We developed a zero-to-five index of the strength of accountability in 50 states based on the use of high-stakes testing to sanction and reward schools, and analyzed whether that index is related to student gains on the NAEP mathematics test in 1996–2000. The study also relates the index to changes in student retention in the 9th grade and to changes in high school completion rates over the same period. The results show that students in high-accountability states averaged significantly greater gains on the NAEP 8th-grade math test than students in states with little or no state measures to improve student performance. Furthermore, students in high-accountability states do not have significantly higher retention or lower high school completion rates.

This paper assesses the relative effectiveness and efficiency of private and public schools in Chile, where the military government implemented a national voucher plan in 1980. Non-religious voucher schools (accounting for two-thirds of primary enrollments in all private voucher schools) are marginally less effective than public schools in producing academic achievement in the fourth grade; at best, they are similarly effective. Catholic voucher schools are somewhat more effective than public schools. Nevertheless, non-religious schools are more efficient, by virtue of producing academic achievement at a lower cost. The difference is probably attributable to lower teacher wages and constraints on public school resource allocation. The relative efficiency of public and Catholic schools is similar. We tentatively conclude that the case for shifting public resources to privately run schools is mixed (although a comprehensive evaluation would require evidence not provided by this research).

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In State, Power, Socialism, Nicos Poulantzas conceptualized a state that materializes and concentrates power and displaces the class struggle from the economic to the political arena. In the past twenty years, much has changed. We argue that economic relations have been transformed by economic globalization, work reorganization, and the compression of space, time, and knowledge transmission through an information and communications revolution. Knowledge is far more central to production, and the locus of the relation between power and knowledge has moved out of the nation state that was so fundamental to Poulantzas' analysis.In his innovative last work, State, Power, Socialism, Nicos Poulantzas conceptualized a state that materializes and concentrates power and displaces the class struggle from the economic to the political arena. At the same time, Poulantzas' state is 'organically present in the generation of class powers' (Poulantzas 1978; English edition, 1980: 45). Thus, the state is neither just political nor juridical in the sense that it reproduces or enforces the legal bases of capitalist exchange. Rather, it is fundamental to the conditions under which the bourgeoisie can accumulate and control capital, displacing struggle and conflict to the political from the economic sphere.Poulantzas' brilliant analysis of late capitalism identifies the state as both the crystallization and locus of class struggle. On the one hand, in the Gramscian tradition, this is a struggle dominated by the unequal power of the bourgeoisie over the division of knowledge, over the organization of production, over the juridical apparatuses of the state, and over the definition of space and time where the nation state presides -a definition that unifies segmented, separated, individualized, and isolated workers. The state reintegrates separated and individualized workers into the people-nation under a set of institutions that homogenize and normalize them, differentiating them under a new set of rules, norms, values, history, tradition, language, and concepts of knowledge that emanate from the dominant class and its fractions. On the other hand -and this is Poulantzas' particular contribution to theories of the state -this integration takes place in the context of class struggle, and all the institutions of society, including the state, are the product of that struggle. The capitalist state provides the framework for struggles among fractions of the dominant class, integrates the working class into a nation and a unifying set of rules and institutions. But at the same time, the state provides the political space for class struggle, and sojust as the capitalist state emerged from a struggle -the state becomes shaped by class struggle. The state is key to the reintegration of workers (and bourgeoisie) into a

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This paper reviews the various elements that enter into the relation between higher education expansion and income distribution. Contrary to the prevailing ideology, the paper suggests that under certain conditions the mass expansion of higher education can contribute to greater income inequality. These conditions are related to three important variables not usually considered in the education-income distribution model: rising returns to university education relative to secondary and primary education, decreasing public spending differences between higher and lower levels of education, and increasing spending differences between elite and mass universities. All three appear to be increasingly common features of educational expansion in developing countries, including large ones such as China, Russia, Brazil, and India, although researchers are just beginning to observe such changing patterns of spending within higher education systems. The paper discusses the role that such payoffs and government education spending patterns can play in contributing to changes in income distribution using suggestive data from the developing countries.