Funding For Education Programs Research Articles

Debt swaps for financing education: Exploration of new funding resources

As an innovative financial mechanism to explore additional funds for social development programs in developing countries, debt swaps for development, including debt-for-education swaps, became popular between the 1980s and 2000s. Their popularity, however, seems to have diminished since the beginning of the 2010s. This article describes debt swaps for development with a focus on debt-for-education swaps, explaining how they became popular, examining why they have lost momentum, and exploring whether debt-for-education swaps are a feasible option for funding social development programs. Despite recent economic recovery and growth worldwide, one of the key obstacles for achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 4—to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all—remains inefficient funding for education programs in developing countries. Based on the findings, this article argues for the feasibility of debt-for-education swaps to ...

A sequential model to link contextual risk, perception and public support for flood adaptation policy

The economic damage from coastal flooding has dramatically increased over the past several decades, owing to rapid development in shoreline areas and possible effects of climate change. To respond to these trends, it is imperative for policy makers to understand individuals' support for flood adaptation policy. Using original survey data for all coastal counties of the United States Gulf Coast merged with contextual data on flood risk, this study investigates coastal residents' support for two adaptation policy measures: incentives for relocation and funding for educational programs on emergency planning and evacuation. Specifically, this study explores the interactive relationships among contextual flood risks, perceived flood risks and policy support for flood adaptation, with the effects of social-demographic variables being controlled. Age, gender, race and partisanship are found to significantly affect individuals' policy support for both adaptation measures. The contextual flooding risks, indicated by distance from the coast, maximum wind speed and peak height of storm surge associated with the last hurricane landfall, and percentage of high-risk flood zone per county, are shown to impact one's perceptions of risk, which in turn influence one's support for both policy measures. The key finding –risk perception mediates the impact of contextual risk conditions on public support for flood management policies – highlights the need to ensure that the public is well informed by the latest scientific, engineering and economic knowledge. To achieve this, more information on current and future flood risks and options available for mitigation as well as risk communication tools are needed.

Editor's Column: Prisons, Activism, and the Academy—a Roundtable with Buzz Alexander, Bell Gale Chevigny, Stephen John Hartnett, Janie Paul, and Judith Tannenbaum

tors appear on page 567. America’s prisons and jails house more than two million inmates. At least half the prisoners released in 2008 are likely to be returned to “correctional” facilities by 2010 (“Second Chance”).1 What is the academy’s responsibility to the men, women, and children who live behind bars? What is its responsibility to those who are released? Over the last fifteen years federal and local governments in the United States reduced or ended funding for educational programs in prison. These programs helped reduce recidivism and offered lifers and other long-­term inmates the resources to invent more mean-­ ingful lives. This Editor’s Column features a conversation among educational activists who have confronted these tough financial and ideological facts and who continue to work with prisoners against all odds. Judith Tannenbaum is a poet who worked through California’s Arts-­in-­Corrections, a statewide program that for more than twenty years has paid professional artists to make art with people locked up in California state prisons. With the help of University of Michigan undergraduates, Buzz Alexander started the Prison Creative Arts Project in 1990, and PCAP has facilitated hundreds of workshops, readings, exhibitions, and performances throughout Michigan. Janie Paul, a curator of PCAP’s Annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan Prisoners, has facilitated art workshops in Michigan prisons and teaches PCAP courses that train and supervise art students who are sent into Michigan juvenile facilities and prisons. The author of Incarceration Nation, Stephen John Hartnett has spent eighteen years teaching and protesting at America’s prisons; he also runs a weekly poetry workshop at the Champaign County jail in Illinois. Finally, Bell Gale Chevigny is the editor of Doing Time: Twenty-Five Years 1 2 3 . 3 ]

AAS Reviews Education Strategy

When news got out this past May that the American Astronomical Society was closing its Chicago education office, Bruce Partridge, chair of the AAS’s astronomy education board (AEB), was deluged with e-mails from upset members. The numbers started dropping off, he says, after the AAS council and the AEB made it clear that funding for education programs would not be cut, but simply moved to the society’s Washington, DC, headquarters.The traditionally research-oriented AAS first hired people to focus on education in 1996. The decision to close the office after four years followed a review calling for a substantial rethinking of the society’s education strategy. “A lot of our education effort is new,” says Partridge, “and we’re feeling our way.” In Washington, DC, the new director of educational activities will have more opportunity to collaborate with other societies. That is important, says AAS executive officer Bob Milkey, for a small society to amplify its educational effect.Doug Duncan, the education coordinator who lost his job with the office’s end-of-year move, says, “One of the Chicago office’s highest priorities has been to base [teaching] recommendations on solid research about what works and what does not.” Duncan worries that the focus on education research—which is important for education sessions at AAS meetings, support of introductory college astronomy teaching, and development of a Web database with resource materials for teachers—will lose momentum once it is separated from an academic education research group.But the AAS council plans to refocus its education effort, and is looking at how to juggle the office’s responsibilities, which range from answering third graders’ queries to implementing national K–12 standards. The council also hopes for more outside funding—the AAS has only netted $60 000 in education grants since the Chicago office opened. The aim now, Partridge says, is to “maximize the bang for the buck.”© 2001 American Institute of Physics.

The Position of U.S. English on Bilingual Education

U.S. English is a nonprofit organization that promotes English as the common language of the United States. This position has been attacked by bilingual advocates as racist and antiminority. The author examines U.S. English's position toward bilingual education as an educational technique, an educational theory, a social theory, and a political movement. U.S. English has no objection to the use of non-English-speaking students' native languages in classrooms as an educational technique. Research evidence, however, supports neither claims that bilingual education is superior to alternative methods nor the educational theory behind bilingual education. Therefore, U.S. English advocates broadening federal funding for educational programs designed for limited-English-proficient children to include the full range of such programs rather than limiting funding to bilingual programs. Bilingual education is rooted in a social theory of cultural pluralism and a belief in the institutional racism of American schools. U.S. English advocates an emphasis on the commonalities between Americans rather than on the divisions between ethnic and cultural subgroups. It advocates English-language training leading to rapid classroom integration rather than to long-term language-based segregation within schools. Politically, advocacy of bilingual education comes primarily from Hispanic organizations whose continued power depends upon maintaining strong ethnic solidarity and separatism and from defining Hispanic Americans as a minority rather than an immigrant group.