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Publications
Mendes, J.P. and Aleluia, M. (2019), “Aging Effects in Public Policy Making”, System Dynamics Review, Vol. 35(3), pp. 232-254
Administrations in public education can do little besides struggle to balance the number ofneeded and available teachers. Conventional student–teacher ratios perpetuate trends and areunfit for policy making. Besides lacking a suitable alternative, the Portuguese government wasconcerned that declining birth rates might make tenured teachers redundant over time. Theirhiring policies became gradually more conservative and less transparent, and grievances esca-lated. An SD model provided rigorous estimates for the number of public grade and secondaryteachers 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 usedto quantify and allocate tenured teacher vacancies in 2015. The model showed that redundancyconcerns were unfounded and hiring for all vacancies was justifiable in the future. These resultsmight have been difficult to anticipate by human decision makers because of the delaysinvolved.
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