Does Diversity Still Matter?Revisiting the Role of Racial and Socioeconomic Diversity in K-12 Education

Despite efforts toward school integration following the historical U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, evidence shows that American schools have continued to see de-facto segregation along both racial and socioeconomic lines. This dissertation focuses on racial and socioeconomic diversity in the school context and strives to understand whether and how de-facto school segregation might shape educational inequality in the long run. In the first empirical chapter, I use survey data from the Monitoring the Future Study (MTF) to examine the influence of school socioeconomic context on students’ educational expectations. The results pointed to context-specific meanings of diversity. In particular, in low-SES schools, the positive association between diversity and educational expectation is more pronounced among students with less educated parents than among their peers with more educated parents. However, an opposite pattern was found in medium- and high-SES schools, where students’ relative socioeconomic disadvantage in school acts as a moderator that attenuates the association between diversity and expectations. Consequently, in more advantaged schools, socioeconomically disadvantaged students benefit less from socioeconomic diversity than their more affluent peers, while in less-advantaged schools they benefit more. This chapter thereby points to both the benefits and potential drawbacks of school socioeconomic integration policies and suggests that socioeconomically disadvantaged students might not always be the ones who benefit most from such policies. In the second empirical chapter, I revisited the relevance of school racial diversity by applying a quasi-experimental design. Using data from the 2010 U.S. census and Monitoring the Future (MTF), I examined whether school racial context might play a role in shaping students’ race-related values. The results showed that even after adjusting for selection bias with the use of a full matching technique, students who attend less racially diverse high schools are significantly more likely to hold pro-segregation school preferences. I argued that ongoing school segregation may have a self-perpetuating tendency—schools lacking racial diversity might themselves become the soil in which pro-segregation ideologies are reproduced. The last empirical chapter moves above school-level analysis and considers the variation in racial and socioeconomic diversity at the school-district level. Using data from the Common Core Data (CCD) and the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), I applied a longitudinal perspective to explore whether diversity trajectories differ across different school districts and examine the association between diversity trajectories and district-level test scores. The findings showed that predominantly-white school districts saw slight increase in racial diversity but remained the type of school districts with the lowest racial diversity. In comparison, mostly-nonwhite school districts saw noticeable decline in racial diversity, which was particularly driven by the decline in share of white students and increase in the proportion of low-income and Hispanic students. The results also suggested that school districts that underwent faster withdrawal of white students also tended to see decreases in district-level test scores over time. Taken together, this dissertation contributes to the literature on both diversity and educational equity by offering a more refined understanding of racial and socioeconomic diversity in schools and school districts, and their implications for educational stratification. Findings from these analyses are particularly relevant given the continued debates regarding the effectiveness of school integration efforts and can provide crucial insights for policy makers who aim to tackle ongoing challenges of school segregation.PHDSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163225/1/yuanhe_1.pd

Dietary nitrate reduces skeletal muscle oxygenation response to physical exercise : a quantitative muscle functional MRI study

© 2014 The Authors. Physiological Reports published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of the American Physiological Society and The Physiological Society.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Targeted Derepression of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Long Terminal Repeat by Pyrrole-Imidazole Polyamides

The host factor LSF represses the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 long terminal repeat (LTR) by mediating recruitment of histone deacetylase. We show that pyrrole-imidazole polyamides targeted to the LTR can specifically block LSF binding both in vitro and within cells via direct access to chromatin, resulting in increased LTR expression

Understanding how dogs encourage and motivate walking: cross-sectional findings from RESIDE

Background Many people live with dogs but not all walk with them regularly. This study examines the demographic and behavioural factors that contribute towards owners reporting having a strong sense of encouragement and motivation to walk provided by their dogs, which we call ‘the Lassie effect’. Methods Data was collected from 629 dog owners participating in the RESIDE cross-sectional survey in Perth, Western Australia. Multivariable logistic regression analyses of factors associated with two separate outcome survey items ‘Dog encouragement to walk’ (how often dog encouraged me to go walking in last month) and ‘Dog motivation to walk’ (Having a dog makes me walk more). Results Owning a larger dog; having an increased level of attachment to dog; knowing dog enjoys going for a walk; believing walking keeps dog healthy; and having high social support from family to go walking, were positively associated with both outcomes ‘dog encouragement to walk’ and ‘dog motivation to walk’. Conversely, reporting the presence of children at home; that the child is the main person who walks with the dog; and perceiving dog-specific barriers to walking with dog daily; were negatively associated with both outcomes. In addition, ‘Dog motivation to walk’ only was positively associated with a belief walking reduces barking, and negatively with owning a dog that is overweight or a dog that is too old/sick. Reporting that the spouse/partner is main person who walks with the dog was also negatively associated with ‘dog motivation to walk’, as was increased perceived access to public open spaces with dog-supportive features. Conclusions There are both dog and owner factors that are associated with an owner’s sense of encouragement, and motivation to walk the dog, which in turn has been found to be associated with dog waking behaviour. These factors may be targeted in future interventions to increase and maintain physical activity levels of both people and pets

Temperature-dependent Mollow triplet spectra from a single quantum dot: Rabi frequency renormalisation and sideband linewidth insensitivity

We investigate temperature-dependent resonance fluorescence spectra obtained from a single self-assembled quantum dot. A decrease of the Mollow triplet sideband splitting is observed with increasing temperature, an effect we attribute to a phonon-induced renormalisation of the driven dot Rabi frequency. We also present first evidence for a non-perturbative regime of phonon coupling, in which the expected linear increase in sideband linewidth as a function of temperature is cancelled by the corresponding reduction in Rabi frequency. These results indicate that dephasing in semiconductor quantum dots may be less sensitive to changes in temperature than expected from a standard weak-coupling analysis of phonon effects.Comment: Close to published version, new figure and minor changes to the text. 5 pages, 3 figure