Suchergebnisse

La Escuela francesa: igualdad de oportunidades y logicas de una institución
Serge BOULOT y Damelle BOIZON-FRADET
En los debates sobre la sociedad, imigración y escuela están íntimamente ligados. La escuela aparece como uno de los medios más importantes de integración. La presencia de niños extranjeros en la escuela francesa no es un fenómeno reciente. Pero la escuela ha experimentado mutaciones radicales. Por lo tanto, no se puede razonar con los esquemas del pasado. La escuela francesa está dominada por la filosofía de la igualdad de oportunidades y por la lógica institucional de la igualdad de trato. Sin embargo los resultados no están a la altura de las esperanzas : una es sólo aparente y la otra no reduce las desigualdades sociales de origen. Incluso si el fracaso escolar es considerado cada vez más coma una injusticia, la desigualdad en las medidas son cada vez menos aceptadas por la sociedad. Cuatro ejemplos (la enseñanza de las lenguas y culturas regionales, las clases de acogida para los niños extranjeros, la enseñanza de las lenguas y culturas de origen y las zonas de educación prioritarias) ponen en evidencia que introducir la discriminación -sea ésta positiva- en un sistema como éste trae como consecuencia que sus beneficiaros corran el riesgo de la marginalización y de la estigmatización.

Many risks have the property that large numbers of people are exposed and have little or no individual control over the risks they face. Dams, nuclear power plants, and recombinant DNA research have proven controversial not simply because there is vast uncertainty about the true level of risk associated with each, but because a fundamental issue is that in each case social risks can be lessened by spending more on safety: dams can be designed to withstand larger earthquakes, nuclear plants can have additional safety equipment, and DNA research could be done in yet more carefully isolated laboratories. Since each person will have preferences regarding the proper trade‐off between increased cost and increased safety, there is little possibility of consensus. More importantly, we show that a voting process for expressing individual preferences can be manipulated and is seriously flawed in the sense that it does not lead to an "efficient" outcome. In addition, we show that virtually all people are unhappy with the safety decision, in the sense that each would prefer either a safer or a cheaper outcome. Thus, making safety decisions that affect a large group of people who will not be able to control the outcome is even more difficult than has been appreciated. We suggest some ways of handling some of the difficulties.

SUMMARYThis paper deals with the occurrence of fiscal illusion and its effect on public expenditures. Fiscal illusion is here taken to be a systematic misperception by individuals of both the public revenue burden borne by them and the amount of benefit they derive from public expenditures. Taking the revenue structure and public outlays of the 110 largest Swiss cities as an example, it is shown that there is in fact empirical evidence for the existence of fiscal illusion (presently defined for the most part in the literature as a systematic underestimation of fiscal burden) and, as a result, for higher public expenditures when it occurs than when it is absent. By dividing the Swiss cities according to the degree of citizen participation in the making of public decisions, we were able to formulate hypotheses predicting to what degree fiscal burden illusion (understood as systematic underestimation) will occur under each system. These hypotheses have been empirically confirmed. Further analysis of the results has indicated that in cities in which the citizens can only indirectly participate in public decision‐making, the government and public bureaucracy have more freedom to act independent of the wishes of the voters with respect to expenditures, though these are taken more and more into consideration as elections approach. This expenditure behavior and particularly the concrete manner in which expenditures are adjusted to approaching general elections leads us to the conclusion that illusion with respect to the benefit derived from public expenditures also exists.