Perceived Leadership Behavior Of School Principals In Selected California Public Elementary Schools With A High Hispanic Student Population And High Or Low Sixth Grade Reading Achievement Scores

Purpose. The purpose of this study was to investigate perceived leadership behavior of principals in selected California public elementary schools with a high Hispanic student population. Two groups of schools were selected for comparison: those with high scores on the sixth grade California Assessment Program test of reading achievement, and those with low scores on the same test. Procedure. The population of this study was composed of California public elementary schools meeting specific criteria. Also included in the sample were all full-time teachers at the selected schools, the school principals, and a certificated central office employee knowing the principal. Participants numbered 110. The instrument used was the Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire-Form XII by Ralph M. Stogdill. The data were processed using multivariate analysis of variance. Findings. Low achieving school principals appear to represent their faculties more often indicating their staffs have less concern and accountability, have the ability to tolerate uncertainty, use persuasion more effectively and exhibit strong convictions, work less with faculty on instructional improvement, and are more concerned with faculty well being and personal needs. Recommendations. (1) Effective schools need to be studied in depth with regard to specific leadership characteristics in addition to those studied in this research and with regard to other characteristics which may account for their success. Such a study might clarify effective leadership behaviors and if leadership is the result of a specific situation. (2) Leadership behavior of all principals at California public elementary schools identified as effective should be studied in depth by the California State Department of Education and other agencies to identify the characteristics of effective leadership and effective schools. Such a study could improve the educational programs in all schools. (3) Studies suggested above should include a larger sample so that generalization can be made with a clearer picture of findings

The Earned Income Tax Credit and Rural Families: Differences between Participants and Non-participants

The differences between rural low-income mothers who were participants and non-participants in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) were examined. One-third of the 224 eligible mothers in a multi-state study did not claim the tax credit. Non-participants were more likely to be Hispanic, less educated, with larger families, borrowing money from family, and living in more rural counties. Participating mothers, on the other hand, were more food secure, perceived their household income as being adequate, reported recent improvements in their economic situation, were satisfied with life, and lived in states with a state EITC. Analysis of qualitative data revealed that rural mothers had many misconceptions about the EITC. These findings contribute to family and economic professionals’ understanding of why rural low-income families do not participate in the tax credit and assist in formulating policies and education/outreach efforts that would increase their participationEITC non-participants, EITC participants, rural low-income mothers, state EITC, rural low-income families

Exploring the Experience of Living with Young Onset Dementia

Introduction: Research into the experiences of those with a diagnosis of young onset dementia is extremely limited and the research that does exist tends to be loss orientated. The current study aimed to explore the full spectrum of lived experience of those with young onset dementia, whilst considering the unique impact of diagnosis at a younger age and the possibility of personal growth. Method: Five individuals took part in semi-structured interviews within which they were invited to bring along anything that helped them to share their experiences. Each participants’ transcribed interviews were then analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). A group level analysis was conducted and superordinate and subordinate themes were identified. Results: Four superordinate themes emerged: ‘Fear’, ‘Anger’, ‘Sadness’, ‘Contentment’ from which a further thirteen subordinate themes were identified. The findings indicated that participants experienced feelings of fear and vulnerability in response to their diagnosis. Participants felt angry that they did not have a voice, not enough was being done for those with dementia and they were being stereotyped. Participants also spoke of a more depressive state of mind in which they grieved for their past self, experienced isolation and loneliness, and feelings of hopelessness and despair. Finally, participants spoke of a sense of contentment in relation to a preserved self, a sense of living alongside their dementia and an desire to live in the present; making the most of the here and now. Discussion: The findings of the study were explored in relation to existing literature and psychological theory. This research highlighted the transitory nature of participants experiences as a result of multiple and repeated challenges to one’s psychological equanimity. A critical appraisal of the strengths and limitations of this study were explored along with clinical implications. Future areas of research were also considered

Rural Low-income Families Speak: Living in Rural Louisiana (Research Information Sheet # 109)

After the passage of federal welfare reform legislation in 1996, faculty from land-grant universities organized to conduct a study of the legislation’s impact on rural families. The project began in 1998 and runs through 2008. The intent was to provide policymakers and program directors with up-to-date information about the ability of rural, low-income families to be economically self sufficient. The objectives of this project are included in this publication.https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/agcenter_researchinfosheets/1000/thumbnail.jp

