Fair Trade: Five Deals to Expand and Improve Charter Schooling

Andrew J. Rotherham offers policymakers five win-win solutions to address the challenges created by charter schools and to help high-quality charters expand

Smart Charter School Caps

By primarily focusing on quantity, charter school caps do not always address the greater concern of quality. Education Sector Co-director Andrew J. Rotherham offers an innovative solution to managing both the growth and quality of charter schools

An Enquiry into Using Supplementary Bioscience Resources in Health

The learning and teaching of bioscience subjects has been recognised to be problematic for well over 20-30 years. Various reasons have been suggested but it is evident that better support for learning at least is required. Various strategies have been tried and effective online support looks promising, especially as an aid to help those students who struggle with science and for whom English is not their first language. This project sought to introduce an online module designed to support student self-efficacy on the basics of science that are fundamental to gaining an understanding of more advanced bioscience processes. The module went ‘live’ in February 2013 as a voluntary adjunct to curriculum teaching. Though designed with students in mind the subsequent access has been disappointing and raises questions about the willingness of some students to voluntarily access extracurricular material. This might be a focus for further exploration

A Sum Greater Than the Parts: What States Can Teach Each Other About Charter Schooling

States with a significant charter sector know firsthand that the success or failure of a charter school is not a matter of chance, but subject to variances in state laws and a state's educational, political, and regulatory climate. In this report, Sara Mead and Andrew J. Rotherham draw on the experiences of 12 states, proposing those lessons that are necessary for charter school quality and growth

A simple statistical method for measuring how life events affect happiness

Background Life events—like illness, marriage, or unemployment—have important effects on people. But there is no accepted way to measure the different sizes of these events upon human happiness and psychological health. By using happiness regression equations, economists have recently developed a method. Methods We estimate happiness regressions using large random samples of individuals. The relative coefficients of income and life events on happiness allow us to calculate a monetary ‘compensating amount’ for each kind of life event. Results The paper calculates the impact of different life events upon human well-being. Getting married, for instance, is calculated to bring each year the same amount of happiness, on average, as having an extra £70 000 of income per annum. The psychological costs of losing a job greatly exceed those from the pure drop in income. Health is hugely important to happiness. Widowhood brings a degree of unhappiness that would take, on average, an extra £170 000 per annum to offset. Well-being regressions also allow us to assess one of the oldest conjectures in social science—that well-being depends not just on absolute things but inherently on comparisons with other people. We find evidence for comparison effects. Conclusion We believe that the new statistical method has many applications. In principle, it can be used to value any kind of event in life

On the Typical Structure of Graphs in a Monotone Property

Given a graph property $\mathcal{P}$, it is interesting to determine the typical structure of graphs that satisfy $\mathcal{P}$. In this paper, we consider monotone properties, that is, properties that are closed under taking subgraphs. Using results from the theory of graph limits, we show that if $\mathcal{P}$ is a monotone property and $r$ is the largest integer for which every $r$-colorable graph satisfies $\mathcal{P}$, then almost every graph with $\mathcal{P}$ is close to being a balanced $r$-partite graph.Comment: 5 page

Unravelling the “equivalence paradox”: An exploration of possible mechanistic explanations for the equivalence of the person-centred approach and cognitive behavioural therapy

This project adopted a neuroscience perspective to explore the reason for the Equivalence Paradox, that is the finding that quite different therapeutic modalities are, as an approximation, equally effective. The project focussed on the equivalence of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and person-centred therapy (PCT). This project is believed to be the first time that a practitioner group with a balance of allegiances has drawn conclusions from the intersection of neuroscience and psychotherapy. A literature search uncovered a set of findings or views (neuroscience elements) with possible relevance to the problem. In a focus group (or workshop) format, a group of PCT and CBT therapists contributed their understanding of healing processes based on their practice experience. They were then asked to match these experiences to the set of neuroscience elements provided. The group found that there are important similarities in terms of the therapeutic relationship and the desired endpoint, namely a more integrated, more congruent brain; however there were also significant differences in terms of processes that correlate to what is actually “done” in therapy. In CBT, affect-modulating left cortex and executive processes lead, whereas in PCT there is an emphasis on left-right and cortical-limbic “dialogue” and integration. Overall, together with literature observations, the project concluded that for CBT and PCT different healing routes can are progressed, most likely with the client filling in between sessions the healing steps that are not specifically catalysed by the therapy. However “equivalence” may be just about symptom reduction; a CBT-healed brain may differ from a PCT-healed brain

Some Algebraic Properties of the Image of the Period Mapping

Paper by Andrew J. Sommes