School Competition and Efficiency with Publicly Funded Catholic Schools

The province of Ontario has two publicly funded school systems: secular schools (known as public schools) that are open to all students, and separate schools that are limited to children with Catholic backgrounds. A simple model of inter-system competition predicts that incentives for effort are higher in areas where there are more Catholic families who are relatively uncommitted to one system or the other. We measure the willingness of Catholic families to switch systems by studying the effect of school openings on enrollment at nearby schools in the competing system. The results suggest that families in rapidly growing areas have the weakest attachment to a particular system. We then relate student test score gains between 3rd and 6th grade to measures of potential cross-system competition. We find that competition for Catholic students has a significant effect on test outcomes in both systems, particularly in fast-growing areas. Our estimates imply that expanding competition to all students would raise average test scores in 6th grade by 6-8% of a standard deviation.school competition; student achievement

Women in Leadership and Social Justice\u27 talk contextualizes strides toward gender equity at UMaine

University of Maine President Joan Ferrini-Mundy hosted The Women in Leadership and Social Justice: The Importance of Diversity. Equity and Inclusion talk on March 15 [2021], at 4 p.m. This talk was a part of Women\u27s History Month and focused on discussing women\u27s issues and the importance of diversity

Growing High School STEM Outreach Program Led by Graduate Student

Inspiring passion for science-related fields in the next generation of scholar

Take part in Black History Month by stepping up to Fogler’s Racial Justice Challenge

Jen Bonnet, Madelyn Woods and Anila Karunakar co-designed Fogler Library’s Racial Justice Challenge, one resource of many for celebrating Black History Month at the University of Maine. Bonnet is a social sciences and humanities librarian at the Fogler Library on campus, Woods is a Ph.D. student in earth and climate sciences and Karunakar serves as the director of the Office for Diversity and Inclusion. The Racial Justice Challenge first launched in August of this past summer. “With the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Rayshard Brooks and other BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) at the hands of police officers, we recognized that we were witnessing unprecedented numbers of people from all walks of life join the longstanding efforts by BIPOC to address and dismantle systemic racism in this country,” Bonnet explained. The goal, according to Bonnet, was to create a program that allowed as many people as possible to participate and commit to this work. The three went on to then create the Racial Justice Challenge

Beowulf : Interpretation and Supplementation

This thesis investigates the various ways in which Beowulf has been interpreted across time, explaining how factors, called paratexts, have played a large part in shaping these interpretations and how, especially in reading the Beowulf manuscript, we inherit the sum of these influences. In order to demonstrate this, I present a variety of arguments and perspectives on the text that have been developed by scholars over the years based on different types of paratexts (physical, intangible, and translational) in the absence of a known author. At each stage of Beowulf’s life, there have been opportunities for individuals with authority over the text to change the way it was presented to the audience, even today where new media adaptations are responsible for representing Beowulf to a modern audience. My investigation concluded that despite the immense amount of research having been previously conducted in an effort to develop a deeper understanding of the text, ultimately, there will always be room for new interpretations

New Biology Chair Aims to Lift Program to New Heights

Sixue Chen brings focus on plant efficiency and desire to increase student opportunitie

Department of Communication and Journalism lecture discusses how to foster dialogues around race in the classroom

On October 19, 2020, as part of the CMJ Fall 2020 Colloquium, Laura Rickard and the Department of Communication and Journalism here at the University of Maine held “Dialoguing About Race,” a lecture about race and the classroom. This lecture featured three women with inspiring backgrounds: Jaquel Eley, Amber Kennedy and Lauren Babb