Think about all the money it costs to educate a person. Start with pre-school, the elementary and secondary years, and then consider right up through college and, for some, grad school. Now that you have a cost in mind, let us discuss the costs and the benefits. In this week's Discussion area, examine the following: Public education is a good that has helped millions and millions of Americans become successful, productive members of society. Would the average person be able to go to school if the Government did not provide for this good? Would only the very rich be well educated and successful? Look into the criticisms and the success stories about public education. What, if anything, can be done to make our schools more successful at educating our children? What benefits do you get from the tax dollars you pay into this effort? Is the cost worth the benefit?

answer

watching

146

views

For unlimited access to Homework Help, a Homework+ subscription is required.

You have 0 free answers left.
Get unlimited access to 3.8 million step-by-step answers.

Get unlimited access

Already have an account? Log in

Lelia LubowitzLv2

28 Mar 2019

Unlock all answers

Get 1 free homework help answer.

Already have an account? Log in

Related questions

. Vouchers to Pay Private School
Tuition
Two conditions that justify government intervention in a market are the presence of external benefits and equity concerns. Both of these issues are present in the case of primary and secondary education in the United States. Think about what education without government education would look like. In the absence of government intervention, all primary and secondary education in the US would be private. Public school districts would not exist. Parents would need to pay private firms (schools) to educate their children.

External benefits

If all education were private, itâs likely that people would buy too little education, from societyâs point of view. External benefits are one reason. When a child is educated, he or she benefits and we expect his or her parents to take those benefits into account when they purchase education. But there are additional benefits to society which parents may ignore. As people become more educated, they are less likely to be unemployed or be criminals and are more likely to volunteer and vote. The presence of these external benefits is an example in support for the government getting involved in education.

Equity

Many families in the United States have low incomes. Among all children in first through twelfth grades in 2001, 46% were from families with incomes below $40,000. Since the cost of private education would be an important share of these familiesâ incomes, most Americans would be concerned about the fairness of relying on markets to decide how much education children receive. Current spending by these families on private education provides some support for this concern. Of all children in private school in 2001, only 25% were from families with incomes below $40,000. Therefore, equity concerns are another example in support for government getting involved in education.

Providing vs. producing education

Most economists think external benefits and equity concerns justify government intervention in education. But it is important to distinguish between government production of education and other forms of government intervention. At the level of elementary and secondary education, K- 12 education, government intervention today mostly means production of education by local school districts. To benefit, children must attend public schools. But this is not the only form intervention could take.
There are other markets where government intervention takes the form of subsidizing peopleâs access to productsâthink of financial aid to college students, for example. Many people in the US think that government should move from producing education to subsidizing access.

One form that subsidy could take is government providing vouchers to parents. Parents would use the voucher to help pay for their childâs education in a private school. After it receives the voucher, the school would turn it in and be paid by a local or state government.

Today there is a lively debate between people who think K-12 education should be delivered publicly and people who think quality and efficiency would be higher if government provided vouchers and the education was delivered by private schools. Some of these quality and efficiency arguments can be based on material we covered this week. Price competition between private schools will pressure each one to produce efficiently. Competition for students will lead private schools to offer programs of interest to parents and their children.

Answer the questions below and make use of the sources supplied. Be sure to cite you sources in your answers.

1. Explain whether a potential exit by students with vouchers will lead to the improvement of public schools. 2. Discuss whether the implementation of vouchers will lead the best students to leave public school, which could lead to a decline in education for the students left behind in the public schools. 3. Consider what might happen to the students who use vouchers to leave public schools in order to attend private schools. How might their academic performance change as a result of switching? 4. Finally, think about the impact of a voucher system on the students in an urban setting. Describe whether all families would have an equal opportunity to access education.

Your final product will be a paper that: ? Addresses each of the four questions above in total. ? Is APA formatted. ? The body is to be 2 pages minimum.

The requirements for your assignment are: 1. Answer each question fully 2. Define the overall subject of each question. 3. Cite at least three (3) resources from this weekâs materials.

Grade inflation Gone Wild - sTUarTrojsTaCzer

A bout six years ago, I was sitting in the student union of a small liberal arts college when I saw a graph on the cover of the student newspaper that showed the history of grades given at that institution in the past 30 years.

Grades were up. Way up.

