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On the Friday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Washington Post global opinions editor Karen Attiah will speak with Mayor Steven L. Reed, Montgomery, Ala., and Mayor Randall Woodfin, Birmingham, Ala. Their cities were central battlegrounds in the civil rights era. Reed and Woodfin are part of a new wave of Black mayors elected in Southern Black cities in the past decade. Tune in Friday, Jan. 15 at 11:00 a.m. ET, for a conversation about the arc of history and where we are today.

President Trump listed a slew of misleading economic statistics during his annual State of the Union address on Feb. 5.

How do national high-stakes exams affect educational expansion across the world? High-stakes exams are conventionally viewed as systems of exclusion that constrain enrollments. In this paper, we situate exams within a broader historical and institutional context and argue that the constraining effect of exams on educational enrollments is a recent phenomenon. Exam systems diffused globally at a time when schooling was a limited enterprise, linked to just a few occupational roles. The later emergence of more inclusive visions of education, culminating in the Education for All (EFA) movement, propelled rapid global educational expansion. In this context, national high-stakes exam systems institutionalize earlier logics of selective education and consequently blunt the impact of more recent expansionary norms. Using panel regression models and a newly constructed dataset of 142 countries from 1960 to 2010, we show that high-stakes exams are associated with lower enrollments. However, this association is strongest in recent years, and exams interact negatively with measures of international pro-educational norms and pressures on nation-states. These findings are consistent with our historical/institutional argument: Exams constrain enrollments in recent years, in part by rendering nations less responsive to global expansionary pressures.

How do educational systems prepare workers for the labor market? Stratification research has often made a distinction between two ideal-types: “qualificational spaces,” exemplified by Germany with a focus on vocational education, and “organizational spaces,” exemplified by France with a focus on general education. However, most studies that investigated this distinction did so by focusing only on the size of the vocational sector, not on whether graduates with a vocational degree actually link strongly to the labor market. Moreover, they often studied male workers only, ignoring potential gender differences in how school-to-work linkages are established. In this paper, we map the change in education–occupation linkage in France and Germany between 1970 and 2010 using an approach that can distinguish between changes in rates and changes in the structure of school-to-work linkages. Surprisingly, we find that the German vocational system in 1970 was not, on average, substantially more efficient in allocating graduates to specific occupations than the French system. This finding is a major departure from earlier results, and it shows that the differences between 1970’s France and Germany, on which the qualificational-organizational distinction is based, are smaller than previously assumed. Partly, this is due to the fact that the female labor force was omitted from earlier analyses. We thus show that ignoring the female workforce has consequences for today’s conception of skill formation systems, particularly because a large share of educational expansion is caused by an increase in female enrollment in (higher) education.

El presente artículo trata de ilustrar el concepto de ciudad entendido como espacio de significación implícito en las primeras propuestas teóricas urbanas de Juan Navarro Baldeweg al comienzo de su trayectoria, poniendo de manifiesto la relevancia de un nuevo modo intervención sobre la ciudad, alejada de metodologías de carácter formalista o funcionalista, que darían lugar a intervenciones menos legibles, pero que trataban de transcender al medio físico y dotar a un entorno urbano de cierta identidad y significación. En estas propuestas plantearía, en primer lugar, la incorporación al medio urbano de un sistema de símbolos o imágenes lo suficientemente variado como para representar en tiempo real procesos que podían tener lugar en el ámbito social. En segundo lugar, la generación de una estructura que permitía la participación voluntaria de los miembros de la comunidad en la conformación del espacio urbano. En tercer lugar, el desarrollo de sistemas artificiales autónomos que incorporaban procesos de retroalimentación, haciendo visibles a través de medios tecnológicos las relaciones entre la realidad física con la que se operaba y los símbolos que la dotaban de significación. Y por último, la superación de concepciones preestablecidas en las metodologías de intervención urbana a través de la apertura a una nueva semántica variada, dinámica y de carácter efímero.PALABRAS CLAVE: Navarro Baldeweg, ciudad, urbanismo, medio ambiente, comunicación e información.The present article tries to illustrate the concept of the city understood as a significant environment implicit in Juan Navarro Baldeweg’s first theoretical urban proposals developed during the first years of his professional career. It reveals the importance of a new way to intervene on the city far away from formal or functional methodologies that uses less legible interventions to go beyond the physical reality providing the urban environment of certain identity and significance. In all these proposals, first of all, he proposes adding the urban environment a system of symbols or images sufficiently varied to represent real time processes that could take place in the society. Secondly, the creation of a structure that allows the voluntary participation of the members of the community in the conformation of the urban space. Thirdly, the development of autonomous artificial systems that incorporates feedback, making visible through technology the relationships between the physical reality and the symbols that provides it with significance. And finally, the overcoming of pre-established conceptions in methodologies of urban intervention through the opening of a new, dynamic and ephemeral semantic.KEYWORDS: Navarro Baldeweg, city, urbanism, environment, communication and information