Examining the Myth of Accountability, High-Stakes Testing, and the Achievement Gap

In this article we outline how notions of accountability and the achievement gap have relied upon the massive expansion of high-stakes exams in our nation’s schools. Texas-style test and punish accountability manifested in various ways within schools and school culture across the nation via NCLB, which undermined notions of trust within education. More than decade of national education policy focused on high-stakes testing and accountability—despite that the fact that the rise of high-stakes testing also involved considerable legal, ethical, and social considerations. We argue the practice of spending large amounts of time on test preparation and test taking must be reversed lest we continue on the path of maintaining schools solely as machinery for stratification. We conclude that market- and business-oriented ideology, has reinforced the racist under- and overtones of testocracy in the United States and has neither closed the achievement gap nor fomented meaningful accountability or success

Skin Cancer Prevention

The state of Vermont has one of the highest incidences of skin cancer, and in particular melanoma, in the entire country. In fact, melanoma is the fifth most common cancer diagnosed in Vermont. The purpose of this project is to determine the impact of skin cancer on the state of Vermont and to develop a patient-centered educational brochure in which to educate patients on skin cancer and ways to prevent it. Through interviews with subject experts it is clear that one of the best ways to prevent skin cancer is through education. The informational brochure on skin health met a need in the family medicine clinic. Moreover, a survey was created to determine patients’ knowledge on the topic of skin cancer as well as to determine the effectiveness of the brochure. Finally, an abbreviated version of the brochure as well as a skin lesion history and description form was created for the electronic medical record.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1161/thumbnail.jp

High Costs to Peddling Solutions in Search of Problems. A Book Review of \u3cem\u3eSelling School: The Marketing of Public Education\u3c/em\u3e

The unwavering commitment by reformers to privatize schools through educational marketplaces has fostered a rise in educational advertising necessitated by the competitive nature of commodification. Not only has this new form of edvertising fostered the creation of new jobs within the corporate cabal but it relies heavily on what are likely misleading claims of academic success and, additionally, raises serious questions about funds being diverted away from pedagogical practices in favor of glossy advertisements and videos. Selling School: The Marketing of Public Education by DiMartino and Jessen explores the ways in which edvertising within the educational landscape serves as a mechanism by, and through, which, corporate slogans, ideological commitments, and misleading claims seek to reify the need for privatization and the creation of customer loyalty both within and outside of the corporate school

Choice without Inclusion?: Comparing the Intensity of Racial Segregation in Charters and Public Schools at the Local, State and National Levels

We conduct descriptive and inferential analyses of publicly available Common Core of Data (CCD) to examine segregation at the local, state, and national levels. Nationally, we find that higher percentages of charter students of every race attend intensely segregated schools. The highest levels of racial isolation are at the primary level for public and middle level for charters. We find that double segregation by race and class is higher in charter schools. Charters are more likely to be segregated, even when controlling for local ethnoracial demographics. A majority of states have at least half of Blacks and a third of Latinx in intensely segregated charters. At the city level, we find that higher percentages of urban charter students were attending intensely segregated schools

Brown Dwarfs in the Pleiades Cluster. III. A deep IZ survey

We present the results of a deep CCD-based IZ photometric survey of a ~1 sq. deg area in the central region of the Pleiades Galactic open cluster. The magnitude coverage of our survey (from I~17.5 down to 22) allows us to detect substellar candidates with masses between 0.075 and 0.03 Msol. Details of the photometric reduction and selection criteria are given. Finder charts prepared from the I-band images are provided.Comment: 11 pages with 8 figures, 4 of them are finder charts given in gif format. Accepted for publication in A&AS. Also available at http://www.iac.es/publicaciones/preprints.htm

Ideologies of time: How elite corporate actors engage the future

Our paper deals with how elite corporate actors in a Western capitalist-democratic society conceive of and prepare for the future. Paying attention to how senior officers of ten important Danish companies make sense of the future will help us to identify how particular temporal narratives are ideologically marked. This ideological dimension offers a common sense frame that is structured around a perceived inevitability of capitalism, a market economy as the basic organizational structure of the social and economic order, and an assumption of confident access to the future. Managers envisage their organization?s future and make plans for organizational action in a space where ?business as usual? reigns, and there is little engagement with the future as fundamentally open; as a time-yet-to-come. In using a conceptual lens inspired by the work of Fredric Jameson, we first explore the details of this presentism and a particular colonization of the future, and then linger over small disruptions in the narratives of our interviewees which point to what escapes or jars their common sense frame, explore the implicit meanings they assign to their agency, and also find clues and traces of temporal actions and strategies in their narratives that point to a subtly different engagement with time

NEPC Review: The Effects of Means-Tested Private School Choice Programs on College Enrollment and Graduation (Urban Institute, July 2019)

A report by the Urban Institute, The Effects of Means-Tested Private School Choice Programs on College Enrollment and Graduation, compares certain outcomes of three school voucher programs to traditional public school programs. It finds that students using vouchers to attend private schools sometimes have higher rates of college enrollment and completion than their public school counterparts. These findings, however, arise from comparisons of apples to oranges, because the two case studies showing some voucher benefits do not sufficiently account for pivotal differences between choosers and non-choosers. Only in the third case study, which uses random assignment and thus avoids these selection effects, do we see no voucher benefits. Two other concerns are important to note. First, the literature review places an unbalanced reliance on non-peer-reviewed sources. Second, the report attempts to &ldquo;move the goalposts&rdquo; away from the test-score outcomes that have been the center of voucher advocacy and debate for decades&mdash;coinciding with recent voucher studies finding null or negative effects on test scores. These shortcomings render the report of limited value for evaluating voucher policies.</p