I am a scientist by training and I love numbers. So when I looked at that graph, I wondered, How many colleges and universities have
data like this that I can find? The answer is that a lot of schools have data like this hidden somewhere. Back then, I found more than 80 colleges and universities with data on grades, mostly by poking around the Web. Then I created a website (gradeinflation.com) so that others could find this data. I learned that grades started to shoot up nationwide in the 1960s, levelled off in the 1970s, and then started rising again in the 1980s. Private schools had much higher grades than public schools, but virtually everyone was experiencing grade inflation.

What about today?

Grades continue to go up regardless of the quality of education. At a time when many are raising questions about the quality of U.S. higher education, the average GPA at public schools is 3.0, with many flagship state schools having average GPAs higher than 3.2. At a private college, the average is now 3.3. At some schools, it tops 3.5 and even 3.6. A is average at those schools! At elite Brown University, two-thirds of all letter grades given are now A's.

These changes in grading have had a profound influence on college life and learning. When students walk into a classroom knowing that they can go through the motions and get a B+ or better, that's what they tend to do, give minimal effort. Our college classrooms are filled with students who do not prepare for class. Many studies less than 10 hours a week that's less than half the hours they spent studying 40 years ago. Paradoxically, students are spending more and more money on an education that seems to deliver less and less content.
With so few hours filled with learning, boredom sets in and students have to find something to pass the time. Instead of learning, they drink. A recent survey of more than 30,000 first-year students across the country showed that nearly half were spending more hours drinking than they were studying. If we continue along this path, well end up with a generation of poorly educated college graduates who have used their four years principally to develop an addiction to alcohol.

Many say that grade inflation is a complicated issue with no easy fix. But there are solutions. At about the same time that I started to collect data on rising grades, Princeton University began to do something about its grade-inflation problem. Its guidelines have the effect of now limiting A's on average to 35 per cent of students in a class. Those guidelines have worked. Grades are going back down at Princeton and academic rigour is making a comeback. A similar successful effort has taken place at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. And through a concerted effort on the part of faculty and leadership, grades at Reed College in Oregon have stayed essentially constant for 20 years.

Princeton, Wellesley, and Reed provide evidence that the effort to keep grade inflation in check is not impossible. This effort takes two major steps. First, school officials must admit that there is a problem. Then they must implement policies or guidelines that truly restore excellence.

I asked Dean Nancy Malkiel at Princeton why so few schools seem to be following Princeton's lead. Because its hard work, she answered. Because you have to persuade the faculty that its important to do the work.

Making a switch will take hard work, but the effort is worthwhile. The alternative is a student body that barely studies and drinks out of boredom. That's not acceptable. Colleges and universities must roll up their sleeves, bring down inflated grades, and encourage real learning. It's not an impossible task. There are successful examples that can be followed. I am looking forward to the day when we can return to being proud of the education that our nation's colleges and universities provide.

Analyze Stuart Rojstaczer's argument in Grade Inflation Gone Wild, addressing the following questions:
What evidence does Rojstaczer use to indicate that there is a problem?
How would you characterize this evidence (for example, scientific, anecdotal), and to what extent are you persuaded by the evidence he provides to suggest that grade inflation has a profound effect on life and learning?
To what extent does he persuade you that a change in policy is
necessary or that such a change would make a difference?

goldporcupine700

Need help revising, and recommendation for a conclusion.

Throughout this paper is my understanding of what I have learned in class chapters 1-4, expressing my understanding and opinions. Economics is the study of how we deal with scarce resources. Microeconomics specially deals with business in the home country exclusively. This type of economics affects small businesses in the home country only. On the other hand, macroeconomics concerns our national welfare concerning trade and international business.

I believe that many things affect our economy on a microeconomics level. Things such as our understanding of our country in reflection to the world are very important. That is why we study ourselves before we study the macroeconomic principle of the world. Understanding ourselves is what microeconomics teaches us. Working from the inside out. The world is a place where there are differences in our wants and what we get. That is what makes items scarce. That is what positive economics is. Positive economics deals with what is and what we have. The other type of economics is called normative statements. This deals with what we should receive instead of what is and deserved to some extent. It's our scarce resources that determine our allocation of resources and how we use our resources and time. This is where opportunity costs come in, giving up something to do something. A successful business or country never ignores opportunity costs. We must ensure that we have a comparative advantage instead of the absolute advantage. Our resources must be used to achieve maximum output. Comparative is met when we have fewer opportunity costs to make some certain products than the other person or entity.

