Managing Networks for School Improvement: Seven Lessons from the Field

In recent decades, new networks for school improvement (NSI) have proliferated across the country. These emerging organizational structures present education leaders with an opportunity to build dynamic infrastructures to engage schools in improvements to teaching and learning. NSI are diverse. Some NSI are part of school districts, while others are contracted by school districts to design blueprints for school improvement. What all NSI have in common is a central hub supporting a set of member schools, like the center of a wheel and its spokes. In this guidebook, we focus on common lessons for designing improvement infrastructures from the perspective of leaders across four different types of networks, including: Local district superintendents who support schools in a particular geographic area; Field support centers, which partner with district superintendents in the intermediary space between the central office and schools; Affinity organizations, which are independent non-profit organizations that work under contract from the central district office to support a select group of district schools; and Charter school management organizations that operate outside the district, supporting their affiliated member schools. Our aim was to better understand how NSI were responding to the increased demands of recent shifts to more rigorous college- and career-ready standards. These seven lessons emerged from interviews with central office administrators overseeing NSI and staff working in network hubs, as well as from observations of professional learning (PL) sessions provided by hubs. We hope these lessons are useful to your work improving teaching and learning in your school, network, or district

Possible effect of medically administered antibiotics on the mutans streptococci: implications for reduction in decay

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/74585/1/j.1399-302X.1989.tb00103.x.pd

The role of beta-lactamase-producing-bacteria in mixed infections

Beta-lactamase-producing bacteria (BLPB) can play an important role in polymicrobial infections. They can have a direct pathogenic impact in causing the infection as well as an indirect effect through their ability to produce the enzyme beta-lactamase. BLPB may not only survive penicillin therapy but can also, as was demonstrated in in vitro and in vivo studies, protect other penicillin-susceptible bacteria from penicillin by releasing the free enzyme into their environment. This phenomenon occurs in upper respiratory tract, skin, soft tissue, surgical and other infections. The clinical, in vitro, and in vivo evidence supporting the role of these organisms in the increased failure rate of penicillin in eradication of these infections and the implication of that increased rate on the management of infections is discussed

Constraints on Macquarie Ridge tectonics provided by Harvard focal mechanisms and teleseismic earthquake locations

In this study we evaluate teleseismically determined focal mechanisms and epicenters for earthquakes along the Macquarie Ridge Complex (MRC) from 45°S to 61°S and 155°E to 168°E, a region characterized by some previous investigators as undergoing subduction initiation. From 65 centroid moment tensors reported by Harvard, we develop statistical guidelines for choosing 26 which represent better determined, more reliable focal mechanisms for tectonic analysis. Although thrust mechanisms occur in the north, near Fiordland, elsewhere along the MRC the better determined mechanisms virtually all indicate that present-day motion along most of the MRC is strike-slip. This is consistent with sidescan sonar and multichannel reflection data collected between 50°S and 57°S on 1994 and 1996 cruises; the active plate boundary zone appears to be quite narrow (&lt; 5 km wide), and no active compressional features can be observed on the seafloor. If we determine a rotation pole for plate boundary motion using only slip vectors from better determined Harvard mechanisms along the MRC, the best fitting “instantaneous” pole is at 57.4°S, 179.4°E, about 2.5° north of the NUVEL-I Australian-Pacific pole, which averages motion over the last 3.0 my. If the MRC pole was formerly farther south than at present, this could explain the existence of relict features associated with crustal shortening, such as bathymetric highs and troughs; yet, the absence of active features such as thrust faults, etc., suggests ongoing compression or subduction initiation. We also carefully read arrival times for P phases for 53 earthquakes at 16 teleseismic stations, selected to represent a range of azimuths surrounding the earthquakes; we relocated these earthquakes using standard joint epicentral determination (JED) methods. While most of the better quality relocations lie on or very close to the Australia-Pacific boundary as determined on the 1994 cruise, a few epicenters occur well away from the boundary, apparently on Cenozoic fracture zones. Thus, on the Macquarie Ridge Complex and other major strike-slip boundaries (e.g., in California), it appears that the very largest earthquakes occur on the principal plate boundary fault but that other earthquakes, some quite large, may occur away from the boundary along zones of preexisting weakness. <br/