Generous Leaders and Selfish Underdogs: Pro-Sociality in Despotic Macaques

Actively granting food to a companion is called pro-social behavior and is considered to be part of altruism. Recent findings show that some non-human primates behave pro-socially. However, pro-social behavior is not expected in despotic species, since the steep dominance hierarchy will hamper pro-sociality. We show that some despotic long-tailed macaques do grant others access to food. Moreover, their dominance hierarchy determines pro-social behavior in an unexpected way: high-ranking individuals grant, while low-ranking individuals withhold their partner access to food. Surprisingly, pro-social behavior is not used by subordinates to obtain benefits from dominants, but by dominants to emphasize their dominance position. Hence, Machiavellian macaques rule not through “fear above love”, but through “be feared when needed and loved when possible”

Bumetanide Enhances Phenobarbital Efficacy in a Rat Model of Hypoxic Neonatal Seizures

Neonatal seizures can be refractory to conventional anticonvulsants, and this may in part be due to a developmental increase in expression of the neuronal Na+-K+-2 Cl− cotransporter, NKCC1, and consequent paradoxical excitatory actions of GABAA receptors in the perinatal period. The most common cause of neonatal seizures is hypoxic encephalopathy, and here we show in an established model of neonatal hypoxia-induced seizures that the NKCC1 inhibitor, bumetanide, in combination with phenobarbital is significantly more effective than phenobarbital alone. A sensitive mass spectrometry assay revealed that bumetanide concentrations in serum and brain were dose-dependent, and the expression of NKCC1 protein transiently increased in cortex and hippocampus after hypoxic seizures. Importantly, the low doses of phenobarbital and bumetanide used in the study did not increase constitutive apoptosis, alone or in combination. Perforated patch clamp recordings from ex vivo hippocampal slices removed following seizures revealed that phenobarbital and bumetanide largely reversed seizure-induced changes in EGABA. Taken together, these data provide preclinical support for clinical trials of bumetanide in human neonates at risk for hypoxic encephalopathy and seizures

Reckoning up: sexual harassment and violence in the neoliberal university

This paper situates sexual harassment and violence in the neoliberal university. Using data from a ‘composite ethnography’ representing twelve years of research, I argue that institutional inaction on these issues reflects how they are ‘reckoned up’ in the context of gender and other structures. The impact of disclosure is projected in market terms: this produces institutional airbrushing which protects both the institution and those (usually privileged men) whose welfare is bound up with its success. Staff and students are differentiated by power/value relations, which interact with gender and intersecting categories. Survivors are often left with few alternatives to speaking out in the ‘outrage economy’ of the corporate media: however, this can support institutional airbrushing and bolster punitive technologies. I propose the method of Grounded Action Inquiry, implemented with attention to Lorde’s work on anger, as a parrhesiastic practice of ‘speaking in’ to the neoliberal institution

