Aging effects in public policy making

Abstract

Administrations in public education can do little besides struggle to balance the number of needed and available teachers. Conventional student-teacher ratios perpetuate trends and are unfit for policy making. Besides lacking a suitable alternative, the Portuguese government was concerned that declining birth rates might make tenured teachers redundant over time. Their hiring policies became gradually more conservative and less transparent, and grievances escalated. An SD model provided rigorous estimates for the number of public grade and secondary teachers needed in each Portuguese school district, per teaching group (science, English, etc.). The model combined a structure of three goal-seeking aging chain arrays. Its results were used to quantify and allocate tenured teacher vacancies in 2015. The model showed that redundancy concerns were unfounded and hiring for all vacancies was justifiable in the future. These results might have been difficult to anticipate by human decision makers because of the delays involved.

Environment, Business, and Health Care Prevail: A Comprehensive, Systematic Review of System Dynamics Application Domains

“…Inducement of interest among academic staff members is crucial as well. Mendes and Aleluia [194] focused on aging in public policy making. SFD captured age groups of teachers and the flow of students.…”

Demand smoothing response by street‐level bureaucrats (SLB) in delivering public services during COVID‐19 scenario: A system dynamics modeling study

“…In the end, we could only pinpoint the following papers as relevant for our purpose. Forliano et al (2020) examined the credit collection process in Italian local government-owned enterprise, while Mendes and Aleluia (2019) looked the Portuguese school district to unpack the concerns regarding redundancy and hiring for all vacancies. Through group model-building, an extension of SD modeling, (Rouwette et al, 2014) investigated the quality of public policy interventions to allay increased public nuisance, bullying, and criminal activities in one of the outskirts of a Dutch city.…”

Using System Dynamics Approach to Development of Enrollment Policies in Higher Education: A Case of Teacher Education Faculties in Croatia

“…Therefore, there is a need for better understanding of elements of the system, modelling and experimenting in safe environment without making mistakes which will downgrade educational system for years. The application of mathematical modeling in educational system is present in many countries, such as modelling human resources in Portugal schools [6], modelling population of students, staff, and investments in a private university in Syria [7], etc.…”