Persistent Inequality: The Chilean voucher system and its impacts on socio-economic segregation and quality of education.

In the last decades, the Chilean educational system is carrying on a process of increasing reforms, beginning with the instauration of a voucher system. Since the implementation of this scheme, however, researchers have pointed out the low academic efficacy and remarkable problem of equity that have developed from this intended reform. After the resulting social discontent, education became an undeniable priority in the national debate; consequently, a significant adjustment to the system was enacted in 2008. Existing scholarly work points to the need for expanding the study of school effectiveness to include a wider notion of context. Theoretically, part of the existing research isolates school performance from its wider sociocultural context, which can be defined as the policy environment and socioeconomic composition of the school. Both of these definitions of context have been avoided or reduced. Although the current effectiveness research emphasises school processes as a way to centralise the idea that school can make a difference, it nevertheless remains acritical with regard to specific policy ideological assumptions and their implications on the notion of effectiveness and the real power of the school to take part in social change. The purpose of this research is to broaden the study of school effectiveness within a long-lasting market oriented system. Using a mixed method research design, the data is collected and analysed through quantitative and qualitative approaches. Deploying multilevel analysis (HLM), the study analyses the presence and impact of the socioeconomic composition of school related to the effectiveness and equity of mathematics academic distribution in 4th grade students at a national level. Aiming to decode the impact of recent policy accountability, the qualitative approach interviews principals and teachers, thereby examining practices for effectiveness and the impact of accountability on the teachers' sense of professionalisation. Nvivo software is used to initiate a grounded theory explanation of the sensemaking of principals and teachers in three socioeconomic disadvantaged school cases. The study concludes that the level of socioeconomic composition of a school impacts more strongly than the family socioeconomic composition, constituting a double disadvantage for vulnerable students. Disadvantaged students attending disadvantaged schools are doubly affected by socioeconomic segregation. These contextual variables affect the effectiveness of schools, resulting in school comparisons that are unfair and misleading. Public schools appear to perform better than private schools when contextual variables are taken into account; however, the existing public policy of school classification does not include multilevel analysis or the type of contextual variables incorporated in this research. Another important conclusion of this study is that the policy of accountability erodes teacher professionalisation and encourages an authoritarian type of leadership. The practice of emphasising specific subjects and the idea of equating student learning with results on standardised evaluations affect the pedagogical practices of teachers, limiting their process to undertaking a series of routine actions for test preparation. Moreover, the urgency toward achieving good test results encourage schools to focus their practices on accomplishing these results, and not on the process of learning. A successful approach to effectiveness within the accountability system seems to be related to highly organised schools with a top-down type of leadership. Disadvantaged schools with a high sense of teacher professionalism and with democratic and flexible school organisation appear to be in opposition to the accountability policy. These findings have significant implications for the operation of a market oriented system. The market oriented system operating in Chile affects the distribution of student opportunities based on their socioeconomic background. The existing school segregation impacts both the operations inside the school and the purpose of the system that is intended to equalise and develop opportunities for students, thereby making school a social institution that can have a positive effect on the lives of pupils and staff. Persisting in a view of the market as a social regulator of effectiveness is not supported by empirical evidence; instead, this view shifts responsibility to the schools and encourages them to compete with each other as a logic of productivity, which affects how schools respond to students who are most in need of their care. Reducing the objectives of education to performativity leads to an impoverishing of the educational experience of students, and a diminishing sense of professionalism of staff. The notion of educational quality requires broadening to include a democratic experience of knowledge construction

DESIGN OF MOBILE DATA COLLECTOR BASED CLUSTERING ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consisting of hundreds or even thousands of nodes, canbe used for a multitude of applications such as warfare intelligence or to monitor the environment. A typical WSN node has a limited and usually an irreplaceable power source and the efficient use of the available power is of utmost importance to ensure maximum lifetime of eachWSNapplication. Each of the nodes needs to transmit and communicate sensed data to an aggregation point for use by higher layer systems. Data and message transmission among nodes collectively consume the largest amount of energy available in WSNs. The network routing protocols ensure that every message reaches thedestination and has a direct impact on the amount of transmissions to deliver messages successfully. To this end, the transmission protocol within the WSNs should be scalable, adaptable and optimized to consume the least possible amount of energy to suite different network architectures and application domains. The inclusion of mobile nodes in the WSNs deployment proves to be detrimental to protocol performance in terms of nodes energy efficiency and reliable message delivery. This thesis which proposes a novel Mobile Data Collector based clustering routing protocol for WSNs is designed that combines cluster based hierarchical architecture and utilizes three-tier multi-hop routing strategy between cluster heads to base station by the help of Mobile Data Collector (MDC) for inter-cluster communication. In addition, a Mobile Data Collector based routing protocol is compared with Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy and A Novel Application Specific Network Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks routing protocol. The protocol is designed with the following in mind: minimize the energy consumption of sensor nodes, resolve communication holes issues, maintain data reliability, finally reach tradeoff between energy efficiency and latency in terms of End-to-End, and channel access delays. Simulation results have shown that the Mobile Data Collector based clustering routing protocol for WSNs could be easily implemented in environmental applications where energy efficiency of sensor nodes, network lifetime and data reliability are major concerns