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FEW ideas in education are more controversial than vouchers---letting parents choose to educate their children wherever they wish at the taxpayer’s expense.First suggested by Milton Friedman, an economist, in 1955, the principle is compelling simple.The state pays; parents choose; schools compete; standards rise; everybody gains.
Simple, perhaps, but it has aroused predictable----and often fatal---opposition from the educational establishment.Letting parents choose where to educate their children is a silly idea; profeionals know best.Cooperation, not competition, is the way to improve education for all.Vouchers would increase inequality because children who are hardest to teach would be left behind.
But these arguments are now succumbing to sheer weight of evidence.Voucher schemes are running in several different countries without ill-effects for social cohesion; those that use a lottery to hand out vouchers offer proof that recipients get a better education than those that do not.Harry Patrinos, an education economist at the World Bank, cites a Colombian program to broaden acce to secondary schooling, known as PACES, a 1990s initiative that provided over 125,000 poor children with vouchers worth around half the cost of private secondary school.Crucially, there were more applicants than vouchers.The programme, which selected children by lottery, provided researchers with an almost perfect experiment, akin to the “pill-placebo” studies used to judge the efficacy of new medicines.The subsequent results show that the children who received vouchers were 15—20% more likely to finish secondary education, five percentage points le likely to repeat a grade, scorced a bit better on scholastic tests and were much more likely to take college entrance exams.
Vouchers programmes in several American states have been run along similar lines.Greg Forster, a statistician at the Friedman Foundation, a charity advocating universal vouchers, says there have been eight similar studies in America: seven showed statistically significant positive results but was not designed well enough to count.
The voucher pupils did better even though the sate spent le than it would have done had the children been educated in normal state schools.American voucher schemes typically offer private schools around half of what the sate would spend if the pupils stayed in public schools.The
Colombian programme did not even set out to offer better schooling than was available in the state sector; the aim was simply to raise enrollment rates as quickly and cheaply as poible.
These results are important because they strip out other influences.Home, neighborhood and natural ability all affect results more than which school a child attends.If the pupils who received vouchers differ from those who don’t----perhaps simply by coming from the sort of go-getting family that elbows its way to the front of every queue---any effect might simply be the result of any number of other factors.But aigning the vouchers randomly guarded against this risk.Opponents still argue that those who exercise choice will be the most able and committed, and by clustering themselves together in better schools they will abandon the weak and voicele to languish in rotten ones.Some cite the example of Chile, where a universal voucher scheme that allows schools to charge top-up fees seems to have improved the education of the best-off most.The strongest evidence against this criticism comes from Sweden, where parents are freer than those in almost any other country to spend as they wish the money the government allocates to educating their children.Sweeping education reforms in 1992 not only relaxed enrolment rules in
state sector, allowing students to attend schools outside their own municipality, but also let them take their state funding to private schools, including religious ones and those operating for profit.The only real restrictions imposed on private schools were that they must run their admiions on a first-come-first-served basis and promise not to charge top-up fees(most American voucher schemes impose similar conditions).
The result has been burgeoning variety and a breakneck expansion of the private sector.At the time of the reforms only around 1% of Swedish students were educated privately; now 10% are, and growth in private schooling continues unabated.
Anders Hultin of Kunskapkolan, a chain of 26 Swedish schools founded by a venture capitalist in 1999 and now running at a profit, says its schools only rarely have to invoke the
first-come-first-served rule----the chain has responded to demand by expanding so fast that parents keen to send their children to its schools usually get a place.So the private sector, by increasing the total number of places available, can ease the mad scramble for the best schools in the state sector(bureaucrats, by contrast, dislike paying for extra places in popular schools if there are vacancies in bad ones).
