Suchergebnisse

David Stern argues that some basic features of the American high school must be modified if it is to serve all students successfully. He notes, for example, that only three-quarters of U.S. high school students graduate four years after beginning ninth grade and that the National Assessment of Educational Progress found no improvement in reading or mathematics for seventeen-year-olds between 1971 and 2004. The nation's system for educating teenagers, says Stern, seems to be stuck, despite the constant efforts of teachers and repeated waves of reform.

Citing two widely accepted public purposes of educating teenagers—preparation for civic participation and for economic self-sufficiency—Stern proposes four new strategies to achieve those goals. He draws on empirical evidence suggesting that these are promising directions for research and policy, but acknowledges that existing studies provide only limited guidance.

First, he says, schools should continue the current trend toward integrating educational options to provide young people with skills and experiences that pave the way to both college and careers. Second, states and districts should tie education funding not simply to the number of students attending school, but also to what young people learn, whether they graduate, and whether they find jobs or enroll in postsecondary education. Such a move, he argues, would encourage teaching and learning formats that use students' time more effectively. Third, more adults in addition to classroom teachers should be involved in educating teenagers. Other adults acting as academic advisers, learning coaches, student advocates, internship supervisors, mentors, and college counselors could help guide the education of teenagers inside and outside of school and provide some relief for the chronic shortage of teachers. Fourth, schools should expand the options for educating teenagers outside of geographically fixed schools. Combining improved Internet-based curriculum with internships and civic engagement projects, for example, may produce better results for many young people and also may promote academic achievement for teenagers who do not thrive in conventional classrooms and for those who face academic and social challenges when they move from one place to another. Stern argues that the limited success of today's high schools makes such new initiatives well worth trying and evaluating.

This paper examines critically some recent developments in the sustainability debate. The large number of definitions of sustainability proposed in the 1980's have been refined into a smaller number of positions on the relevant questions in the 1990's. The most prominent of these are based on the idea of maintaining a capital stock. I call this the capital theory approach (CTA). Though these concepts are beginning to inform policies there are a number of difficulties in applying this approach in a theoretically valid manner and a number of critics of the use of the CTA as a guide to policy. First, I examine the internal difficulties with the CTA and continue to review criticisms from outside the neoclassical normative framework. The accounting approach obscures the underlying assumptions used and gives undue authoritativeness to the results. No account is taken of the uncertainty involved in sustainability analysis of any sort. In addition, by focusing on a representative consumer and using market (or contingent market) valuations of environmental resources, the approach (in common with most normative neoclassical economics) does not take into account distributional issues or accommodate alternative views on environmental values. Finally, I examine alternative approaches to sustainability analysis and policy making. These approaches accept the open-ended and multi-dimensional nature of sustainability and explicitly open up to political debate the questions that are at risk of being hidden inside the black-box of seemingly objective accounting.