The Obsolescence of San Antonio v. Rodriguez in the Wake of the Federal Government’s Quest To Leave No Child Behind

Since the mid-1950s, a sea change in public education has taken place. Public education—a policy concern traditionally reserved to the states—has become a core concern of the federal government. This Note surveys three of the federal government’s most significant appropriations of power: the enactment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965; the creation of the Department of Education in 1980; and the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), the most recent, and easily most expansive, iteration of the ESEA. This Note also considers the manner in which the Supreme Court has facilitated federal control over education, despite the Court’s refusal to recognize a formal right to education. Finally, this Note argues that the federal government’s incursion into the realm of public education has established an implicit right to education that has rendered San Antonio v. Rodriguez, the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision that denied the existence of a fundamental right to education, obsolete

Money and mental contents

It can be hard to see where money fits in the world. Money seems both real and imaginary, since it has obvious causal powers, but is also, just as obviously, something humans have just made up. Recent philosophical accounts of money have declared it to be real, but for very different reasons. John Searle and Francesco Guala disagree over whether money is just whatever acts like money, or just whatever people believe to be money. In developing their accounts of institutions as a part of social reality, each uses money as a paradigm institution, but they disagree on how institutions exist. Searle argues that the institution of money belongs to an ontological level separate from the physical world, held up by the collective intentions of a group, while Guala claims that money is a part of the ordinary physical world and is just whatever performs a “money-like function” in a group, regardless of what that group believes about it. Here, we argue that any purely functional account like Guala’s will be unable to capture the distinctive phenomenon of money, since monetary transactions are defined by the attitudes transactors hold toward them. Money will be obscured or misidentified if defined functionally. As we go on to show by examining recent work by Smit et al., belief in money does not require taking on all of Searle’s ontological commitments, but money and mental contents will stand or fall together

Downright Sexy: Verticality, Implicit Power, and Perceived Physical Attractiveness

Grounded theory proposes that abstract concepts (e.g., power) are represented by perceptions of vertical space (e.g., up is powerful; down is powerless). We used this theory to examine predictions made by evolutionary psychologists who suggest that desirable males are those who have status and resources (i.e., powerful) while desirable females are those who are youthful and faithful (i.e., powerless). Using vertical position as an implicit cue for power, we found that male participants rated pictures of females as more attractive when their images were presented near the bottom of a computer screen, whereas female participants rated pictures of males as more attractive when their images were presented near the top of a computer screen. Our results support the evolutionary theory of attraction and reveal the social-judgment consequences of grounded theories of cognition

Pilot Study of Psychopathology Among Roman Catholic Secular Clergy

This pilot study gathered information regarding overall levels of psychopathology in a nationally selected, random sample of U.S. Roman Catholic secular (i.e., diocesan) priests using the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R; Derogatis, 2004). The study yielded a response rate of 45%. One-half of the participants reported marked psychological problems, with interpersonal sensitivity, anxiety, and depression most strongly correlated with the instrument’s overall index of psychopathology. Four dimensional scales were elevated (i.e., obsessive-compulsive, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, psychoticism), as were two indices (i.e., GSI, PST). Implications and directions for future research are discussed

Wages, Supervision and Sharing:An Analysis of the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey

Instrumental efficiency wage models predict an inverse relationship between wages and supervision with this relationship becoming more pronounced amongst firms that participate in some form of employee sharing. To be sure, our theoretical exposition predicts that an increase in total remuneration will elicit a larger cut in optimal monitoring in ‘sharing’ rather than ‘non sharing’ firms. In this paper, we explore these predictions empirically using the British 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey. Our results confirm an inverse relationship between supervision and pay but the trade-off is only heightened by the presence of performance related pay and employee share ownership schemes. We also find that employee share ownership and performance related pay are relatively more successful in alleviating the need to monitor, with the rate of profit sharing impacting insignificantly on the level supervision.Monitoring; supervision; profit sharing; employee share ownership; efficiency wages

Two-Variable Wilson Polynomials and the Generic Superintegrable System on the 3-Sphere

We show that the symmetry operators for the quantum superintegrable system on the 3-sphere with generic 4-parameter potential form a closed quadratic algebra with 6 linearly independent generators that closes at order 6 (as differential operators). Further there is an algebraic relation at order 8 expressing the fact that there are only 5 algebraically independent generators. We work out the details of modeling physically relevant irreducible representations of the quadratic algebra in terms of divided difference operators in two variables. We determine several ON bases for this model including spherical and cylindrical bases. These bases are expressed in terms of two variable Wilson and Racah polynomials with arbitrary parameters, as defined by Tratnik. The generators for the quadratic algebra are expressed in terms of recurrence operators for the one-variable Wilson polynomials. The quadratic algebra structure breaks the degeneracy of the space of these polynomials. In an earlier paper the authors found a similar characterization of one variable Wilson and Racah polynomials in terms of irreducible representations of the quadratic algebra for the quantum superintegrable system on the 2-sphere with generic 3-parameter potential. This indicates a general relationship between 2nd order superintegrable systems and discrete orthogonal polynomials