My initial understanding was scarcity was oil potentially running out, but we have so much of it that you can always find more with techniques such as fracking. Now it's obvious to me, one of our most scarce resources is time. You cannot avoid the 8,760 hours in a year. I understand that people have unlimited wants but limited resources. Everything has a cost and we must make a choice as we don't have unlimited farms, factories workers, etc. scarcity forces choices and this ties in with opportunity cost, for every gun made, a theft from the hungry is made. The opportunity cost not being used to feed the poor, but to make guns. And I find it easy to understand no one can have everything choices must be made on benefits. If I'm going to school, imp giving up making cash, as I'm giving up money for an education, I value education more. Scarcity is also related to the invisible hand. As it's an achievement that leads free markets and capitalism through competition for scarce resources.

My understanding of the invisible hand is a person neither intends to promote public interest and does not know how much he is promoting it. Only intending on his own gain. Without being his intention a person can be lead by the invisible hand to do good for society by pursuing one's own self-interest. Going into equity and efficiency the invisible hand does ensure both equity and efficiency. People work in their selfish ways to maximize profit while also contributing to the economy as a whole. It can also be argued that as the invisible hand wants to ensure efficiency, it cannot guarantee efficiency, because it can fail to produce an efficient allocation of resources, which in turn lead to a market failure. It can also be argued that it can't guarantee equity because not everyone gets a fair price. The way I like to remember efficiency is with a real-life example, like a reduction in the number of workers needed to produce a particular good for a particular amount. Equity refers to the ownership interest in an asset, for example, if a person owns a house with a market value of $800,000 and owes $100,000 on the mortgage leaving a $700,000 equity in the home.

It can be predicted that if the price of beef increases - ceteris paribus-the quantity of beef demanded by buys will decrease. In other words, if the price of beef increases, then the quantity of beef increases, then the quantity of beef demanded will decrease because all things have to be equal. In-class lecture thought me all other things remaining the same. Economists use ceteris paribus to determine the effect of a factor when all other factors have been held the same and helps simplify the study and get a more refined data set.

Economists deal with many issues that pertain to assuring that both a countries domestic output is efficient and that there is an effective trade balance. This means that there are a balance and limit on the amount of imports. Also, this means home production must be able to meet export demands. There are many factors that affect the production of goods and their effect on shifting the production possibilities frontier. This involves evaluating every detail including knowing the products and any close substitutes and compliments. It also involves knowing how an action or other external force will affect demand. This is called price elasticity; Substitutes are products that can replace any given product or service. An example of this would be Coke and Pepsi. The presence of substitutes affects price elasticity because if there are other options, then any change to the price or quality of the product will cause a shift of the demand curve. O course, price is a huge reason why the demand for a product decreases or increases yet it doesn't shift the curve because of the price only. This price change will cause a domino effect that will end with the shifting of the demand curve because it will cause an increase or decrease in demand of the substitute good if the price change is either lower or higher respectively. This price change serves as a catalyst that will change people's desire to spend more money on a more expensive product and that will instead choose to buy the substitute good for cheaper or buy more of the desired product. The change in the price of actual products will not shift the demand curve yet the change of the price of substitutes will because it serves to change people's purchasing behavior. On the other hand, compliments serve to boost demand when there is a decrease in price. The use of complementary goods is dependent upon another product. An example of this would be hot dogs and buns. If the price of hotdogs decreases then, conversely, the demand for hot dog buns will increase because of this change in price. In this scenario, the decrease in price will cause a positive shift in the demand curve because of people's desire and willingness to buy more buns. This is an example of a demand shifter. There are a few other demand shifters. The shifters of the demand curve are changes in expectations, disposable income, price of substitute goods and complements, tastes and preferences, and population size and composition. Changes in income affect the demand curve because if income is lower then people tend to save any extra income instead of wasting it. Disposable income is minimized and spending is lower. This also causes people to see a perceived value of things and distinguishing between what is necessary and what is a relative luxury. The lower the income, the higher the saving and avoidance to spend. An example of this would be if someone needs to buy some medication and it is relatively expensive, that doesn't mean that someone won't buy the medication just because it is expensive. It is necessary. Other factors that contribute to spending and demand are having a price ceiling and price floor. Having a price ceiling is a limit on the price of the product this is a government-imposed idea that is meant to protect consumers from unfair pricing and other conditions that may be malicious or obscure. This affects demand because if there is a price ceiling there is a limit on profit on a unit-to-unit basis. The other factor is the price floor. This price floor was created to encourage competition and affect consumers' willingness to pay because sometimes this new price may be higher than the original price. This causes a negative impact on a product that has a less than wanted perceived value. Many factors contribute to economic prosperity and certainly do help assure that information is analyzed and implemented into an economic and business plan.