Kentucky School Districts as Educational Bright Spots

Every year a select group of Kentucky school districts perform better than expected on measures of educational achievement. These measures include things like the percentage of elementary students who achieve proficiency or distinguished in reading, or the proportion of less‐advantaged middle school students who show a similar level of competency on the math assessment. There are wide differences in the learning environments, finances, and student outcomes among and within Kentucky’s 173 school districts. This is not surprising given that the largest school district in the state, Jefferson County, has 97,000 students and 165 schools, while the smallest, West Point Independent in Hardin County, has one school with 120 students. Since school districts are likely to reflect the underlying economic conditions of their surrounding communities, the socioeconomic characteristics of Kentucky’s school districts are as diverse as the state itself. Similarly, student outcomes are also widely distributed across the state’s 173 districts. From this broad range of student outcomes, family and community backgrounds, and school district characteristics, we identify districts that have performed better than expected—which we refer to as “bright spots.

Kentucky Public Schools as Educational Bright Spots (September 2020)

Understanding the reasons for better‐than‐expected performance across Kentucky\u27s 173 school districts, taking into account student outcomes, backgrounds, and school district characteristics. Building on the previous work with school districts and using school-level data, this paper discusses the estimated expected level of school-level performance using district-level fixed effects. From this broad range of student outcomes, family and community backgrounds, and school characteristics, we identify schools that have performed better than expected—which we refer to as “bright spots.

Copy of Remarks of keynote speaker at National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia 43rd Annual Meeting

Copy of Remarks of keynote speaker at National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia 43rd Annual Meeting.https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/sdfrancisco_documents/1013/thumbnail.jp

Kentucky\u27s Educational Performance & Points of Leverage

This issue brief explores the links between obstacles students face and educational outcomes

Effect of helicity and rotation on the free decay of turbulent flows

The self-similar decay of energy in a turbulent flow is studied in direct numerical simulations with and without rotation. Two initial conditions are considered: one non-helical (mirror-symmetric), and one with maximal helicity. The results show that, while in the absence of rotation the energy in the helical and non-helical cases decays with the same rate, in rotating flows the helicity content has a major impact on the decay rate. These differences are associated with differences in the energy and helicity cascades when rotation is present. Properties of the structures that arise in the flow at late times in each time are also discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

OzDES multifibre spectroscopy for the Dark Energy Survey: 3-yr results and first data release

We present results for the first three years of OzDES, a six year programme to obtain redshifts for objects in the Dark Energy Survey (DES) supernova fields using the 2dF fibre positioner and AAOmega spectrograph on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. OzDES is a multi-object spectroscopic survey targeting multiple types of targets at multiple epochs over a multiyear baseline and is one of the first multi-object spectroscopic surveys to dynamically include transients into the target list soon after their discovery. At the end of three years, OzDES has spectroscopically confirmed almost 100 supernovae, and has measured redshifts for 17 000 objects, including the redshifts of 2566 supernova hosts. We examine how our ability to measure redshifts for targets of various types depends on signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), magnitude and exposure time, finding that our redshift success rate increases significantly at a S/N of 2–3 per 1-Å bin. We also find that the change in  S/N with exposure time closely matches the Poisson limit for stacked exposures as long as 10 h. We use these results to predict the redshift yield of the full OzDES survey, as well as the potential yields of future surveys on other facilities such as (i.e. the 4-m Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope, the Subaru Prime Focus Spectrograph and the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer). This work marks the first OzDES data release, comprising 14 693 redshifts. OzDES is on target to obtain over 30 000 redshifts over the 6-yr duration of the survey, including a yield of approximately 5700 supernova host-galaxy redshifts