Competing for School Improvement Dollars: State Grant-Making Strategies

Outlines early findings about the the revamped School Improvement Grant program's impact on states and three approaches to evaluating district and school grant applications, including the use of external reviewers and cutoff scores. Makes recommendations

The Heart of the Matter: The Relationship Between Communities, Cardiovascular Services and Racial and Ethnic Gaps in Care

As part of an initiative to address racial/ethnic disparities in the diagnosis and treatment of heart disease, examines factors behind the segmentation of healthcare access and service patterns by income and insurance status and its effect on minorities

Strategies for Successfully Marketing and Stabilizing the Occupancy of Mixed-Income/Mixed-Race Properties: A Case Study of Spanish Oaks in Jacksonville, Florida

Spanish Oaks is a late 1960s garden apartment development in the Arlington section of Jacksonville, Florida. Originally built as market-rate rental housing, Spanish Oaks entered the inventory of the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) after the original owner defaulted. It was sold in 1995 to a partnership of two local non-profits -- Jacksonville Housing Partnership and Families First -- under the RTC's Affordable Housing Program. The development has 194 units with between one and three bedrooms. The agreement with the RTC was that 20 percent of the units (40 units) would be reserved for households with incomes at or below 50 percent of area median, another 55 percent (107 units) could have occupants with incomes up to 80 percent of area median, and a quarter (47 units) could be rented to households at any income level at unrestricted, market rents. The actual income levels of the households in 2005 are more heavily weighted towards the low end: half the units are occupied by households with incomes below 50 percent of median including 38 percent that have incomes below 30 percent of median

India: a Case of Fragile Wireless Service and Technology Adoption?

Wireless penetration and the Indian economy have grown significantly over the past few years, but how robust and sustainable is the adoption of wireless services and products? Several papers have discussed India as a wireless service and product market, and sometimes tried to assess quantitative attributes thereof. The present paper aims instead at looking, from a management point of view, at the unique underlying evolution processes, bottlenecks and risks. On specific facets, a comparison is given to adoption indicators in other key markets such as China.For example, just to illustrate highlights of these unique attributes , it is indeed surprising that such a major economy with its very large population has not yet achieved the wireless service usage and mobile terminal penetration ratios of neither an early European adopter ,nor of a recent large scale adopter like China or Russia . India has also been characterised by a surprising regulatory development process quite different from many other contexts, both in terms of its both centralised and regional structure, of very low tariffs providing almost no ROI to investors in a stable situation, and of absence of neutrality across communications technologies. At the same time, a very large fraction of the population has not , for affordability and regional coverage reasons, been able to get the access opportunities of more developed regions , leading to a distribution unbalance which is also a significant opportunity .Also , the wireless service and product adoption pattern in India , specific to communicating services , has so far been in rather sharp contrast with the widely known software and outsourcing services industry evolutions in that country .Therefore it is important to compare the most relevant known wireless service and product adoption theories, to establish from facts whether they apply in the Indian context, and, if not, suggest new or mixed theories able to explain all such facts and cast some light into its likely future structural evolution. It is of high relevance in management to validate if indeed established models apply or not in a significant case like India, just as it is also of high relevance for the main stakeholders to identify methodology able to support their analyses.The paper first provides background information on wireless, fixed, and other operators, on wireless penetration, on telecommunications infrastructure and investments, and on Indian human capital. Thereafter is analyzed in detail the relevance, or not, of five traditional technology adoption models across the Indian user base: the absorption business model, the perceived benefits business model, consumer attitudes, the globalisation business model, and finally the brand management business model. These first analyses are followed by the identification and detailed analysis of five other business models or structural processes, some rather unique to India: the two-tier migration model, large scale imported adoption without a telecommunications infrastructure & terminals industry, unstable adoption with lack of consistent public policies, knowledge sharing and productivity enhancement adoption model, and finally late foreign capital investments into a large emerging market.From the comparison of facts and background data , with these ten wireless service and product adoption models , the paper establishes which are not relevant, and which are too some degree . Furthermore the relevant business models are shown to share, further attributes of sustainability (or not) and dynamic behaviour. This allows concluding that India has had an overall quite fragile adoption and deployment path with growing tensions such as coverage, quality of service and affordability disparities. The model comparison also allows to diagnose the key three structural measures needed to reach a sustainable equilibrium from the business, economic and social points of view.India;Mobile communications;Adoption;Business models;Economic development;Infrastructure;Manufacturing;Mobile terminals;Wireless

Increasing Spectrum for Broadband: What Are The Options?

The growth of wireless broadband is a bright spot in the U.S. economy, but a shortage of flexibly licensed spectrum rights could put a crimp on this expansion. Freeing up spectrum from other uses would allow greater expansion of wireless broadband and would bring substantial gains—likely in the hundreds of billions of dollars—for U.S. consumers, businesses, and the federal treasury. ... U.S. experience suggests that it takes at least six years, and possibly over a decade, to complete any large-scale reallocation of spectrum. Thus, for policymakers, the ?projected? need is actually here today. This paper makes three proposals to increase spectrum available for wireless broadband under a flexibly licensed, market-based regime.

Next Generation Connectivity: A Review of Broadband Internet Transitions and Policy From Around the World

Fostering the development of a ubiquitously networked society, connected over high-capacity networks, is a widely shared goal among both developed and developing countries. High capacity networks are seen as strategic infrastructure, intended to contribute to high and sustainable economic growth and to core aspects of human development. In the pursuit of this goal, various countries have, over the past decade and a half, deployed different strategies, and enjoyed different results. At the Commission's request, this study reviews the current plans and practices pursued by other countries in the transition to the next generation of connectivity, as well as their past experience. By observing the experiences of a range of market-oriented democracies that pursued a similar goal over a similar time period, we hope to learn from the successes and failures of others about what practices and policies best promote that goal. By reviewing current plans or policy efforts, we hope to learn what others see as challenges in the next generation transition, and to learn about the range of possible solutions to these challenges

European Law and Regulation of Mobile Net Neutrality

Mobile is a rapidly growing and potentially major element of the future Internet, and its environment cannot be sensibly considered in isolation from fixed networks [2]. A note on terminology: Europe uses the term Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) while the United States uses 'wireless' Internet Service Providers (ISPs) [3]. 'Wireless' is somewhat more open in the United States. In Europe, mobile has always made special pleading for forms of self-regulation, as we will see. The article introduces mobile broadband, then considers net neutrality in the fixed environment including the new laws passed in November 2009 in the European Parliament, before considering the mobile net neutrality debate, the degree of price control regulation exerted on European mobiles and the MNOs' vigorous rear-guard anti-regulation defence. Finally, I look at the effects of this regulatory asymmetry and whether MNO calls for mobile to be treated differently from other ISPs can be justified. I conclude by examining what the effect of price and content control on mobile is likely to be for incentives for fixed ISPs and produce a result that I describe as the 'fixed' strategy