education-industry

One of a three-volume set, (the others are "The Chemistry of Food Dyes" and "The Chemistry of Vat Dyes") this is an excellent reference volume for novice dyers, students of chemistry, and experienced textile artists alike. It is structured as a handbook for guiding students through classroom exercizes to develop their understanding of the physiochemical properties of dyes for woolen fibers. The editor, an award-winning high-school chemistry professor, has an easy-going manner and knowledgable style that encourage confidence in this challenging subject among lay readers.

This book was a required textbook in one of my sport management major classes - it's the only one so far that I've bothered to keep. The information is timely and easy to reference.

If you ever wanted to get a greater appreciation of decision support by fuzzy sets and operations research, then you'll probably really enjoy Hans-Jürgen Zimmermann's key selected papers edited by Da Ruan and Chongfu Huang. I was totally in awe of his knowledge, most of which I'm sure did not come just through research.

Stephen McGinty's survey of the editors of journals provides important insights into this aspect of scholarship. The book is relatively slim, but there are many places where it pays to stop and ponder the implications of the preceding pages. Insights are frequent, the writing is quite clear and spare, and while the interviews could have been edited, the verbatims are interesting even when a bit meandering. An excellent book for people in the field.

Based upon a December 2000 conference sponsored by the Laboratory of School Success in Washington D.C., this edited volume offers 10 different papers on the economics of education productivity. The conference, and the commissioned papers that resulted from it, set out to bridge the communication divide that often exists between educators, policy practitioners, and even academics in the traditional field of education, and the new generation of economists that have devoted their research careers to studying the production of education. Authors were specifically directed to write in a manner that would convey important economic findings on education productivity at a level that would be useful for crafting real world policies on the issue. Most of the articles are summaries of the literature in a specific subfield of the economics of education productivity. After reading the volume, I am pleased to proclaim that the vast majority of the articles contained within it have achieved the laudable goal of producing an accessible summary that offers many "nuggets" of policy and administrative relevance. I highlight these nuggets in the following review.
The first three chapters (or papers) in this volume examine external influences on the production of primary and secondary education. The next four chapters single out an internal factor that exerts a principal influence on the production of K-12 education in the United States. The remaining three chapters offer an understanding of how economists think about education production functions.
The external influences on K-12 education production in the United States covered in this volume include state and local limitations on taxes to support public schools, the effect of litigation on the use of state revenues to support public schools, and the impact that private school competition has had on the production of public education. Thomas Downes and David Figlio conclude that just reducing the amount of revenue available to public schools does little to reduce waste in the production of education and may have the opposite effect. As an example, teacher's unions usually respond by cutting starting salaries, but rarely reduce the salaries of experienced teachers. Sheila Murray summarizes the impact of three decades of attempting to achieve funding equity in America's public schools and proclaims these attempts successful. She notes that student achievement in previously high-spending districts has not been greatly harmed by this redistribution. Dan Goldhaber offers a straightforward summary of the theory and evidence previously generated by economists on the impact of the availability of private school alternatives to the production of public education. Regretfully, he concludes that this previous research does not offer enough information to fully determine the likely consequences of the United States implementing a widespread policy of allowing vouchers.
The internal factors, covered in this volume, that affect school productivity include grade-retention policies, teacher resources, and site specific ways of measuring productivity and resource allocation. Eric Eide suggests that the decision to promote or retain a student would be better made if both parents and educators were forced to bear the full benefits and costs their decisions. Susanna Loeb offers evidence on the sizable degree that public schools differ in the average characteristics of their teachers and how these differences are related to the fact that "quality" teachers prefer schools with students of high socio-economic backgrounds. To overcome this, and the result that high socio-economic students receive higher quality educations, she suggests higher salaries and other perks to attract quality teachers to schools with low socio-economic students. Amy Schwart and Leanna Stiefel summarize the various ways in which economists measure the efficacy of K-12 school production and offers suggestions to policymakers such that school level data is preferred to district level and that multiple measures are favored to a single measure. While Ross Rubenstein and Patrice Latarola use data from the New York public schools to conclude, perhaps because of limited flexibility in allocation decisions, that expenditures on specific items at a school site tend to be very similar across school sites - even the high and low performing - in this district.
The last three papers in this volume deal with the broad issue of whether money matters to the production of quality K-12 education. Corrine Taylor provides a highly readable summary of reasons for the opposite sides taken on this issue. Using her own data, she offers convincing evidence that school resources do matter. Samid Hussain continues this important discussion by offering original research that finds that money matters more too low-performing schools and suggests that policymakers design interventions that keep this in mind. Finally, Jens Ludwig offers a summary of the statistical techniques that researchers need to employ to overcome the self-selection problem of children with strong family backgrounds choosing high-spending schools and thus making it difficult to determine that money does matter to quality education production.
Of most relevance to overcoming the divide that exists between education economists and education practitioners is the concluding chapter. In this chapter the editors summarize the interdisciplinary discussions that occurred after each paper was presented. After readings these summaries it is easy to conclude that the work of education economists has had an impact. From their recorded comments, practitioners believe that accountability in education production is important and that markets need to weigh more heavily in education resource allocation. But these same practitioners stress that in order for economists to maximize their contributions toward current federal, state, and local efforts to improve public school production, they must integrate their economic theories and statistical tests into a more holistic approach that includes what sister social sciences like anthropology, sociology, psychology, and political science have to offer. Volumes like this one, and the conference it was drawn from, are the steps necessary to achieve this goal.

