Eliminating Excessive and Unfair Exclusionary Discipline in Schools Policy Recommendations for Reducing Disparities

All schools must be safe places for all members of the learning community. Schools have the right and indeed the responsibility to develop safe school climates to protect the safety of students and teachers, as well as the integrity of learning Yet the data indicate that it is relatively rare for students to pose a serious danger to themselves or others.In states like Texas, serious safety concerns trigger a "non-discretionary" mandatory removal, but these represent less than 5% of all disciplinary removals from school. While exclusion on grounds of safety is infrequent, students are routinely removed from school for minor offenses like tardiness, truancy, using foul language, disruption, and violation of the dress code.Of course, public school educators are also responsible for ensuring the integrity of the learning environment and attend to misbehavior that does not raise safety concerns. There is no question that there are circumstances where removing a student from a classroom is helpful to de-escalate a conflict, or to pursue an intervention outside the classroom with the support of an administrator, a counselor, parent(s) or community members. However, too many of our nation's public schools have moved away from reserving school exclusion only for the most serious offenses, and as a measure of last resort. Excessive suspensions and expulsions threaten educational opportunity, thereby undermining our national goals for closing academic achievement gaps for all children

Reauthorize, Revise, and Remember: Refocusing the No Child Left Behind Act To Fulfill Brown\u27s Promise

The adoption of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) was billed as a watershed moment in education policy. Yet, NCLB did not mark the federal government\u27s first major foray into education policy; in fact, it was just the most recent incarnation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA). Enacted at the height of the civil rights movement and as part of America\u27s War on Poverty, the ESEA is a federal civil rights statute at its core, designed to level the playing field and expand educational opportunity for poor children and children of color

The Disparate Impact of an Underfunded, Patchwork Indigent Defense System on Mississippi’s African Americans: The Civil Rights Case for Establishing a Statewide, Fully Funded Public Defender System

A fundamental principal of our nation\u27s criminal justice system is that regardless of financial status, whether wealthy or destitute, every accused person is entitled to the effective assistance of counsel. Despite over a decade of calls for reform by state courts, Mississippi is one of the few states that fail to meet its obligation to provide funding for attorneys representing the indigent criminally accused. As a result, Mississippi\u27s counties have shouldered the responsibility of paying court-appointed counsel without financial contribution from the state. The state\u27s eighty-two counties vary widely in wealth and resources. Some counties are able to provide reasonably adequate funding for indigent defense services, and even feature full-time, fully staffed public defender offices. Others, however, have maintained under-funded, part-time, court-appointed counsel systems. The resulting patchwork system of indigent defense practically ensures geographic disparities in the quality of counsel provided to poor Mississippians. Alternatively, a defendant\u27s access to counsel or decent advocacy varies widely depending on the county in which he is charged. African Americans in Mississippi, as throughout the nation, are disproportionately among the poor and the criminally accused. Therefore, the state\u27s failure to fund attorneys for the indigent accused acutely affects African Americans. The effects of the absence of meaningful advocacy for poor defendants reverberates widely and impacts African American families, neighborhoods, and communities

Children's creative collaboration during a computer-based music task

The purpose of this study was to identify and analyse specific instances of transactive communication as children engaged in a paired melody writing task using a computer-based composing environment. Transactive communication has been identified as one of the features of general collaborative engagement that is most helpful in an educational sense, and which makes collaborative learning an important tool for learning and teaching. The paper reports the results of an empirical study in which a group of 10 and 11 year olds worked in pairs to compose short melodies using computers. Analysis of between-pupil dialogue suggested that levels of transactive communication varied between pairs, and also within pairs as pupils took on different roles at the computer. Factors of individual difference, such as musical expertise or whether the pair were friends, did not appear to have a significant influence on the extent of, or nature or, transactive communication

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Search for gravitational-lensing signatures in the full third observing run of the LIGO-Virgo network

Gravitational lensing by massive objects along the line of sight to the source causes distortions of gravitational wave-signals; such distortions may reveal information about fundamental physics, cosmology and astrophysics. In this work, we have extended the search for lensing signatures to all binary black hole events from the third observing run of the LIGO--Virgo network. We search for repeated signals from strong lensing by 1) performing targeted searches for subthreshold signals, 2) calculating the degree of overlap amongst the intrinsic parameters and sky location of pairs of signals, 3) comparing the similarities of the spectrograms amongst pairs of signals, and 4) performing dual-signal Bayesian analysis that takes into account selection effects and astrophysical knowledge. We also search for distortions to the gravitational waveform caused by 1) frequency-independent phase shifts in strongly lensed images, and 2) frequency-dependent modulation of the amplitude and phase due to point masses. None of these searches yields significant evidence for lensing. Finally, we use the non-detection of gravitational-wave lensing to constrain the lensing rate based on the latest merger-rate estimates and the fraction of dark matter composed of compact objects

Search for eccentric black hole coalescences during the third observing run of LIGO and Virgo

Despite the growing number of confident binary black hole coalescences observed through gravitational waves so far, the astrophysical origin of these binaries remains uncertain. Orbital eccentricity is one of the clearest tracers of binary formation channels. Identifying binary eccentricity, however, remains challenging due to the limited availability of gravitational waveforms that include effects of eccentricity. Here, we present observational results for a waveform-independent search sensitive to eccentric black hole coalescences, covering the third observing run (O3) of the LIGO and Virgo detectors. We identified no new high-significance candidates beyond those that were already identified with searches focusing on quasi-circular binaries. We determine the sensitivity of our search to high-mass (total mass M>70 M⊙) binaries covering eccentricities up to 0.3 at 15 Hz orbital frequency, and use this to compare model predictions to search results. Assuming all detections are indeed quasi-circular, for our fiducial population model, we place an upper limit for the merger rate density of high-mass binaries with eccentricities 0<e≤0.3 at 0.33 Gpc−3 yr−1 at 90\% confidence level

Ultralight vector dark matter search using data from the KAGRA O3GK run

Among the various candidates for dark matter (DM), ultralight vector DM can be probed by laser interferometric gravitational wave detectors through the measurement of oscillating length changes in the arm cavities. In this context, KAGRA has a unique feature due to differing compositions of its mirrors, enhancing the signal of vector DM in the length change in the auxiliary channels. Here we present the result of a search for U(1)B−L gauge boson DM using the KAGRA data from auxiliary length channels during the first joint observation run together with GEO600. By applying our search pipeline, which takes into account the stochastic nature of ultralight DM, upper bounds on the coupling strength between the U(1)B−L gauge boson and ordinary matter are obtained for a range of DM masses. While our constraints are less stringent than those derived from previous experiments, this study demonstrates the applicability of our method to the lower-mass vector DM search, which is made difficult in this measurement by the short observation time compared to the auto-correlation time scale of DM