Evaluating the structure and pedagogy of Bavarian ESL texts

This study compares ESL textbooks used Hauptschule, Realschule and Gymnasium classrooms across Bavaria, Germany. To make these comparisons, textbooks were collected and evaluated by a newly created evaluation tool. Essential components of textbooks were determined while properties of test usefulness and the possible TLU\u27s of learners were examined and incorporated into the new evaluation tool. Texts were examined by the detailed completion of questions posed in the evaluation tool. The findings show that Bavarian ESL textbooks do seem to take into account the possible TLU\u27s of their learners and tend to limit the difficulty level of the materials based on level and school type. Overall the textbooks are well designed, but some have distracting features such as poor design, uninteresting topics and biased and/or offensive language. These findings will be useful to ESL teachers and materials writers who are interested in determining textbooks that most fit learner\u27s needs. This research also contains many applications for further research into materials evaluation

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: The Maintenance of White Privilege and Power Amid Demographic Change in a Suburban School District

My dissertation examines racial power dynamics and whiteness in a previously all-white suburban school district that is now home to a very racially, ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse population. Specifically, I explore how white parents make sense of and respond to changing racial demographics in their community and the extent to which whites maintain privilege and power as they comprise a declining proportion of the community population overall. In light of the current political and social context in the U.S that has accompanied demographic change, there is a great need to critically examine the racial ideologies of whites as they relate ongoing structures of inequality, particularly in suburban areas that are previous centers of white isolation and modern epicenters of demographic change. Using a multi-modal case study methodology, I found that in this particular suburban context, where residents of color possessed similar or greater levels of income and education than white residents, and students of color performed at similar levels as white students in the public schools, dominant ideologies that associated whiteness with superiority and goodness persisted and led some white parents to flee the changing community and schools. Moreover, despite the increasingly small proportion of whites in the community and schools, white parents and residents were able to leverage their racial privilege and status in ways that reasserted and maintained unequal racial power relations in Parkwood through school district policies and practices. This research highlights the often invisible and under-examined ways in which white interests are continuously centered and served in ways that reproduce structures of racism in the “post-racial” era. Overall, the findings from this study contradict dominant colorblind narratives and point to the many ways in which whiteness operates, often in surreptitious ways, to maintain the racial status quo and exert social control over people of color even in contexts in which logic might imply that the power and privilege associated with whiteness would be threatened

Doubly Burdened: Race-Ethnic Disparities in the Effects of COVID-19 and COVID-19 Mitigation Strategies

Black and Hispanic populations across New York State and around the United States have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 both in terms of COVID-19 associated morbidity and mortality but also bearing a larger burden of the economic impacts. Race-ethnic minorities also experience more longstanding and justified distrust of the medical community, which could serve to prolong the pandemic effects in the most vulnerable communities by contributing to reduced vaccine uptake. This paper reports the results of a survey fielded in November 2020 with an oversampling of Non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic respondents across New York State concerning the impacts of the virus and intentions to seek vaccination and estimates of the social and economic impacts of COVID-19 on minority communities. Overall, the survey finds that Latinx populations have been especially negatively impacted by the virus followed by non-Hispanic (NH) Blacks and NH Whites. Consistent with other surveys, NH Blacks were more hesitant about vaccination than other groups; however, 42% of respondents reported that they would definitely get the vaccine as soon as possible and another 27% said they would probably get the vaccine. All groups reported substantial indirect economic and social effects related to stay-at-home orders including lost income, but Hispanics have been the most impacted population, followed by NH Blacks. More effort should be put in understanding and alleviating the economic and social harms from COVID-19 mitigation strategies and consideration should be given to how these economic and social effects may compound existing health disparities into the future

Predicting success in the first year of residency

This study is motivated by two research questions 1) What are the independent variables that are associated with performance for first year residents in an Anesthesiology Residency? and 2) What linear combination of factors can predict success (not entering remediation/probation) for the first year of residency? A post-hoc correlational analysis of 3 years of first year resident data was conducted using linear regression to determine any significant predictive relationships. Previous literature has indicated that past test performance is likely to predict future performance and those models of prediction that incorporate both cognitive and non-cognitive attributes tend to be the most successful. Results indicated a strong association between Step 1 scores and minority status for predicting performance on first year examinations with weaker associations for the variables of gestalt and interview scores. Analysis also indicated a strong association between gestalt scores and sex and prediction of whether individuals would end up on remediation or probation within their first year of training.