Robert W. Wassmer
California State University
Sacramento, CA 95819-6081, USA

E-mail address: rwassme@csus.edu

I'm serious. Do NOT buy this book. The positive reviews on this page must be for some other book. I just read this book (took me about 20 minutes). It is a skinny, flimsy, 'See Jane Run' book with no serious content. I have a very real problem - a hospital bill, and I wasn't insured. Hospitals price gouge the uninsured, especially if they are middle class. They expect higher payments from uninsured patients then they get from insured patients or patients with Medicare. I am busy educating myself on my bill with the help of friends who work in the medical industry. I thought this book would be useful in my education, it is not. It's just an additional waste of money. The font in this book must be 14 point (very large), and everything they have to say was either common sense, or simply not useful. I need industry-specific knowledge to better arm myself to fight/negotiate my real medical bill. This book did not offer that. With my level of medical knowledge (an average individual) plus a tiny bit of research, I could have written this book. I don't always write book reviews, but this book really steamed me because I felt simply publishing this book was an insult to everyone's intelligence. Don't buy it online - if you think you need this book, please walk into a book store and flip through it - you'll see instantly it's a waste of your time.

An "Insiders Guide to Understanding Your Hospital Bill" ought to be on your bookshelf if you sincerely want to reduce your hospital bill. You may not need it now, but odds are you or a family member will need it in the future. It's easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to use. The authors know their business. In fact, the title of the book IS their business. The easy-to-read, non-technical style makes the book work for anybody who wants to have some control over their own hospital costs. If I sold medical insurance, I'd see that every policyholder had a copy of this book. If I administered a hospital, I'd give one to every single patient who came there. At last somebody has given us a weapon with which we can fight high medical costs. It's terrific!

This book warns you to check your hospital bill because it often contains billing errors -- and, since most of us have to pay something (after the insurance pays), it's good to know where to look for the errors to save money! The book is filled with detailed examples and suggests you keep a diary of your hospital stay so you can compare your entries to the final bill. Some are human errors, but most are not -- and this book lists the common areas where hospitals overcharge. More importantly, Chapter 6 tells you how to go about getting the hospital to correct your bill. And, if you don't want to do it yourself (or are too ill to do it yourself), the authors will (for a small fee). Overall, this is an excellent "How to..." book that gives you the option of letting the authors help you... when was the last time you had an author use their expertise for you? Most "How to..." books tell you what to do, but leave you hanging when you get in trouble. Not these authors!

The frist chapters are good backround infromation. The recipes are done in metric, and are well written as to the steps to make the products. With some knowlage of baking you can do these here in America. Some of the recipes are for very ruial areas of the world, ie: use cow-dung for the fire to bake one of the breads. Over all good info for setting up a bakery.

I was looking for references to start my own bakery and this was one of the books that came up in my search. For someone like me who never went to a culinary school where food management is taught extensively, I thought that Mr Bathie answered some of my very basic questions of lay out and process management. It's a highly instructive book for someone, like me, who has no professional background in baking. The writing is clear and concise and layman languange is used extensively through out the book. As Mr Bathie was a consultant for most of Asia and African countries, he laid to rest some of my uncertainty of the operations of a bakery. The book includes some basic layout configurations of certain types of bakery and also explains briefly uses of machineries for semi or fully automated bakeries. I find the book very enlightening and I recommend it for those who has no background in baking for profit as a point of reference.

