Knowledge Society, Educational Attainment, and the Unequal City: A Sociospatial Perspective

Education plays a key role in knowledge society, since, from a meritocratic perspective, it opens up fair opportunities for well-paid jobs, thereby increasing social mobility and well-being more generally. In order to foster their economic competitiveness, cities are therefore encouraged to engage in knowledge-based urban development by trying to provide good schools and world-class universities to attract the “creative class.” However, meritocracy is a “myth,” as access to educational opportunities is itself socially biased. With the example of Heidelberg, a so-called “knowledge pearl,” we show how knowledge-institutions, such as the university, may shape socioenvironmental contexts in ways conducive to spatially selective access to—and use of—educational opportunities. Instead of reducing social polarization, knowledge-institutions may instead (re-)produce inequalities.

Equality and Closure: The Paradox of Local Citizenship

In Bourgeois Utopias, a cultural history of suburbia in America, Robert Fishman states the fundamental paradox about the suburbs: “[H]ow can a form based on the principle of exclusion include every-one?” The promise of the American suburb was that every middle-class family would be able to own a home with a yard, but this egalitarian ideal was illusory because what made the suburbs appealing was precisely what it excluded, namely everything having to do with the city—its congestion, political corruption, and most importantly, its racial diversity. And so, as suburbia was mass-produced and made avail-able with cheap low-interest loans to white middle-class families, racial minorities were rigidly excluded. Although several waves of demographic change have reshaped the suburbs over the generations, this paradox remains evident today. Suburbs are becoming more dense and more diverse as many minorities have migrated from “inner cities” toward first-ring suburbs, and immigrants have found welcoming enclaves in the suburbs. But while suburbs have grown more diverse, they have also grown more segregated. High opportunity suburbs with plentiful jobs and good schools mandate low-density sprawl through zoning regulations, like mini-mum lot size and floor area requirements, parking mandates, and set-backs, that have the cumulative effect of making housing scarce and expensive. Only the very affluent or those lucky enough to have purchased a home years ago are welcome in these places. Racial minorities who, thanks to the earlier generation of suburban exclusion, have not had the opportunity to build the inter-generational wealth that is often a prerequisite to purchasing a home in the suburbs still find themselves locked out of the most desirable communities. The infra-structure of suburban communities, such as roads, sewers, and schools, are designed, perhaps deliberately, to completely collapse if the number of users increases by even a small amount, so these communities fiercely oppose any efforts to densify and permit more housing. Even modest attempts at densification are treated as calls to destroy suburban neighborhoods. But because our society has made a decision, undoubtedly questionable in retrospect, to treat suburban homeownership as the central tool for wealth building in this country, we cannot hope to meet our national aspirations for equality without opening up our suburbs to more housing. And so the question re-mains—how can a form based on the principle of exclusion include everyone?

The survival of school financing management in COVID-19 pandemic

This study aimed to explore the survival of school financing management during the COVID-19 pandemic, to assure the quality of teaching and learning continuously. This study used a qualitative design, and data collection is carried out by observing resource persons and in-depth interviews, analysis or analysis of documentation and a combination of the three as triangulation method. The collected data were analyzed using an interactive model. The results showed that financial management strategies in managing school finances effectively and efficiently, through transparency, accountability and responsibility, are considered to have contributed to the prospects, quality, progress and sustainability of education in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is based on the fact that many quality and good schools eventually experience setbacks due to the lack of transparency, accountability and responsibility in the management of education funds. Openness in schools can promote accountability and fight corruption in education, if it is implemented effectively and any malpractice is dealt with clear consequences. The implication is the strategies of education financing management in terms of transparency, accountability and accountability need to be carry out consistently to ensure the improvement of school quality runs in a sustainable manner.

School Choice and Accountability

School choice and accountability are both mechanisms initially designed to improve standards of education in publicly provided schools, although they have been introduced worldwide with alternative motivations such as to promote equality of access to “good” schools. Economists were active in the initial design of school choice and accountability systems, and continue to advise and provide evidence to school authorities to improve the functioning of the “quasi-market.” School choice, defined broadly, is any system in which parents’ preferences over schools are an input to their child’s allocation to school. Milton Friedman initially hypothesized that school choice would increase the diversity of education providers and improve schools’ productivity through competition. As in the healthcare sector and other public services, “quasi-markets” can respond to choice and competition by improving standards to attract consumers. Theoretical and empirical work have interrogated this prediction and provided conditions for this prediction to hold. Another reason is to promote equality of access to “good” schools and therefore improve social mobility. Rather than school places being rationed through market forces in the form of higher house prices, for example, school choice can promote equality of access to popular schools. Research has typically considered the role of school choice in increasing segregation between different groups of pupils, however, due to differences in parents’ preferences for school attributes and, in some cases, the complexity of the system. School accountability is defined as the public provision of school-performance information, on a regular basis, in the same format, and using independent metrics. Accountability has two functions: providing incentives for schools, and information for parents and central authorities. School choice and accountability are linked, in that accountability provides information to parents making school choices, and school choice multiplies the incentive effect of public accountability. Research has studied the effect of school accountability on pupils’ attainment and the implications for teachers as an intermediate mechanism.

AN ECONOMIC THOUGHT OVER THE DISTORTING ROLE OF EMERGING POLITICAL CONSULTANCY SERVICES IN INDIA

There is a common practice existing among the people for time immemorial, not only in India even among the western world,to have or seekconsultants/experts/advisers/assistants/sometimes even astrologers forgetting somevaluableexpertise opinions beforeventuringinto a new business, finding good schools fortheir children, selecting a suitable educational for their wards, where to construct a house, where to go for a tour, selecting a suitable bridegroom and brides,how to make their children a popular figure in the society etc. etc.

Local news poverty in Canadian communities: presentation to the House of Commons Heritage Committee

This is an updated version of the brief submitted to the House of Commons Heritage Committee on Oct. 6, 2016 as part of the committee’s study on Communities and Local Media. Residents of Canada’s largest municipalities can obtain news from multiple sources, but it’s a different story elsewhere in the country. People who live in smaller cities and towns, suburban communities and rural areas have fewer options to begin with, and in recent years their choices have become even more limited. Traditional news outlets have been hit by cutbacks, consolidations and closures, while digital first news sites often struggle to stay afloat. Does any of this matter? The answer is “yes,” according to a report by the U.S.-based Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. The commission’s report concluded that information is “as vital to the healthy functioning of communities as clean air, safe streets, good schools, and public health (Knight Commission, 2009, xiii).” It went on to argue that in addition to helping communities develop a sense of connectedness, access to information is essential in terms of holding public officials to account and making it possible for community members to work together to solve problems. While local journalism is the subject of increasingly intensive scrutiny by scholars in the United States – Duke University’s Philip Napoli, for instance, is launching a project that will investigate the state of local news in 100 U.S. communities (Napoli, 2016) - there is much we don’t know about the Canadian situation and the extent to which the critical information needs of rural areas, towns and smaller cities in particular are being addressed. As Carleton University professor Dwayne Winseck warned committee members during his testimony earlier this year, there are “severe” shortages of information on changes to the media landscape overall. Moreover, he cautioned, there are “a lot of opinions and little data to act upon” (Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage 2016, 5) .