•An additional year of schooling was induced by a large-scale compulsory schooling reform.•An additional year of schooling has zero detectable impact on later-life labor market outcomes, including ...earnings.•The additional schooling occurred in the lower-track schools within Britain’s elite education system.•Lower-track schools were characterized by, among other things, large classes and a focus on practical education.
What is the causal effect of schooling on subsequent labor market outcomes? In this paper I contribute evidence on this question by re-examining a British compulsory schooling reform that yields large-scale and quasi-experimental variation in schooling. First, I note that this reform was introduced in 1947, when British students attended higher-track (for the “top” 20%) or lower-track (for the rest) secondary schools. The reform increased the minimum school leaving age from 14 to 15 and I show that the vast majority (over 95%) of affected students attended lower-track schools. Second, I show that the additional schooling induced by the reform had close to zero impact on a range of labor market outcomes. Third, I attribute these findings to the quality of these lower-track schools, which I argue was low along several dimensions.
The association between parents’ and children’s schooling determines how schooling and socioeconomic inequality evolve over time. In China, schooling has become more equal over time. Using Chinese ...survey data we find that the estimated effects of fathers’ and mothers’ schooling on their children’s schooling have fallen significantly over time, with large differences across cohorts and gender. Our estimates suggest that the decline in the marginal effect of parents’ schooling on child schooling has accounted for roughly one-half of the reduction in schooling inequality in China over the last half century.
•Schooling became significantly more equal in China over the past half century.•The association between parents’ and children’s schooling has weakened over time.•Fathers’ and mothers’ schooling are complements in affecting children’s schooling.
Considerable evidence demonstrates the importance of the cognitive home environment in supporting children's language, cognition, and school readiness more broadly. This is particularly important for ...children from low-income backgrounds, as cognitive stimulation is a key area of resilience that mediates the impact of poverty on child development. Researchers and clinicians have therefore highlighted the need to quantify cognitive stimulation; however existing methodological approaches frequently utilize home visits and/or labor-intensive observations and coding. Here, we examined the reliability and validity of the StimQ.sub.2, a parent-report measure of the cognitive home environment that can be delivered efficiently and at low cost. StimQ.sub.2 improves upon earlier versions of the instrument by removing outdated items, assessing additional domains of cognitive stimulation and providing new scoring systems. Findings suggest that the StimQ.sub.2 is a reliable and valid measure of the cognitive home environment for children from infancy through the preschool period.
Fish in schooling formations navigate complex flow fields replete with mechanical energy in the vortex wakes of their companions. Their schooling behavior has been associated with evolutionary ...advantages including energy savings, yet the underlying physical mechanisms remain unknown. We show that fish can improve their sustained propulsive efficiency by placing themselves in appropriate locations in the wake of other swimmers and intercepting judiciously their shed vortices. This swimming strategy leads to collective energy savings and is revealed through a combination of high-fidelity flow simulations with a deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm. The RL algorithm relies on a policy defined by deep, recurrent neural nets, with long–short-term memory cells, that are essential for capturing the unsteadiness of the two-way interactions between the fish and the vortical flow field. Surprisingly, we find that swimming in-line with a leader is not associated with energetic benefits for the follower. Instead, “smart swimmer(s)” place themselves at off-center positions, with respect to the axis of the leader(s) and deform their body to synchronize with the momentum of the oncoming vortices, thus enhancing their swimming efficiency at no cost to the leader(s). The results confirm that fish may harvest energy deposited in vortices and support the conjecture that swimming in formation is energetically advantageous. Moreover, this study demonstrates that deep RL can produce navigation algorithms for complex unsteady and vortical flow fields, with promising implications for energy savings in autonomous robotic swarms.