It's a shame that Amazon.com doesn't have the "look inside" feature for this book, because it doesn't just "[include] tips on writing resumes, filling out applications, interviewing, and keeping a job," over ONE HUNDRED PAGES are devoted to this! And it's not even horse-industry-specific information, it's the same stuff you could find in any job-seeking guidebook. There are 71 horse-related careers that get a single-page outline each. Might be useful for someone who has absolutely no knowledge of the horse industry, or someone looking for a general job-hunting guide with a little horsey info at the end, but that's about it.

It's too bad amazon doesn't have the "look inside" option for this book. It doesn't just "[include] tips on writing resumes, filling out applications, interviewing, and keeping a job," over ONE HUNDRED PAGES are devoted to this. And it's all very generic info that you could find in any "how to get and keep a job" book. Then there are 70 pages outlining 71 careers - that's right, ONE PAGE devoted to each. Could be useful if you really have no idea what's involved in working with horses, but otherwise not worth the $.

The Career Guide to the Horse Industry is an excellent reference for anyone interested in a career with horses. It is easy to understand and is loaded with helpful hints in securing a career within the horse industry. Its not cluttered with pictures or sucess stories as is other books.
Each chapter deals with a specific topic in a job-search within the horse industry.

This book was an extreme disappoointment. What other reviews call 'facts' are mostly just anecdotes from England's experience. I guess what really bothers me about this book is that although she understands and is passionate about education, she knows little to nothing about business. Her examples of 'corporations' and 'big business' only reveal that fact. She doesn't even acknowledge the existence of the difference between 'product-based' business and 'service-based' business, two sectors most kids do learn about in grade school. The difference between the two offer great insights into what the organizations in education and business may be able to learn from each other. I am sure there is a great, fact-based argument on why business models do not work well in education, but it IS NOT found in this book. She is lucky to get one star.

At the conclusion of this trim read I kept wondering, "Did the editor forget to submit the final section to the printer?"

Well researched and carefully documented throughout, the whiny-ness and "Woe is me" tone has got to go. It makes England sound worse than the government officials she is complaining about in the first plce. Ms. England writes with tons of metaphor which sometimes gets to be too much.

She writes that businesses want to hire folks who have a high level of emotional intelligence and "workers who interact cooperatively with others and are able to solve problems" and then the reader is left flapping around in the next chapter which arrives way too early, like a guest who read the invitation wrong.

The last chapter on "Forced Electives" left me puzzled... I kept wanting to say "And what was your intent in publishing this unfinished book?"

I do appreciate finding the website www.kidsource.com from the book. Now that you know it from my review, wait for the next edition of this book to appear.

This has the foundations of a really good book... if only it wasn't only half way finished....

England's "None of Our Business Why Business Model Don't Work in Schools" addresses the business model being use the schools such as the Standardize Test. She scrutinizes issues of expectations, marketing, standards, audience, assessment, and legislations role in the educational reform. England addresses these issues by opening the question of "Is education an art or and industry?" She goes on to say that it is not to say that standardize test is not the key to the children success but we as educators and none educators should look into other factors that may be affect the child's live too. She draws attention to idea of teachers focusing on creativity and individuality in addition to the test scores. Educators should read this book, whether they agree with the writer or not. This book will open your mind in questioning whether or not the business model really works.

This book proposes to be an 'learning' tour de force, however i was disatisfied with its intellectual nous. I found the full volume, a collection of tired and hackneyed cliches, the example tests are unfulfilling and frankly at points, patronising. This author simply exploits common consultancy buzzwords. This appears to be a book in a time warp. All in all, this is a very ordinary publication. My advice is steer well clear of this and any other 'enpowerment' authors.

I'm a senior partner in a successful consulting firm and so naturally I have read many books about knowledge management and empowerment etc. This book was recommended to me by an ex-colleague and so I tracked a copy down for myself. It seemed to me that the content of the book was mainly promo material for the author. I didn't feel that he was working with me and my business so much as trying to sell me something. The author goes to great lengths to tell the reader that this is not some sort of training manual. This is, however, some sort of training manual. You could say it is the wool that has been pulled over the eyes of middle management but this would probably be too punishing a metaphor to be fair. The book serves little practical purpose but escapes just one star by being enthusiastically written. The author seems to believe his own hype and this at least affords the book a sense of energy and momentum which is so important in business. In summary, there are far superior texts available but I'll leave you to discover these for yourself!

The Power of Learning is a practical book written with implementation in mind. It's full of insightful ideas that can be immediately appropriated and put into practice by immaginative readers. Useful for anyone looking for inputs to make training and education really work in organizational settings. It could point to some more "academic references" for people interested in furthering their research.