Giving a Student Voice to California's Dropout Crisis

Shares what first-year high school students find motivating or discouraging; how they view family, peer, and school factors; and how demographic characteristics, attitudes toward school, and support networks affect the odds of their dropping out

Discovering the Path Through the Labyrinth of the Fields: A Closer Look at the Education of Mexican-American Students in California's Central Valley and the Push for a Targeted Multicultural Curriculum

Is "the implicit role of the schools to keep the poor and minority students in their place by teaching them the proper attitudes and behaviors for becoming good workers, and of keeping the dominant classes in power by teaching their children to manage and control the working class?" While educational institutions may not consciously hold students back, by continuing white middle class pedagogy we reinforce the current situation. Thus, school is already predestining tomorrow's work force. Labeled "at risk," most poor (often times minority) children spend their entire educational careers on lower tracks, Schools serve to perpetuate not only a working-class work force, but in the process form a working-class mentality; the belief that certain individuals deserve respect while others should be looked down on is today being fed into the minds of all children

A Possible Alignment Between the Orbits of Planetary Systems and their Visual Binary Companions

Astronomers do not have a complete picture of the effects of wide-binary companions (semimajor axes greater than 100 AU) on the formation and evolution of exoplanets. We investigate these effects using new data from Gaia EDR3 and the TESS mission to characterize wide-binary systems with transiting exoplanets. We identify a sample of 67 systems of transiting exoplanet candidates (with well-determined, edge-on orbital inclinations) that reside in wide visual binary systems. We derive limits on orbital parameters for the wide-binary systems and measure the minimum difference in orbital inclination between the binary and planet orbits. We determine that there is statistically significant difference in the inclination distribution of wide-binary systems with transiting planets compared to a control sample, with the probability that the two distributions are the same being 0.0037. This implies that there is an overabundance of planets in binary systems whose orbits are aligned with those of the binary. The overabundance of aligned systems appears to primarily have semimajor axes less than 700 AU. We investigate some effects that could cause the alignment and conclude that a torque caused by a misaligned binary companion on the protoplanetary disk is the most promising explanation.Comment: 30 pages, 19 figures, 2 csv files included in Arxiv source; accepted for publication in A