Breaking Down Barriers: An Evaluation of Parent Engagement In School Closures and Co-Locations

The Department of Education's ("Department") decisions to close or co-locate schools frequently involves the loss of critical space and programs, which can have serious impacts on students' education. Historically, in making these decisions the Department has a poor track record of soliciting and incorporating parental and community input. Despite new parental engagement procedures added to the law in 2009 to facilitate greater parental consultation in major school change decisions, this year's story does not seem to be markedly different. The Department treated these hearings as procedural hurdles in order to satisfy the letter of the law, rather than an opportunity to engage in a productive dialogue about the impacts of proposed school closures and co-locations on students and what is in the best interests of affected students. By examining the New York State Education Law, Educational Impact Statements (EIS), transcripts from public hearings, and by conducting a parent survey of 873 parents at 34 schools affected by co-locations, the report concludes that the Department's parental engagement process provided insufficient information and left too many questions unanswered questions about how students and the school community will be affected by these major school decisions. The report's key finding is that the EIS -- the official document assessing the impact that a proposed change will have on school services -- does not provide adequate information for members of the school community to understand and comment about how students will be affected by these decisions. This finding is consistent with the courts' recent decision that the school closure process is flawed. Further, if not well-planned and coordinated, closures and co-locations can disrupt students' education and decrease their access to school facilities such as classrooms, gymnasiums and cafeterias

Passeurs: Narratives of Border Crossing in the Western Alps

This article focuses on representations of passeurs: migrant smugglers across the French-Italian and Swiss-Italian borders. I analyze a heterogeneous corpus of novels, films, and essays published between 1990-2017 that refer to different waves of migration, from World War II to the contemporary migration crisis. I argue that these texts complicate and help question the current criminalization of migrant smugglers most often found in the media and political discourses. In particular, I claim that these discourses confuse or dismiss migrants’ experience of border crossing, as they neglect important ethical and legal differences between smuggling and trafficking, humanitarian actors and professional smugglers. The texts I analyze insist on these nuances, enriching our understanding of the human stakes of “illegal” migrations. Through the analysis of literature and film, I present figures of migrant smugglers who have operated illegally to facilitate migrants, but who must not be confused with human traffickers. For example, in his bio-fiction Il vuoto alle spalle (1999), journalist Marco A. Ferrari gives an uplifting, idealized portrayal of Ettore Castiglioni, an Anti-Fascist Alpinist active during World War II, who smuggled Italian Jews and political opponents to the Fascist regime to Switzerland, including the second President of the Italian Republic, Luigi Einaudi. Francesco Biamonti, who lived at the French-Italian border and was a prolific novelist in the 1980s and 1990s, insists on the professionalism of smugglers who have been traditionally present in the Western Alps. In particular, Biamonti stresses that good passeurs are those who never put the life of their clients (migrants) at risk. Novels such as Vento largo (1991) and Le parole la notte (1994) not only point at the negative effects of globalization in Liguria (Italy), but also lament Europeans’ lack of attention to and understanding of increasing migratory flows, well before the media started talking about a migrant “crisis.” Lastly, I present the work of journalists who occasionally performed the role of “humanitarian smugglers” and later reported their experience in written or cinematic form: Io sto con la sposa, by Gabriele del Grande, Khaled Soliman Al Nassiry, and Antonio Augugliaro (2014); Passeur, by Raphaël Krafft (2017). These works express the authors’ need to reconnect with the professional and anti-Fascist tradition of passeurs in the Western Alps, at a time when there is no alternative to “illegal” border crossing for too many migrants. 

Production or consumption? Disentangling the skill-agglomeration connection

To explain the concentration of human capital in cities, urban theory conjectures that the metropolitan scale provides two sources of returns for the more educated; production benefits, both in terms of wages and non-monetary gains, and consumption benefits. By exploiting a unique survey on Italian workers that records information for the two sources of returns, this paper quantifies their respective roles. The findings show that skilled workers enjoy higher consumption amenities in larger cities. They benefit from the local public goods, such as transportation, health and schooling services, the shopping possibilities, and the cultural consumption potentials made possible by the urban location of cinemas, theaters, and museums. On the other hand, the more educated do not receive benefits on the production side. Their wages do not reflect a premium, and the returns to education and experience are not higher than elsewhere. Moreover, urban skilled workers do not change jobs more readily than elsewhere and do not appear to be more satisfied of their jobs. The estimates imply that in the largest metropolitan areas the value of the consumption amenities can be as high as 50% of the rents or 16-17% of the wages.cities, human capital

Does the Internet Kill the Distance? Evidence From Navigation, E-Commerce, and E-Banking.

By diminishing the cost of performing isolated economic activities in isolated areas, information technology might serve as a substitute for urban agglomeration. This paper assesses this hypothesis by using Italian household level data on internet navigation, e-commerce, and e-banking. Empirically, I find no support for the argument that the internet reduces the role of distance. My results suggest that: (1) Internet navigation is more frequent for urban consumers than their non-urban counterparts. (2) The use of e-commerce is basically not affected by the size of the city where the household lives. Remote consumers are discouraged by the fact that they cannot see the goods before buying them. Leisure activities and cultural items are the only goods and services for which e-commerce is used more intensively in isolated areas. (3) E-banking bears no relationship with city size. In choosing a bank, non-urban customers evaluate personal acquaintances as an important factor more intensively than urban clients. This also depends on the fact that banking account holders in remote areas are more frequently supplied with a loan by their bank.

Electoral rules and voter turnout

The paper investigates the effect of electoral rules on voter turnout. It focuses on Italian municipalities, where voting schemes are differentiated by the size of the city: a single ballot system applies to municipalities with less than 15,000 inhabitants, while a dual ballot system is in place above that threshold. By exploiting this discontinuity, the paper finds that the dual ballot increases participation at the local polls, with an estimated effect of about 1 percentage point. The increase in voter turnout is associated with wider political representation, politicians of higher quality, greater fiscal discipline, and more robust local development. Finally, we document that the higher political participation triggered by local electoral rules extends to nationwide voting contexts.voter turnout, electoral systems, regression discontinuity design

Local electoral rules and political participation

The paper investigates the effect of local electoral rules on the political participation of the residents, as reflected in voter turnout. It focuses on Italy, where municipal voting schemes are differentiated by the size of the city: a single ballot system applies to municipalities with less than 15,000 inhabitants, while a dual ballot system is in place above that threshold. By exploiting this discontinuity, the paper finds that the dual ballot increases political participation. The magnitude of the effect is estimated at between 1 and 3 percentage points.

The Legacy of History for Economic Development: The Case of Putnam's Social Capital

Putnam (1993) argues that (i) center-northern Italy has developed faster than southern Italy because the former was better endowed with social capital; and (ii) that the endowments of social capital across Italian territories have been highly persistent over centuries. This paper provides an empirical investigation of PutnamÂ’s case. To evaluate the relevance of social capital, we present a test based on worker productivity, entrepreneurship, and female labor market participation. Using as instruments regional differences in civic involvement in the late ninetieth century and local systems of government in the middle age, we show that social capital does have economic effects.Social Capital, Economic Development