Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination

Despite failure to improve academic outcomes or close the achievement gap, school-choice policies, advanced by education legislation and doctrine, have come to dominate public discourse on public education reform in the United States, with students of color disproportionately enrolling in voucher programs and charter schools. This Article moves past the typical market-based critiques of school choice to analyze the particularly racialized constraints on choice for marginalized students and their families in the public school system. The Article unpacks the blame-placing that occurs when the individualism and independence that school choice and choice rhetoric promote fail to improve academic outcomes, and the ways in which choice merely masks racial subordination and the abdication of democratic values in the school system. Students of color and their families may be opting out, but their decisions to do so neither improve public education nor reflect genuine choice. This Article ultimately argues that the values underlining school choice and choice rhetoic-like privacy, competition, independence, and liberty-are inherently incompatible with the public school system. The Article concludes by suggesting an alternate legal and rhetorical framework acknowledging the vulnerability of minority students, as well as the interdependence between white students and nonwhite students in the system, and it advances strict limitations on school choice, even, if necessary, in the form of compulsory universal public school education

Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination

Despite failure to improve academic outcomes or close the achievement gap, school-choice policies, advanced by education legislation and doctrine, have come to dominate public discourse on public education reform in the United States, with students of color disproportionately enrolling in voucher programs and charter schools. This Article moves past the typical market-based critiques of school choice to analyze the particularly racialized constraints on choice for marginalized students and their families in the public school system. The Article unpacks the blame-placing that occurs when the individualism and independence that school choice and choice rhetoric promote fail to improve academic outcomes, and the ways in which choice merely masks racial subordination and the abdication of democratic values in the school system. Students of color and their families may be opting out, but their decisions to do so neither improve public education nor reflect genuine choice. This Article ultimately argues that the values underlining school choice and choice rhetoic-like privacy, competition, independence, and liberty-are inherently incompatible with the public school system. The Article concludes by suggesting an alternate legal and rhetorical framework acknowledging the vulnerability of minority students, as well as the interdependence between white students and nonwhite students in the system, and it advances strict limitations on school choice, even, if necessary, in the form of compulsory universal public school education

Lessons from the CARTA Program in Nepal and Bangladesh

Recent years have witnessed concerns about issues of governance, particularly public service delivery accountability. There is a growing need to identify and promote approaches toward building accountability that rely on citizen engagement. CARTA builds on the World Bank's continuing emphasis on supporting initiatives aimed at engaging citizens and citizen groups as a way to strengthen the accountability of governments to poor people. CARTA offers valuable practical lessons on program design and operation, establishment of local partnerships, and project management. This report summarizes the primary findings and synthesizes lessons from the varied implementation challenges.The Citizen Action for Results, Transparency and Accountability (CARTA) Program was a unique initiative designed "to enhance the development impact, sustainability and client ownership of pro-poor projects financed by the World Bank (WB), by promoting civil society organizations' engagement, experience and capacity to demand better governance." What made it unique was the feature that, to improve project responsiveness and results, the Government and World Bank agreed to complement the projects' internal monitoring and evaluation systems with independent third-party monitoring by communities with the assistance of CSOs under the CARTA program

Retention Rates and Pre-Matriculation Variables of First-Time, Full-Time Students at Three, Small, Private, Liberal Arts Universities in Georgia

The purpose of this non-experimental, correlational, quantitative study was to provide an in-depth understanding of the relationship between pre-matriculation variables on retention of first-year, full-time students from fall-to-fall semesters at three small, private, liberal arts institutions in the Southeast United States. The findings will help to determine the significance of the relationships between retention and pre-matriculation variables on first-year, full-time students who entered each institutions the fall 2017 and fall 2018 semesters. Archival data at the participating institutions were used to test the significance of the relationships between retention rates and pre-matriculation variables (standardized test scores, high school GPAs, gender, first-generation status, and financial aid status). The sample for this study included approximately 3,612 first-year, full-time students who entered the three participating universities for the fall semesters of 2017 and 2018. Independent samples t-tests or two-way contingency tables using crosstabs were used to evaluate each of the respective research questions. Findings from this study demonstrated student demographic variables financial aid status (Pell Grant eligibility), gender, and first-generation status had a significant relationship to retention for Institutions 2 and 3; students who were not eligible for financial aid were retained at higher percentage rate than students who were eligible for financial aid; students who were first-generation students were retained at lower percentage rate than students who were continuing-generation students; and self- identified female students were retained at a higher percentage rate those students who were self-identified as males at Institution 1

The Changing Roles of Community Health Workers

Community Health Workers (CHWs) have been gaining attention from policymakers because of their unique role in addressing health disparities and socioeconomic drivers of disease, and because of their potential integration into the health care delivery system. To date, there has been limited research specifically describing the variation in CHWs’ roles and relationships, and how that variation relates to management, to financing, to health system integration, and to the competencies CHWs should have in different contexts. This report provides a snapshot of the varied landscape of CHW programs to better understand how CHWs are integrating with the health system both in terms of the structural elements of these programs, and the relational elements of CHW-health system interaction that make integrated models succeed. Authors suggest that there is no blueprint for success; rather, there are certain unifying structural elements of various integration types, and certain useful mechanisms that enable the preservation of the CHW concept

Report & Recommendations Legal Scholar Team

The Report’s Recommendations for next steps reflect and incorporate the multiple experiences, false starts, insights, frustrations and new beginnings that represent the various ways that diversity works within the different sectors of the legal profession. We have included Recommendations that are already being used as well as some that are ambitious and aspirational. Within each of the four sectors of the profession, the recommendations are broadly categorized, but not prioritized. We recognize that every individual or organization will have its own priorities based on its unique circumstances. We do encourage the Report’s users to select and prioritize recommendations for next steps that they can implement in their own environments

Examining Exclusionary Discipline Practices: Utilizing Response to Instruction and Intervention for Behavior as an Innovation for Change in Attendance and Suspension Rates within Three Rural Elementary Schools in Tennessee

Widespread school discipline problems came to forefront in the educational arena in the 1990s (lm & Vuran, 2016). Exclusionary practices (e.g., in- or out-of-school suspension, strict rules, or punishment [Skiba & Peterson, 2000]), also known as traditional school discipline practices (TSDP) (Scheuermann & Hall, 2011) have become common behavioral practices across the American public education landscape (U.S. Department of Education, 2016). These practices remove students from instruction, often resulting in detrimental impacts to student performance (Edward & Brea, 2016), and have neither positive effects on student behavior (Ogulmus & Vuran, 2016) nor positive longevity effects (Costenbader & Markson, 1998).In support of federal legislation aimed at retention of students in the school environment (U.S. Department of Justice, 2011), Positive Behavior Interventions and Support (PBIS) (used interchangeably with School Wide Positive Behavior Interventions and Support [SWPBIS]), focuses on improving the school climate. The PBIS-tiered behavior system in Tennessee, Response to Instruction and Intervention for Behavior (RTI2-B), was created to increase prosocial behaviors and decrease problem behaviors. Although PBIS has been well studied throughout the literature, there has been a paucity of formal research conducted on this tiered behavior system.The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine if the RTI2-B program created statistically significant differences in attendance and suspension rates of students by grade and race at three rural Tennessee elementary schools, using archived student data from a small rural school district in western Tennessee. A paired samples t test was conducted to compare suspension rates before and after program implementation, and another paired samples t test was used to analyze school-wide attendance patterns before and after program implementation. Bivariate analysis was used to examine post-intervention suspension differences by race. The relationships between pre- and post-intervention attendance data by year, pre- and post-suspension data by grade across years, and post-intervention differences in race were also analyzed