Ready Educators Quality Improvement Pilot: Linking Program Improvement to Child Outcomes

This report is an evaluation of the first year of the Ready Educators Quality Improvement Pilot (REQIP), part of Thrive in 5's city-wide Ready Educators strategy. The pilot provided technical assistance and support to early education and care programs in centers and family child care homes that serve children from birth to age five. The REQIP theory of change posits that, to meet the goal of improved child outcomes, programs need to build "sustainable independent capacity to operationalize a continuous quality improvement process (CQI)." As the Pilot was envisioned, CQI involved the development of a Program Improvement Plan (PIP) through an assessment based on child-level and program data and with support from a Quality Improvement Partner (QIP). The PIP would then serve as the basis for technical assistance to meet the goals of the PIP, followed by a re-assessment using program and childlevel data. This CQI process would be sustained over time, in an ongoing continuous loop. In July 2013, after a competitive RFP process and with funding from the Barr Foundation, Thrive in 5 selected Wellesley Centers for Women to serve as the QIP

Escaping the frameworks: Arguments for CPD as a practice-led break-out from normative occupational standards in health and social care

The newly introduced CPD structures of post-registration training and learning requirements for registered social workers are already under review to examine whether they are ‘fit for purpose’. Quite what ‘fit’ might mean is no clearer than what the ‘purpose’ of CPD should be in the fast changing world of health and social care services. The theoretical arguments that I will advance in this paper set out to problematise some of the current conceptions of social work CPD. I will maintain that the continuing professional development and education of social workers requires a more fundamental analysis in order that ‘people and practices’ can be prioritised. This paper will draw upon social theory and psychological constructivist perspectives with arguments being illustrated through reference to policy documents in this field as well as a small empirical study of post-qualification CPD students carried out by the author

Charter School Replication: Growing a Quality Charter School Sector

NACSA's Policy Guide series is intended to support state legislatures and charter school advocates in creating policy environments that result in high quality authorizing and high quality schools. This guide outlines key considerations for policymakers committed to supporting the replication of existing successful charter school models

Truth and Lives: Beneath Our Skin

“Art can be fundamental to our collective understanding of who we are, what we believe, and how we relate to each other and our surroundings. Artists can weave the cultural fabric necessary for a sustainable, vibrant society.” (Surdna Foundation, 2016). With this in mind, I’ve sought to create a project aimed at generating insight, compassion and critical dialogue around the common threads of body diversity. Through a practice of relationship building with individuals from diverse and marginalized intersections of society, I’ve begun adapting stories, shared by participants, about how they live and thrive (or not) in their bodies. Adaptations are in both visual art format (2D and 3D) and digital catching of the creative process. The stories are then released in video format on the project website www.beneathourskin.org. The catch and release format of this process is aimed at broadening audience impact to create change in how culturally we view and treat our own bodies and the bodies of others. I’ve also engaged in a reflective process around personal impact and assessment with participants to gauge impact and change over time. My intent is to continue this work, growing it to a sustainable program with the potential to impact change for participants within themselves, their relationships and their community. Through participation, contribution and reflections upon seeing their own stories through a new publicly shared lens participants will experience personal change, while their stories help lift perceptions of body diversity into a new light exposing where ongoing societal change is needed