More evidence that choice can raise standards for all comes from Caroline Hoxby, an economist at Harvard University, who has shown that when American public schools must compete for their students with schools that accept vouchers, their performance improves.Swedish researchers say the same.It seems that those who work in state schools are just like everybody else: they do better when confronted by a bit of competition.Altruism（利他主义）, according to the text books, has two forms.One is known technically as kin selection, and familiarly as nepotism.This spreads an individual\'s genes collaterally, rather than directly, but is otherwise similar to his helping his own offspring.The second form is reciprocal altruism, or “you scratch my back and I\'ll scratch yours”.It relies on trust, and a good memory for favours given and received, but is otherwise not much different from simultaneous collaboration (such as a wolf pack hunting) in that the benefit exceeds the cost for all parties involved.Humans, however, show a third sort of altruism—one that has no obvious pay-off.This is altruism towards strangers, for example, charity.That may enhance reputation.But how does an enhanced reputation weigh in the Darwinian balance? To investigate this question, the researchers made an interesting link.At first sight, helping charities looks to be at the opposite end of the selfishne spectrum from conspicuous consumption.Yet they have something in common: both involve the profligate deployment of resources.That is characteristic of the consequences of sexual selection.An individual shows he (or she) has resources to burn—whether those are biochemical reserves, time or, in the human instance, money—by using them to make costly signals.That demonstrates underlying fitne of the sort favoured by evolution.Viewed this way, both conspicuous consumption and what the researchers call “blatant benevolence” are costly signals.And since they are behaviours rather than structures, and thus controlled by the brain, they may be part of the mating mind.Researchers divided a bunch of volunteers into two groups.Those in one were put into what the researchers hoped would be a “romantic mindset” by being shown pictures of attractive members of the opposite sex.They were each asked to write a description of a perfect date with one of these people.The unlucky members of the other group were shown pictures of buildings and told to write about the weather.The participants were then asked two things.The first was to imagine they had $5,000 in the bank.They could spend part or all of it on various luxury items such as a new car, a dinner party at a restaurant or a holiday in Europe.They were also asked what fraction of a hypothetical 60 hours of leisure time during the course of a month they would devote to volunteer work.The results were just what the researchers hoped for.In the romantically primed group, the men went wild with the Monopoly money.Conversely, the women volunteered their lives away.Those women continued, however, to be skinflints, and the men remained callously indifferent to those le fortunate than themselves.Meanwhile, in the other group there was little inclination either to profligate spending or to good works.Based on this result, it looks as though the sexes do, indeed, have different strategies for showing off.Moreover, they do not waste their resources by behaving like that all the time.Only when it counts sexually are men profligate and women helpful.（选自Economist, 08/02/2007）
Digital books start a new chapter
导读：第一代电子书并没有取得预期的成功，然而随着技术的进步，新一代电子书产品逐渐浮出水面。继苹果公司取得巨大成功，令便携电子产品风行一时后，索尼公司利用“数字墨水”技术推出新款图书阅览器，将目光瞄准电子书市场。其它电子阅读器生产商也不甘落后，纷纷推出带有各自特色的产品。本文向读者介绍了电子阅读器产品的最新动态，以及出版商、作家和消费者对这种新生事物的态度。可以想象，电子书时代已经离我们不远了。（选自 Busine Week, 2006）
Richard D.Warren, a 58-year-old lawyer in California, is halfway through Ken Follett’s novel Jackdaws.But he doesn\'t bother carrying around the book itself.Instead, he has a digital version of Follett he reads on his Palm Treo each morning as he communtes by train to San Francisco from his home in Berkeley.He’s a big fan of such digital books.Usually, there are around seven titles on his Treo, and he buys at least two new ones each month.“It is just so versatile , ” he says.“I’ve tried to convert some friends to this, but they think it’s kind of geeky.”
Geeky? For now, maybe, but not for much longer.Many experts are convinced that digital books, after plenty of false starts, are finally ready for takeoff.“Every other forms of media has gone digital---music, newspapers, movies, ”says Joni Evans, a top literary agent who just left the Willian Morris Agency to start her won company that will focus on books and technology.“We’re the only industry that hasn’t lived up to the pace of technology.A revolution is around the corner.”
What developments have won over people like Evans? Portable devices are becoming lighter and more appealing.Books are being scanned into digital form by the thousands.The most important step forward may be in “digital ink,” the technology used for displaying letters on a screen.A small company called E Ink has created a method for arranging tiny black and white capsules into words and images with an electronic charge.Because no power is used unle the reader changes the page, devices with the technology could go as long as 20 books between
battery charges.The text also looks just as sharp as ink on a printed page, since each capsule is the size and pigment of a grain of laser-jet toner.
Sony is the first major player to take advantage of the technology.This spring, it will debut the Sony Reader, which uses E Ink and closely mimics the size, weight, and feel of a book.The Reader will sell for about $ 400.Sony also will offer roughly 10,000 book titles for download from its online store, along with news stories and blog items.
Other pklayers sniff opportunity, too.At least two more companies are introducing digital readers this year.And scorces of companies, from Google to Random House Inc., are angling for other ways to profit from digital books.Chalk it up to the influence of Apple Computer Inc..With its Ipod, Apple has demonstrated that millions of people are willing to carry around digital devices with their favorite content.After music, why not novels and nonfiction? “The iPod led the way in getting people comfortable with [a similar device for books],” says Jack Romanos, CEO of Simon & Schuster Inc..“These things are not only inevitable, but a good idea.”
