Superintendent and School Board Relations: Impacting Achievement through Collaborative Understanding of Roles and Responsibilities

One of the most important and influential persons in the governance structure of the local school district is the Superintendent of Schools. Functioning as the CEO of the district, the superintendent is responsible for a myriad of functions. Examples include daily operations inclusive of transportation and finance, curriculum and policy implementation, media relations, and empowering leaders. However, as Meador (2014) contends, a crucial role is that of board liaison. The Superintendent is responsible for keeping the board informed, making recommendations regarding district operations, and setting the board agenda. It is interesting to note that the superintendent does participate in board meetings, but in an advisory capacity. Finally, the superintendent is responsible for enacting all mandates approved by the school board

Spatio-temporal change in riparian woodlands of the Kruger National Park: drivers and implications

Verbal accounts, supported by limited ground-based and satellite images, reveal decreasing riparian woodland and a loss of large trees along the rivers of the Kruger National Park (KNP) over the last century. These habitats occupy a tiny fraction of the park’s surface area but fulfil critical ecological functions and provide several ecosystem services. Little research has, however, focused on riparian woodland dynamics across the park. Here a multi-decadal time-series analysis of riparian woodland extent was conducted to identify trends in extent and possible drivers of riparian woody vegetation change. Aerial and satellite imagery (1936 to 2018) was used to measure changes in the extent of riparian woodland tree cover for 18 approx. 10 km long sites along five perennial and nine non-perennial rivers in KNP. This change was compared in a multivariate time-series with river flow and rainfall data from nearby gauging and weather stations, respectively. Particular attention was paid to cumulative flow effects, as well as the frequency and magnitude of large infrequent disturbances (LIDs) such as droughts and floods, which regulate the depth of the water table and may manifest as a physical disturbance. Tree cover fluctuated over the time period and the trajectory of change varied between sites. Most sites (n=11) experienced a decline in overall tree cover over the period while 14 showed a downward trend, six significantly. Overall tree cover increased at six sites, three of which showed an increasing trend (one significantly). There tended to be proportionately higher tree cover loss per year at sites with higher median tree cover. It appears that tree cover decreased substantially at a number of sites following the mega-flood event of 2000 and subsequent large floods over the last decade. It was not possible to generalise responses for the different sites, no doubt because of varying geology, flow regimes and vegetation characteristics at each site, resulting in differing responses to aspects of river flow and rainfall. Peak flow and maximum rainfall events, however, were the strongest significant association with decreases in riparian tree cover, indicating that floods are potentially the biggest drivers of tree loss. Flow variability and cumulative rainfall appear to significantly influence woodland expansion. The initial findings from this study should prompt increased attention to riparian habitats through fine-scale, detailed work aimed at further understanding the dynamics of these systems and determining thresholds for conservation concern in an attempt to ensure persistence of these important ecosystems

South Carolina Slave Prices, 1722-1809

Based on data from several samples of probate inventories we construct and analyze a time series of slave prices for South Carolina from 1722 to 1809. These estimates reveal that prices fluctuated without trend prior to the 1760s and then began to rise rapidly, more than doubling by the early nineteenth century. Estimates of supply and demand functions indicate that while long-run slave supply was highly elastic, the short-run supply function was quite inelastic. Our analysis of the slave price series indicates that the price of rice was the major determinant of the demand for slaves and in turn largely explains the rise in slave prices. These findings have important implications for the interpretation of evidence on rising yields in rice production over the eighteenth century and the sources of wealth accumulation in South Carolina.

Conjectural Estimates of Economic Growth in the Lower South, 1720 to 1800

This paper describes the first step in a larger project to build up regional estimates of economic growth before 1800 in the parts of North America that became the United States. In it we employ the method of conjectural estimation to develop new estimates of the rate of economic growth in the Lower South (modern day North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee) from 1720 to 1800 for both colonists and the Native American population of the region. Contrary to the widely held view that GDP per capita grew at a rate of 0.3 to 0.6 percent per year during the eighteenth century our best estimate is that per capita GDP grew at just 0.09 percent per year. Despite the slow growth of GDP per capita, however, the region's economy did achieve appreciable extensive growth, and achieving any advance in per capita production can be viewed as a significant accomplishment in light of the challenges that this growth posed for the economy. The difference between our estimate and those of previous studies appears to be the result of earlier scholars' undue focus on export performance. In contrast, our approach allows us to accurately account for the effect of the slowly growing domestic sector of the economy.

The Role of Exports in the Economy of Colonial North America: New Estimates for the Middle Colonies

Economic historians of the eighteenth-century British mainland North American colonies have given considerable weight to the role of exports as a stimulus for economic growth. Yet their analyses have been handicapped by reliance on one or two time series to serve as indicators of broader changes rather than considering the export sector as a whole. Here we construct comprehensive export measures for the middle colonies. We find that aggregate exports did grow quickly but that this expansion failed to keep pace with population growth during much of the period under consideration. We argue this result challenges the export staples model on the role of foreign demand as a stimulus for economic growth. Instead, these results emphasize the impact of resource abundance and labor and capital scarcity as the defining characteristics of colonial economic growth.

Economic Growth in the Mid Atlantic Region: Conjectural Estimates for 1720 to 1800

We construct decadal estimates of GDP per capita for the colonies and states of the Mid Atlantic region between 1720 and 1800. They show that the region likely achieved modest improvements in per capita GDP over this period despite a number of demographic factors that tended to slow the pace of growth. Nonetheless the rate of growth we find is below that commonly assumed to have prevailed in eighteenth century North America and calls those estimates into question. The striking feature of the region's economy in the eighteenth century was not rising living-standards, but its ability to achieve rapid extensive growth without a decline in living standards. To contemporaries this extensive growth and short-term volatility in incomes must have been much more visible than any trend improvement in overall well-being.This work was supported in part under National Science Foundation Grant SES-031726

An Empirical Study of Judicial Review of Agency Interpretations of Agency Rules

In this essay, Pierce and Weiss report the results of a study of judicial review of agency interpretations of agency rules. Prior studies found that, while courts at all levels uphold about 70% of agency actions, the Supreme Court upholds 91% of agency interpretations of agency rules. Pierce and Weiss find that lower courts do not confer this type of super deference on agency interpretations of agency rules. District courts and circuit courts uphold 76% of such agency actions. That is within the range of the findings of prior studies of judicial review of other types of agency actions and much lower than the rate at which the Supreme Court upholds agency interpretations of agency rules. Pierce and Weiss also find no evidence that judges are influenced by their political or ideological preferences when they review agency interpretations of agency rules. That finding is consistent with the findings of a prior study of judicial review of agency findings of fact, but it is inconsistent with the findings of several studies of judicial review of agency interpretations of agency-administered statutes and of judicial review of agency policy decisions

Rapid protein immobilization for thin film continuous flow biocatalysis

Open Access Article. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.A versatile enzyme immobilization strategy for thin film continuous flow processing is reported. Here, non-covalent and glutaraldehyde bioconjugation are used to immobilize enzymes on the surfaces of borosilicate reactors. This approach requires only ng of protein per reactor tube, with the stock protein solution readily recycled to sequentially coat >10 reactors. Confining reagents to thin films during immobilization reduced the amount of protein, piranha-cleaning solution, and other reagents by ∼96%. Through this technique, there was no loss of catalytic activity over 10 h processing. The results reported here combines the benefits of thin film flow processing with the mild conditions of biocatalysis