Held Back: Addressing Misplacement of 9th Grade Students in Bay Area School Math Classes

While districts regularly make placement decisions regarding all core subjects (math, English, science, social studies), one area is most significant: math. Most universities (including California State and University of California) require at least three years of math for college eligibility, and they prefer students who have taken highlevel math courses such as Calculus or AP Statistics. However, such high-level math courses are generally only available to students who begin high school in Geometry. Ninth grade math placement can therefore not only have far-reaching impacts on a student's confidence, general knowledge of mathematical concepts, and high school experience -- more importantly, it can impact the college and life opportunities available to that student. This report is intended to call attention to the math misplacement issue; to educate districts, community members, and parents about the potential liability associated with such placement decisions; and to encourage districts to take relatively simple steps to remedy the problem of math misplacement. Part I of this report explores the problem of math misplacement in greater detail and reviews the publicly available data regarding 9th graders' math class placement in school districts in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. Part II explains the disparate impact doctrine and demonstrates why a district that engages in math misplacement, even if unintentionally, puts itself at legal risk. Part III explores other possible bases of legal liability. Finally, Part IV presents practical solutions to the problem of math misplacement and provides recommendations for school districts, community advocates, and lawyers to follow to remedy this critical civil rights issue

There are integral heptagons, no three points on a line, no four on a circle

We give two configurations of seven points in the plane, no three points in a line, no four points on a circle with pairwise integral distances. This answers a famous question of Paul Erd\H{o}s.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

A quantitative view on policymakers\u2019 goal, institutions and tax evasion

We develop a general theoretical model to compare two different policymakers both facing tax evasion. Policymakers differs in that they aim to maximize either the fiscal revenues (T) as in a social-democracy as, e.g., Sweden, or the GDP as in a capitalistic country as, e.g., the USA. Both Bureaus can manoeuvre the tax rate and the share of tax receipts spent to fight the tax evasion rather than to increase the public capital. Our model merges the indications of two distinct, and sometimes conflicting, approaches to the analysis of tax evasion in that reconciling them. We also find that the feedbacks between the private and public sector are linked to some Laffer-type relationships usually unexplored by the existing literature. As compared to capitalistic systems, then, our results show that social-democracies end up imposing higher tax rates and, possibly, more pervasive regulations. Consequently, they are likely to suffer from larger tax-evasion-to-GDP ratios. This notwithstanding, social-democracies spend relatively more to contrast tax dodgers. On the other hand, T-maximizing governments have better institutional settings and greater employment rates. Whichever the preferred target, however, no policymaker is able to erase totally the tax evasion, which may explain why this latter is so pervasive and persistent even among the richest countries

No Child Left Behind Bars: Suspending Willful Defiance to Disassemble the School-to-Prison Pipeline

With the criminalization of school discipline and the subsequent increased involvement between students and the juvenile justice system, a path from school to prison became entrenched. Public schools across the nation continued to increase their reliance on punitive disciplinary measures to punish a range of behaviors. Through these measures, schools began to perceive pushed out students as problematic, despite the lack of evidence supporting the efficacy of such policies. Due to school disciplinarians’ implicit bias when enforcing exclusionary policies, students of color and students with disabilities are most at risk. In the hopes of alleviating the devastating effects of the school-to- prison pipeline, California has taken a seemingly significant step towards reform in the form of California Assembly Bill 420. The bill aims to reduce the number of suspensions issued to students for willful defiance, however, it fails to sufficiently mitigate the impact of harsh disciplinary policies among those students who are most disproportionately impacted. In order to successfully enact meaningful education reform, the willful defiance standard in California Education Code section 48900(k) must either be eliminated as a behavior warranting disciplinary action or modified to clearly define the term, outline accountability measures, and allocate sufficient funding for training such that all students are afforded equal protection under the law. Absent substantial revisions to the California Education Code, the amended willful defiance standard not only fails to benefit all students, but may also violate California’s anti- discrimination statute

A Mixed-Mode Sensitive Research on Cannabis Use and Sexual Addiction: Improving Self-Reporting by Means of Indirect Questioning Techniques

In this article, we describe the methods employed and the results obtained from a mixed-mode “sensitive research” conducted in Spain to estimate certain aspects concerning patterns of cannabis consumption and sexual addiction among university students. Three different data-collection methods are considered and compared: direct questioning, randomized response technique and item sum technique. It is shown that posing direct questions to obtain sensitive data produces significantly lower estimates of the surveyed characteristics than do indirect questioning methods. From the analysis, it emerges that male students seem to be more affected by sex addiction than female students while for cannabis consumption there is no evidence of a predominant gender effect.Ministerio de Economía y CompetitividadMinisterio de Educación, Cultura y DeportePRIN-SURWE