Internationally, there has been a dramatic evolution in the numbers of parents choosing to home-school their children for some, or all, of their schooling. Research to date has mainly focussed on the ...characteristics and motivations of parents who home-school. Little is known about the practice and implementation of home-schooling, especially for learners with disability or additional learning needs. Where research exists, it is generally qualitative, location specific, and small in scale. To address this gap, this paper investigates research regarding previously identified reactive and proactive motivations, legal requirements, and implementation processes within home-schooling family demographics. These are then utilised to develop the Parents' Perceptions of Home-Schooling scale (PPHS), which seeks to clarify both motivations as well as implementation and practical issues associated with choosing to home-school. Discussion focuses on the design of the PPHS scale and an initial study with 21 home-schooling parents. Being created for distribution across geolocational, distinct, and international and national contexts, the PPHS will provide scope to gather large-scale quantitative data with a view to improving the supports available to home-schooling families and enhancing learner outcomes.
In Spring 2020, schools in many countries had to close in response to the COVID-19 virus pandemic and move to remote teaching. This paper explores the views of pupils, parents/carers and teachers of ...‘home-school’ in one Norwegian municipality, gathered through parallel online surveys in April 2020 during the peak of the COVID-19 lockdown period. It finds that adaptation happened very quickly and that home-school was well received by pupils and parents. There was more creative learning, better progress, more useful feedback and greater student independence. School leaders reported that they wanted to implement changes based on the experience of remote learning enforced by the lockdown, so that the crisis has become an opportunity for grassroots innovation.
Parents of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) took part in an online survey that explored their experiences of home‐schooling during the coronavirus pandemic. Two hundred ...and thirty‐eight parents from the UK responded to 49 questions about the resources and support they had received, their management and feelings surrounding home‐schooling. Chi‐square analyses were used to establish whether parents' experiences differed as a result of socio‐economic status (SES) or the nature of their child's SEND. Results indicated that parents were dissatisfied with the resources and support they had received for their child's educational and psychological needs. Parents felt inadequate and unprepared and believed that non‐attendance at school had and would have a detrimental effect on their child's education and mental health. Parents also described the negative impact of home‐schooling on their and their family's well‐being. Finally, SES and SEND‐type were not associated with parents' experiences of home‐schooling.
In this paper, we examine whether longer compulsory schooling has a causal effect on mental health, exploiting a 1972 reform which raised the minimum school leaving age from age 15 to 16 in Great ...Britain. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that the reform did not improve mental health. We provide evidence that extending the duration of compulsory schooling impacts mental health through channels other than increased educational attainment. We argue that these effects may mitigate or offset the health returns to increased educational attainment.
•The 1972 Raising of the School Leaving Age in Great Britain did not improve mental health in the long-run.•Longer compulsory schooling may affect mental health through channels other than increased educational attainment.•Using changes in compulsory schooling laws to estimate the causal effect of education on health may prove problematic.
The Wiley Handbook of Home Education is a comprehensive collection of the latest scholarship in all aspects of home education in the United States and abroad. * Presents the latest findings on ...academic achievement of home-schooled children, issues of socialization, and legal argumentation about home-schooling and government regulation * A truly global perspective on home education, this handbook includes the disparate work of scholars outside of the U.S. * Typically understudied topics are addressed, such as the emotional lives of home educating mothers and the impact of home education on young adults * Writing is accessible to students, scholars, educators, and anyone interested in home schooling issues
This paper draws together data from two projects on schooling dis/engagement in Australia. One project focused on mainstream schools and the strategies employed to retain and engage young people in ...learning, whereas the other explored the growing sector of alternative/flexible education for similar solutions. We found interesting parallels. For example, rich, relevant curricula delivered through innovative pedagogies alongside positive staff/student relationships were key elements in schooling engagement across both sectors. Those findings have been published elsewhere. This paper focuses on the contributions to schooling engagement that may be derived from mutually beneficial school/community relationships. Here, we examine one mainstream high school and one flexi secondary school, both situated in remote geolocations, that established bespoke school/community partnerships in response to local needs. The data from each site provide blueprints for other schools that wish to tap into the wealth of human and material support systems in their own local areas.
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