Richard D. Bingham

The Industrial Composition of Edge Cities and Downtowns: The New Urban Reality

This article reports on research examining the industrial composition of edge cities in Ohio and their downtowns. Using the definition of edge cities devised by Joel Garreau, the authors identified 26 edge cities and near-edge cities in Ohio. The research finds that Ohio edge cities are far more economically diverse places than was hypothesized, that they tend to be highly specialized in terms of their industrial structures, and that they do not resemble the downtowns that they surround. The authors hold that edge cities have replaced a segment of downtowns, which are now only one component of specialized regional economic landscapes.

Poverty and Economic Morphology of Ohio Central-City Neighborhoods

The authors examine the relationship between poverty and economic activities in 24 selected industries in more than 100 neighborhoods in Ohio central cities. As expected, local economies deteriorated as poverty levels increased. However, the economic deterioration began much earlier, and was much more serious, than has been suggested in earlier ghetto studies. Furthermore, the decline in neighborhood jobs associated with the economic deterioration was massive. If neighborhood jobs are seen as a road to economic and social recovery for ghetto residents, the findings are very bleak indeed.

Beyond Edge Cities: Job Decentralization and Urban Sprawl

The issues related to the suburbanization of population and the reshaping of the economic landscape in metropolitan areas have drawn much attention during past decades. These issues are important to planning and policy makers because public services, infrastructure provision, tax bases, and housing and land markets are linked to the urban landscape of population and economic activity. The authors analyze the relationship between population and employment changes in the spatial context and the impact of edge cities on residential location choice. They conclude that emerging edge cities push population further out and that the effect of edge cities diminishes if edge cities are located further away from the inner city.

Evaluating Schools and Teachers Based On Student Performance Testing an Alternative Methodology

As urban school systems continue to fail large segments of the school-age population, there has been an increasing concern with accountability. A major question has been: Can teachers be held accountable for the academic achievement of students? This article describes an empirical test of a method of evaluating schools and teachers based on the performance of students on standardized achievement tests. The research indicates that teachers can be evaluated using this method of predicting student performance and comparing it with actual outcomes.

Dual Standards among Teachers: This School Is Good Enough for Other Kids but Not My Child.

Some teachers would not send their children to the schools in which they taught because of school quality, school discipline, school desegregation.

Explaining Teacher/Principal Differences in Evaluating Schools

Explores the question of why principals rate their schools more highly than do their own teachers. Following the work of others, showing that disagreements between teachers and principals stem mainly from disagreements on discipline, reports on results which show that views on disciplinary policy are the only factor which is strong enough to overcome the somewhat biased grading by principals. Concludes that, if a principal wants higher teacher morale and higher grading of their school, efforts must be made to develop greater congruence between teacher and principal expectations and actions on discipline.

Metropolitan Employment Growth and Neighborhood Job Access in Spatial and Skills Perspectives Empirical Evidence from Seven Ohio Metropolitan Regions

The spatial mismatch hypothesis is representative research concerning the intrametropolitan spatial distribution of employment growth and its impact on central-city-confined low-skilled workers. The authors examine the determinants of neighborhood job access and intrametropolitan differences in five industry cohorts, classified by average earnings of workers. They further compare change of job access between 1990 and 1996 across intrametropolitan spatial divisions. Empirical evidence in support of the spatial mismatch hypothesis is found only in the central county context: labor-force-weighted low-wage job access in central-city neighborhoods was, on average, lower than in inner-suburban neighborhoods but greater than in outer-suburban neighborhoods.

Determinants of Parent Attitudes about Schools and the School System

Parents judge the school their child attends by one set of standards, the school system by another.

Another View From the Bridge

can only be considered a service to the readers of this review. Surely if each published work received such a response, the end result would be both stronger research and better policy prescriptions. Yet having quickly granted this, there is a sense in which the onslaught of statistical concerns (of which we will say more later) clouds sight of the framework in which we began our inquiry. That framework is one given by the policy concerns existent in education today, one in which there is a greater call for the giving and using of test scores and one in which these scores are seen as a tool for improving the accountability of teachers and schools. One might see the response of Figueredo et al. as a fundamental attack on this framework. They disagree that standardized tests should be given or,