Political and Governance Challenges to Achieving Global HIV Goals with Injecting Drug Users: The Case of Pakistan

Background The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has recently set the ambitious “90-90-90 target” of having 90% of people living with HIV (PLHIV) know their status, receive antiretroviral therapy (ART), and achieve viral suppression by 2020. This ambitious new goal is occurring in a context of global “scale-down” following nearly a decade of heightened investment in HIV prevention and treatment efforts. Arguably international goals spur action, however, setting unrealistic goals that do not take weak health systems and variations in the nature of the epidemic across countries into consideration may set them up for failure in unproductive ways that lead to a decline in confidence in global governance institutions. This study explores how policy actors tasked with implementing HIV programs navigate the competing demands placed upon them by development targets and national politics, particularly in the current context of waning international investments towards HIV. Methods To examine these questions, we interviewed 29 key informants comprising health experts in donor organizations and government employees in HIV programs in Pakistan, a country where HIV programs must compete with other issues for attention. Themes were identified inductively through an iterative process and findings were triangulated with various data sources and existing literature. Results We found both political and governance challenges to achieving the target, particularly in the context of the global HIV scale-down. Political challenges included, low and heterogeneous political commitment for HIV and a conservative legal environment that contributed towards a ban on opiate substitution therapy, creating low treatment coverage. Governance challenges includedstrained state and non-governmental organization (NGO) relations creating a hostile service delivery environment, weak bureaucratic and civil society capacity contributing to poor regulation of the health infrastructure, and resource mismanagement on both the part of the government and NGOs. Conclusion Our findings suggest that in a context of waning international attention to HIV, policy actors on the ground face a number of practical hurdles to achieving the ambitious targets set out by international agencies. Greater attention to the political and governance challenges of implementing HIV programs in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) could help technical assistance agencies to develop more realistic implementation plans

REGULATING THE POLITICAL WILD WEST: STATE EFFORTS TO DISCLOSE SOURCES OF ONLINE POLITICAL ADVERTISING

The problem of disinformation in online political advertising is growing, with ongoing and potential threats to campaigns coming from both within and outside the United States. Most scholarship in this area has focused on either disclosures and disclaimers under the proposed Honest Ads Act or other fixes aimed at a gridlocked Federal Election Commission (“FEC”). With federal reform at a standstill, states have jumped into the void. Between the 2016 presidential election and early 2020, eight states passed legislation to expressly regulate online political advertising for state candidates and ballot measures, including Maryland, whose state law was declared unconstitutional as applied to a group of media plaintiffs by a federal appellate court. This Article examines these state laws as well as the one federal appellate court opinion as a springboard for thinking about efforts at the national level to address the problem. We raise important considerations for future legislation in light of the appellate court decision. We propose that a law establishing independent record-keeping bodies, similar to those the state of New York has established for independent expenditure committees, is more likely to pass First Amendment scrutiny than a law requiring record-keeping of platforms or websites

Administrative Easing: Rule Reduction and Medicaid Enrollment

Administrative burden is widely recognized as a barrier to program enrollment, denying legal entitlements to many eligible individuals. We examine what effect voluntary state reductions in administrative burden (what we call administrative easing) have had on Medicaid enrollment rates using differential implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Using a novel dataset that includes state-level data on simplified enrollment and renewal procedures for Medicaid from 2008-2017, we examine how change in Medicaid enrollment is conditioned by the adoption of rule-reduction procedures. We find that reductions in the administrative burden required to signup for Medicaid were associated with increased enrollments. Real-time eligibility and reductions in enrollment burden were particularly impactful at increasing enrollment for both children and adults separate from increases in Medicaid income eligibility thresholds. The results suggest that efforts to ease the cognitive burden of enrolling in entitlement programs can improve take-up

Decentralizing for a deeper, more supple democracy

Well-designed decentralization can deepen democracy and strengthen the state in five key ways. Decentralizing below the level of social cleavages should undermine secessionism by peeling away moderates from radical leaders. The “fragmentation of authority” critique is mistaken; decentralization transforms the state from a simpler, brittler command structure to one of multilevel complementarity more robust to local failure. Decentralizing services with low economies of scale, with devolved taxation and bail-outs prohibited, should increase accountability. Lastly, the small scale of local politics allows citizens to become political actors, promoting social learning-by-doing, strengthening political legitimacy and ‘democratic suppleness’ from the grass-roots upwards