thought of as the branch of science education whose field of inquiry encompasses those necessarily value‐laden issues of human intervention in the natural world. While this perception would be contested by those who see the origins of environmental education lying in the sociopolitical arena of community concerns about exploitation of the environment, it is true to say that environmental education and science education are commonly associated in ways that other disciplines are not, and thus it is perhaps to be expected that the dominant paradigm of evaluation in environmental education should be applied science in character. This article raises the issue of the appropriateness of applied science approaches to evaluation in environmental education. The article begins with a critique of applied science approaches to evaluation, drawing arguments from the broader field of educational evaluation. The relationship between characteristics of applied science approaches to evaluation on the one hand and the special characteristics of environmental education on the other is then explored, and the article concludes with an argument for a deliberative choice of research paradigm in environmental education.

The Contribution of Rational Choice Theory to Macrosociological Research

Because it consists of an entire family of specific theories derived from the same first principles, rational choice offers one approach to generate explanations that provide for micro-macro links, and to attack a wide variety of empirical problems in macrosociology. The aims of this paper are (I) to provide a bare skeleton of all rational choice arguments; (2) to demonstrate their applicability to a range of macrosociological concerns by reviewing a sample of both new and classic works; and (3) to discuss the weaknesses of current rational choice theory and the possibilities for its future development.

The Smirnov distribution

Adequacy of the Smirnov approximation to P (D mn ≧c/mn), of the exact distribution of the two sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov criterion,D mn ,m<=n is examined. The main finding is that accuracy depends as much on the sample sizes,m andn, as on the ratio, ρ=m/n. The Smirnov approximation is good whenn is an integer multiple ofm, especiallyn=m, 2m; poor otherwise. This contrasts with the Smirnov approximation to P (D mn >c/mn), where this ordering is reversed, the cases forn=m, 2m being poor. The merit of continuity correction, of order ofn −1 in theD mn scale, is demonstrated for the Smirnov approximation, .1≦ρ, as well as for the Kolmogorov approximation, ρ<.1. As an argument for the optimum choice of ρ, the casen=m+1 is shown to have much to recommend it over the casen=m. Finally the usefulness of theχ 2 distribution with 2 degress of freedom is illustrated as an approximation to the Smirnov distribution.