Dispatches from Flyover Country: Four Appraisals of Impacts of Trump’s Immigration Policy on Families, Schools, and Communities

A university professor and high school ESL teacher, both based in Lincoln Nebraska, each write two short essays that detail implications of the Trump administration immigration policies for students, teachers, schools, and communities. The first two dispatches come from the transition period (after Trump won but while Obama still presided) while the latter two come from the 50-day mark of the Trump presidency. Juxtaposing voices contrasts overarching impact with the local; juxtaposing chronologies allows comparison of political promises and threats to early actions and reactions

Teacher Perspectives on Equitable Education for Immigrant Students

The purpose of this video is to introduce you to four teachers In Eastern Nebraska. Plus myself, a professor at the University of Nebraska (Lincoln). All of us with experience teaching immigrant students and all of us with expertise related to how to best serve the needs, as well as attend to the aspirations and opportunities of immigrant students. This Vodcast will share different perspectives from different folks. We\u27re going to start this Vodcast, and we imagine this as the beginning of the series, basically by introducing ourselves, who are we, why are we on your screen. And then we\u27re going to add on to that a handful of belief statements. I don\u27t think it\u27s easy to figure out what school is supposed to do unless we articulate what we think school is supposed to do, and then from that strategies will follow. Today we are recording who are we, and what do we believe comments, and to kick this off I\u27m going to start, just because I\u27ve already got the mic. My name is Edmund Hamann, although I go as Ted. I\u27m a professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education at the University of Nebraska (Lincoln), and I\u27m also an equity fellow at the Midwest and Plains Equity Assistance Center. I began my career back in the early 1990s, leading an experimental bilingual family literacy program called Family Reading. Which had been co-developed by the National Council of La Raza and the Education Testing Service. The theme of considering immigrant students and families continued, I was the first in my work, but it continued when I wrote my master\u27s thesis on bilingual paraprofessionals in Kansas, mediating between Spanish speaking households and primarily English speaking public schools, and then again when I wrote my dissertation on a partnership that connected Georgia\u27s first majority Latino school district with a university in Mexico. That effort, the Georgia Project, included sending U.S. teachers on summer travel study to Mexico to learn about schools there. It included hiring Mexican teachers to serve temporarily as instructors in Georgia schools. It included a reimagining, revisioning, of the curriculum to be more responsive to those, in this case Mexican newcomers to Georgia. And then since then, first for the federally funded Northeastern Islands Regional Education Laboratory, which was then around university, and then more recently to the University of Nebraska. I have variously considered how school reform includes or excludes English learners, how school districts have responded to immigration enforcement actions, ICE actions In their communities, how curriculum can be adapted to be more accessible to international newcomers, and most extensively how schools in Mexico have received students with prior experience in the United States. In sum then, the biggest part of what I do is think about how schools and school systems respond to the transnationally mobile, whether students or parents, whether from Latin America to the U.S., or the U.S. to Latin America, and then how can they respond better. Transcript attached below

Conflict of interest reforms and analysts’ research biases

This study examines the consequences of the series of reforms targeting investment banking–related conflicts of interest. The authors compare and contrast optimism biases in analysts’ stock recommendations and earnings forecasts across different types of analyst firms in the postreform period of 2004 to 2007 versus the prereform period of 1998 to 2001. The authors document a significant reduction in the relative optimism of sanctioned investment bank analysts’ stock recommendations but not in their earnings forecasts. Moreover, the authors find little change in the profitability of their stock recommendations but detect a drop in the accuracy of earnings forecasts made by investment bank analysts. In sum, the reforms achieve the objective of mitigating the apparent optimism in investment bank stock recommendations, but they do not provide benefit to investors in terms of more profitable recommendations or more accurate earnings forecasts.Guan appreciates research start-up grant from City University of Hong Kong. Lu and Wong acknowledge financial support from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

From Likert scales to images: Validating a novel creativity measure with image based response scales.

The use of image-based testing to assess individual differences has increased substantially in recent years, with proponents arguing that they offer a more engaging alternative to text-based psychometric tests. Yet research examining the validity of these tests is near to non-existent. Traditional image-based formats have been little more than an adaptation of self-reports, with images replacing questions but not response options. The current study develops a novel image-based creativity measure, where images replace conventional response scales, and scores on the measures are obtained using a linear regression scoring algorithm to predict three self-reported creativity measures. Using sequential forward selection on a set of 77 image-based items, an optimal solution of 14 items that were valid predictors of self-reported creativity scores were identified. The image-based measure had good test-retest reliability. Implications are discussed in terms of the usefulness of image-based testing for practitioners seeking engaging and short test formats