Point interaction in dimension two and three as models of small scatterers

In addition to the conventional renormalized--coupling--constant picture, point interactions in dimension two and three are shown to model within a suitable energy range scattering on localized potentials, both attractive and repulsive.Comment: 6 pages, a LaTeX fil

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie: California\u27s Section 11135 Fails to Provide Plaintiffs Relief in Darensburg v. Metropolitan Transportation Commission

This Note examines Darensburg and the evidentiary problems faced by plaintiffs entangled in the bus-versus-rail controversy that are inherent to disparate-impact litigation. Part I discusses the factual background of Darensburg and relevant federal and state law concerning claims of both intentional and disparate-impact discrimination. Part II examines disparate-impact jurisprudence in the context of the unequal distribution of municipal services as background to the complexity of the issues presented in Darensburg. Part III analyzes the Darensburg opinion in light of that background and shows that the burden-of-proof issues faced by plaintiffs are illustrative of the lack of effective guidance to plaintiffs seeking relief from institutional disparities

Binaries with total eclipses in the LMC: potential targets for spectroscopy

35 Eclipsing binaries presenting unambiguous total eclipses were selected from a subsample of the list of Wyrzykowski et al. (2003). The photometric elements are given for the I curve in DiA photometry, as well as approximate Teff and masses of the components. The interest of these systems is stressed in view of future spectroscopic observations.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure; poster presented at the conference "Close binaries in the 21st Century: new opportunities and challenges", Syros, 27-30 June 200

Variability and quasi-decadal changes in the methane budget overthe period 2000–2012

Following the recent Global Carbon Project (GCP) synthesis of the decadal methane (CH4/ budget over 2000– 2012 (Saunois et al., 2016), we analyse here the same dataset with a focus on quasi-decadal and inter-annual variability in CH4 emissions. The GCP dataset integrates results from topdown studies (exploiting atmospheric observations within an atmospheric inverse-modelling framework) and bottom-up models (including process-based models for estimating land surface emissions and atmospheric chemistry), inventories of anthropogenic emissions, and data-driven approaches.The annual global methane emissions from top-down studies, which by construction match the observed methane growth rate within their uncertainties, all show an increase in total methane emissions over the period 2000–2012, but this increase is not linear over the 13 years. Despite differences between individual studies, the mean emission anomaly of the top-down ensemble shows no significant trend in total methane emissions over the period 2000–2006, during the plateau of atmospheric methane mole fractions, and also over the period 2008–2012, during the renewed atmospheric methane increase. However, the top-down ensemble mean produces an emission shift between 2006 and 2008, leading to 22 [16–32] Tg CH4 yr1 higher methane emissions over the period 2008–2012 compared to 2002–2006. This emission increase mostly originated from the tropics, with a smaller contribution from mid-latitudes and no significant change from boreal regions. The regional contributions remain uncertain in top-down studies. Tropical South America and South and East Asia seem to contribute the most to the emission increase in the tropics. However, these two regions have only limited atmospheric measurements and remain therefore poorly constrained. The sectorial partitioning of this emission increase between the periods 2002–2006 and 2008–2012 differs from one atmospheric inversion study to another. However, all topdown studies suggest smaller changes in fossil fuel emissions (from oil, gas, and coal industries) compared to the mean of the bottom-up inventories included in this study. This difference is partly driven by a smaller emission change in China from the top-down studies compared to the estimate in the Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGARv4.2) inventory, which should be revised to smaller values in a near future. We apply isotopic signatures to the emission changes estimated for individual studies based on five emission sectors and find that for six individual top-down studies (out of eight) the average isotopic signature of the emission changes is not consistent with the observed change in atmospheric 13CH4. However, the partitioning in emission change derived from the ensemble mean is consistent with this isotopic constraint. At the global scale, the top-down ensemble mean suggests that the dominant contribution to the resumed atmospheric CH4 growth after 2006 comes from microbial sources (more from agriculture and waste sectors than from natural wetlands), with an uncertain but smaller contribution from fossil CH4 emissions. In addition, a decrease in biomass burning emissions (in agreement with the biomass burning emission databases) makes the balance of sources consistent with atmospheric 13CH4 observations. In most of the top-down studies included here, OH concentrations are considered constant over the years (seasonal variations but without any inter-annual variability). As a result, the methane loss (in particular through OH oxidation) varies mainly through the change in methane concentrations and not its oxidants. For these reasons, changes in the methane loss could not be properly investigated in this study, although it may play a significant role in the recent atmospheric methane changes as briefly discussed at the end of the paper.Published11135–111616A. Geochimica per l'ambienteJCR Journa