Why We Fight: How Public Schools Cause Social Conflict

It is all too often assumed that public education as we typically think of it today -- schooling provided and controlled by government -- constitutes the "foundation of American democracy." Such schooling, it is argued, has taken people of immensely varied ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds and molded them into Americans who are both unified and free. Public schooling, it is assumed, has been the gentle flame beneath the great American melting pot. Unfortunately, the reality is very different from those idealized assumptions. Indeed, rather than bringing people together, public schooling often forces people of disparate backgrounds and beliefs into political combat. This paper tracks almost 150 such incidents in the 2005-06 school year alone. Whether over the teaching of evolution, the content of library books, religious expression in the schools, or several other common points of contention, conflict was constant in American public education last year. Such conflict, however, is not peculiar to the last school year, nor is it a recent phenomenon. Throughout American history, public schooling has produced political disputes, animosity, and sometimes even bloodshed between diverse people. Such clashes are inevitable in government-run schooling because all Americans are required to support the public schools, but only those with the most political power control them. Political -- and sometimes even physical -- conflict has thus been an inescapable public schooling reality. To end the fighting caused by state-run schooling, we should transform our system from one in which government establishes and controls schools, to one in which individual parents are empowered to select schools that share their moral values and educational goals for their children

Unbearable Burden? Living and Paying Student Loans as a First-Year Teacher

It is widely believed that starting public school teacher salaries are too low, and student loan burdens are too high. If true, we could be facing a situation in which recent college graduates cannot afford to go into teaching because they will be unable to repay their college debts. Public policies are already being formulated on the basis of that conclusion. Unfortunately, the only major analysis of teacher salaries and student debt published to date is based largely on borrowers' subjective feelings about debt manageability. Likewise, more traditional methods of determining how much debt is too much offer little help because they are based primarily on general risks of default predicted by debt-to-income ratios rather than the ability of specific borrowers to handle their debts and other expenses. To provide legislators with a more objective basis for policymaking, this paper assesses first year teachers' ability to pay back college loans given their actual salaries and expenses. This method eliminates both the subjectivity of determining debt burdens on the basis of debtors' feelings, and the imprecision of using correlations between debt-to-income ratios and overall default rates. The findings presented here reveal that first year teachers in even the least affordable of the 16 districts examined can easily afford to pay back their debts. Indeed, with just some basic economizing, a first-year teacher could not only pay back average debt, but could handle debt levels nearly three times the national average. This does not mean that current teacher salaries or student debt burdens are "right" -- only markets can determine that -- but it does mean that there is no need for policymakers to intervene in either teacher pay or student aid to assure that college graduates can afford to become public school teachers

Professional knowledge in initial teacher education (ITE): a preliminary review of Hispanic literature

The global dominance of English as the principal language of international interchange in the teacher education field has, perhaps, diverted English-speaking scholars from the task of reviewing discourses in non-English languages. Taking as its focus the issue of professional knowledge in ITE, the present article considers scholarship predominantly of Spanish origin – to a lesser extent Portuguese and Latin American also – in an effort to begin to form an understanding of both historical antecedents and more recent approaches to professional knowledge in a Hispanic context. While the remit of the present article is one of introducing the work and ideas of significant scholars, it ends in pointing towards the need for further research in seeking to identify more fully what might be distinctive about the Hispanic contribution to a global discussion in the face of new 21st-century realities in teacher education and society more generally

On Using Curvature to Demonstrate Stability

A new approach for demonstrating the global stability of ordinary differential equations is given. It is shown that if the curvature of solutions is bounded on some set, then any nonconstant orbits that remain in the set, must contain points that lie some minimum distance apart from each other. This is used to establish a negative-criterion for periodic orbits. This is extended to give a method of proving an equilibrium to be globally stable. The approach can also be used to rule out the sudden appearance of large-amplitude periodic orbits

Global Stability for an SEIR Epidemiological Model with Varying Infectivity and Infinite Delay

A recent paper (Math. Biosci. and Eng. (2008) 5:389-402) presented an SEIR model using an infinite delay to account for varying infectivity. The analysis in that paper did not resolve the global dynamics for R0 \u3e 1. Here, we show that the endemic equilibrium is globally stable for R0 \u3e 1. The proof uses a Lyapunov functional that includes an integral over all previous states

Lyapunov Functions for Tuberculosis Models with Fast and Slow Progression

The spread of tuberculosis is studied through two models which include fast and slow progression to the infected class. For each model, Lyapunov functions are used to show that when the basic reproduction number is less than or equal to one, the disease-free equilibrium is globally asymptotically stable, and when it is greater than one there is an endemic equilibrium which is globally asymptotically stable

Global Stability of an SIR Epidemic Model with Delay and General Nonlinear Incidence

An SIR model with distributed delay and a general incidence function is studied. Conditions are given under which the system exhibits threshold behaviour: the disease-free equilibrium is globally asymptotically stable if R0 \u3c 1 and globally attracting if R0 = 1; if R0 \u3e 1, then the unique endemic equilibrium is globally asymptotically stable. The global stability proofs use a Lyapunov functional and do not require uniform persistence to be shown a priori. It is shown that the given conditions are satisfied by several common forms of the incidence function

DAIRY 2002: ANIMAL DISEASE EXCLUSION PRACTICES ON U.S. DAIRY OPERATIONS, 2002

Tabular reference: herd addition risks, contact risks, vaccination, disease management practicesLivestock Production/Industries,