Torture and the UK’s “war on asylum”: medical power and the culture of disbelief

When the now ‘iconic’ images of shackled, humiliated and dehumanised detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison complex in Iraq were broadcast globally, in the mid-2000s, the relationship between medical power and torture in the “war on terror” was also thrust sharply into focus. Graphic images of coalition troops photographing and posing in front of hooded, naked prisoners forced into a “human pyramid”, and of people made to wear animal collars, indicated a regime in which degradation had a defining role. The photograph of a soldier gloating over the corpse of a man who had died as a result of torture was just one picture of a network of interrogation camps in which detention by coalition forces could be fatal. Yet if there were any expectations that the presence of medical personnel may have checked this violence, these were shattered by the fact that clinicians – in some cases at least – were integral to its practice. «It is now beyond doubt that Armed Forces physicians, psychologists, and medics were active and passive partners in the systematic neglect and abuse of war on terror prisoners», wrote Steven Miles in 2009 (Miles 2009, X). And as he continued, this involved providing interrogators «with medical information to use in setting the nature and degree of physical and psychological abuse during interrogations». It involved monitoring «interrogations to devise ways to break prisoners down or to keep them alive». It involved pathologists holding back death certificates and autopsy reports in order to minimise the number of fatalities or cover up torture-related deaths as deaths by natural causes (Ibid). Procedures including «cramped confinement, dietary manipulation, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding» were among the practices that were «at times (…) legally sanctioned due to medical supervision» in the context of the “war on terror”, according to Hoffman (2011, 1535). He continued to suggest that doctors are not just important to «modern torture methods», they are «irreplaceable». In this context, the “war on terror” is no aberration. As the revolutionary psychoanalyst and philosopher Frantz Fanon documented in 1959, for example, certain medical practitioners had an integral role in the military occupation of Algeria, and «There are, for instance, psychiatrists … known to numerous prisoners», he suggested, «who have given electric shock treatments to the accused and have questioned them during the waking phase, which is characterized by a certain confusion, a relaxation of resistance, a disappearance of the person's defences.» (Fanon 1959/1965, 138). Indeed, in his analysis of the Algerian revolution, he discussed how resistance to and struggles over the meanings of medical power were integral to the revolution itself. However, while the role of medical power in the practice of torture has been subjected to sustained critique in the context of the “war on terror”, what follows examines the relationship between medical power and torture in the context of what has been depicted – metaphorically – as another (although to some extents related) “war”: the “war” on asylum. According to the UNHCR (2017, 3), between 5 and 35 per cent of those asylum seekers who have been granted refugee status have survived torture. And focusing on the UK as a case study, this chapter examines the institutional and legal structures prohibiting torture and inhuman and degrading treatment, particularly as they apply to those subject to immigration control in this context. But further, it also examines the ideological and political conditions within which claims by those seeking asylum that they have been subjected to torture prior to arrival can be (and have been) ignored, downplayed and denied. It examines how medical expertise has frequently been undermined in the asylum process when this expertise is utilised to add weight to asylum seekers’ claims to have experienced torture. It examines how there have been attempts to narrow the definition of torture in ways which exclude people from the protections to which torture survivors are entitled. But it also explores the ways in which segments of the medical profession have been complicit in riding roughshod over existing safeguards to prevent further harm to those who have experienced torture, thus potentially compounding its effects. In particular, it examines claims that in certain contexts clinicians have administered dangerous “care” in order to ensure the removal of people from the UK, despite them claiming that they – or their family members – face serious harm and persecution on arrival as a result of this. In a historical discussion of medical involvement in torture, Giovanni Maio (2001, 1609) has noted that from its earliest incarnations one of the features of torture has been its use as an «oppressive instrument used in the preservation of power». Furthermore, whilst methods of torture have certainly «developed», and continue to do so, he argues, this «function» of torture is «especially relevant today». This chapter argues that the (mis)treatment of those in the UK who say they have been tortured, preserves and is bound up with a particular manifestation of state power: the aims, rationale and dictates of immigration control. Its claims are perhaps much more mundane than the forms of direct medical complicity in torture alluded to above. But they are nonetheless important. For it is argued that the acts of omission and commission documented in this chapter expose the tensions between the rights of certain “categories” of migrants to be afforded adequate clinical care on the one hand, and the goals and aims of immigration control itself on the other. This poses profound questions about the functions of clinical care and the ethical duties, responsibilities and obligations of clinicians, it is suggested. But as this chapter also crucially explores, this is a form of power that many within the medical profession have historically challenged, and continue to do so

A signature motif mediating selective interactions of BCL11A with the NR2E/F subfamily of orphan nuclear receptors

Despite their physiological importance, selective interactions between nuclear receptors (NRs) and their cofactors are poorly understood. Here, we describe a novel signature motif (F/YSXXLXXL/Y) in the developmental regulator BCL11A that facilitates its selective interaction with members of the NR2E/F subfamily. Two copies of this motif (named here as RID1 and RID2) permit BCL11A to bind COUP-TFs (NR2F1;NR2F2;NR2F6) and Tailless/TLX (NR2E1), whereas RID1, but not RID2, binds PNR (NR2E3). We confirmed the existence of endogenous BCL11A/TLX complexes in mouse cortex tissue. No interactions of RID1 and RID2 with 20 other ligand-binding domains from different NR subtypes were observed. We show that RID1 and RID2 are required for BCL11A-mediated repression of endogenous γ-globin gene and the regulatory non-coding transcript Bgl3, and we identify COUP-TFII binding sites within the Bgl3 locus. In addition to their importance for BCL11A function, we show that F/YSXXLXXL/Y motifs are conserved in other NR cofactors. A single FSXXLXXL motif in the NR-binding SET domain protein NSD1 facilitates its interactions with the NR2E/F subfamily. However, the NSD1 motif incorporates features of both LXXLL and FSXXLXXL motifs, giving it a distinct NR-binding pattern in contrast to other cofactors. In summary, our results provide new insights into the selectivity of NR/cofactor complex formation