The Design of Free-Market Economies in a Post-Neoclassical World

The ‘Washington Consensus’ supporting competitive frames and market solutions in economics and law was shown inadequate to address social problems in non-U.S. settings. So would diversity and dynamics suggest theories in need of adjustment to other realities such as culture, increasing returns and market power. Reform must account for an economics of falling cost, ecological limits and complementarity in our relations. Such shall open new applications for economics and law. In this paper a theory of planning horizons is introduced and then employed to raise some meaningful questions about the neoclassical view with respect to its substitution, decreasing returns and independence assumptions. Suppositions of complementarity, increasing returns and interdependence suggest that competition is inefficient by upholding a myopic culture resistant to change. Growth – though long believed to rise from markets and competitive values – may not derive from these sources. Instead, as civilizations advance, shifting from material wants to higher-order intangible output, they evolve from market tradeoffs (substitution and scarcity) into realms of common need (complementarity and abundance). If so, then neoclassical arguments shall no longer apply to any advanced information economy also restrained by its ecology. Indeed, this paper opens standard theory into a more general framework constructing ‘horizon effects’ into a case for cooperation – as more efficient than competition for all long-term problems of growth. The case is made that competition is keeping us stupid and immature, rewarding a myopic culture at the expense of learning and trust, therefore retarding economic growth instead of encouraging it as believed. The policy implications of horizonal theory are explored, with respect to regulatory aims and economic concerns. Such an approach emphasizes strict constraints against entry barriers, ecological harm, market power abuse and ethical lapses. Social cohesion – not competition – is sought as a means to extend horizons and thereby increase efficiency, equity and ecological health. The overriding importance of horizon effects for regulatory assessment dominates other orthodox standards in economics and law. In sum, much of the reason for the failure of the Washington Consensus stems from myopic concerns central to any horizonal view. Reframing economics along horizonal lines suggests some meaningful insight to how regulations should be designed to keep pace with this approach in economics and law

Towards a killer app for the Semantic Web

Killer apps are highly transformative technologies that create new markets and widespread patterns of behaviour. IT generally, and the Web in particular, has benefited from killer apps to create new networks of users and increase its value. The Semantic Web community on the other hand is still awaiting a killer app that proves the superiority of its technologies. There are certain features that distinguish killer apps from other ordinary applications. This paper examines those features in the context of the Semantic Web, in the hope that a better understanding of the characteristics of killer apps might encourage their consideration when developing Semantic Web applications

Information Technology Platforms: Definition and Research Directions

The concept of an information technology (IT) related platform is broad and covers phenomena ranging from the operating system Linux to the Internet. Such platforms are of increasing importance to innovation and value creation across many facets of industry and daily life. There is, however, a lack of common understanding in both research and industry about what is mean by the term platform when related to IT. This lack of consensus is detrimental to research and knowledge development. Thus, the aims of this study are to: (i) provide a sound definition of the IT-platform concept by identifying its distinguishing dimensions; and (ii) identify important current research directions for the IT-platform concept. To achieve these aims a systematic literature review was undertaken with 133 relevant articles taken from major information systems journals, conferences, and business publications. The study contributes by providing a sound base for future research into IT-platforms.Comment: Research-in-progress ISBN# 978-0-646-95337-3 Presented at the Australasian Conference on Information Systems 2015 (arXiv:1605.01032

Sharpening the Cutting Edge: Corporate Action for a Strong, Low-Carbon Economy

Outlines lessons learned from early efforts to create a low-carbon economy, current and emerging best practices, and next steps, including climate change metrics, greenhouse gas reporting, effective climate policy, and long-term investment choices

A gap analysis of Internet-of-Things platforms

We are experiencing an abundance of Internet-of-Things (IoT) middleware solutions that provide connectivity for sensors and actuators to the Internet. To gain a widespread adoption, these middleware solutions, referred to as platforms, have to meet the expectations of different players in the IoT ecosystem, including device providers, application developers, and end-users, among others. In this article, we evaluate a representative sample of these platforms, both proprietary and open-source, on the basis of their ability to meet the expectations of different IoT users. The evaluation is thus more focused on how ready and usable these platforms are for IoT ecosystem players, rather than on the peculiarities of the underlying technological layers. The evaluation is carried out as a gap analysis of the current IoT landscape with respect to (i) the support for heterogeneous sensing and actuating technologies, (ii) the data ownership and its implications for security and privacy, (iii) data processing and data sharing capabilities, (iv) the support offered to application developers, (v) the completeness of an IoT ecosystem, and (vi) the availability of dedicated IoT marketplaces. The gap analysis aims to highlight the deficiencies of today's solutions to improve their integration to tomorrow's ecosystems. In order to strengthen the finding of our analysis, we conducted a survey among the partners of the Finnish IoT program, counting over 350 experts, to evaluate the most critical issues for the development of future IoT platforms. Based on the results of our analysis and our survey, we conclude this article with a list of recommendations for extending these IoT platforms in order to fill in the gaps.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, Accepted for publication in Computer Communications, special issue on the Internet of Things: Research challenges and solution