School Finance Reforms, Tax Limits, and Student Performance: Do Reforms Level Up or Dumb Down?

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, a majority of states substantially changed the ways in which schools were funded, either directly through court- or legislatively mandated school finance reform, or indirectly through tax and expenditure limits. To date, there have been few academic attempts to gauge the effects of these policy changes on actual outcomes of education. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap in the literature. We find compelling evidence that the imposition of tax or expenditure limits on local governments in a state results in a significant reduction in the mean for that state of student performance on standardized tests of mathematics skills. We also find that finance reforms in response to court mandates do not result in significant changes in either the mean level or the distribution of student performance on standardized tests of reading and mathematics. In addition, substantial finance reforms that are not legislative responses to explicit court mandates generally result in increases in mean student performance. Further, in those states that have implemented finance reforms of this type, the test performance of students residing in localities in which local revenues formed smaller shares of total revenue prior to the reforms improve relative to others after the reforms are implemented.

Economic inequality and the provision of schooling

This paper was presented at the conference "Unequal incomes, unequal outcomes? Economic inequality and measures of well-being" as part of session 3, "Education and crime in urban neighborhoods." The conference was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on May 7, 1999. The authors examine the empirical evidence on the relationship between school finance reform and student outcomes, review the economic literature in the field, and present new evidence of the effects of reform on community and school composition. They argue that if one's goal is to reduce income inequality substantially, one should not look to school finance reform as a particularly effective policy instrument. Even the most optimistic estimates of the impact of school finance reform on the distribution of student performance indicate that these effects are relatively small. Furthermore, the authors note that these small gains may come at a cost - the movement of higher income families into private sector schools, a development that would lead to less diversity within the public schools.Income distribution ; Income ; Education

Quantum Communication with an Accelerated Partner

An unsolved problem in relativistic quantum information research is how to model efficient, directional quantum communication between localised parties in a fully quantum field theoretical framework. We propose a tractable approach to this problem based on solving the Heisenberg evolution of localized field observables. We illustrate our approach by analysing, and obtaining approximate analytical solutions to, the problem of communicating coherent states between an inertial sender, Alice and an accelerated receiver, Rob. We use these results to determine the efficiency with which continuous variable quantum key distribution could be carried out over such a communication channel.Comment: Additional explanatory text and typo in Eq.17 correcte

Researching DIY Cultures: Towards a Situated Ethical Practice for Activist-Academia

The empirical study of DIY culture and feminist cultural activism is a flourishing interdisciplinary research area particularly in the USA, Canada, Australia and UK. This has enabled a growth in participant-researchers doing research on their own DIY cultures and activist communities of belonging. Tensions occur here for the participant-researcher in relation to conventional data collection methods, ethical and moral decisions and modes of research dissemination. This article develops discussions of dilemmas experienced by the authors during doctoral research projects on DIY punk, roller derby and queer feminist music cultures. We detail the possibilities and tensions met when the participant-researcher encounters existing subcultural theories, ethical codes of practice, data collection methods and the dissemination of academic research. In addition we offer insights into the under-documented emotional impacts and moments of crisis the participant-researcher needs to attend to when carrying out research with/in personal and political communities of belonging. In conclusion, we offer a series of recommendations for a situated ethical practice for research with/in DIY cultures in relation to engaged data generation

Distribution of entomopathogenic nematodes in an Irish sand dune system

A 100 x 800 m section of the sand dune system at North Bull Island, Dublin Bay, Ireland, was surveyed for entomopathogenic nematodes (EPN) by baiting soil cores with Galleria mellonella in July and August of 2001 and 2002. Two species were found: Steinernema feltiae (2.5 and 3.2% of cores) and Heterorhabditis downesi (1.9 and 3.8% of cores in 2001 and 2002, respectively). In each year, two colour variants of the G. mellonella cadavers containing H. downesi were found: purple and yellow. In both 2001 and 2002, H. downesi was most prevalent in the front 20 m of the dune system. Steinernema feltiae occurrence generally increased with distance into the dunes. In 2002, H. downesi was recovered most often in sandy paths than any other habitat surveyed but there was no habitat differentiation for S. feltiae. Human traffic may be an important factor in the distribution of both EPN and their insect hosts on Bull Island

Distribution of entomopathogenic nematodes in an Irish sand dune system

A 100 x 800 m section of the sand dune system at North Bull Island, Dublin Bay, Ireland, was surveyed for entomopathogenic nematodes (EPN) by baiting soil cores with Galleria mellonella in July and August of 2001 and 2002. Two species were found: Steinernema feltiae (2.5 and 3.2% of cores) and Heterorhabditis downesi (1.9 and 3.8% of cores in 2001 and 2002, respectively). In each year, two colour variants of the G. mellonella cadavers containing H. downesi were found: purple and yellow. In both 2001 and 2002, H. downesi was most prevalent in the front 20 m of the dune system. Steinernema feltiae occurrence generally increased with distance into the dunes. In 2002, H. downesi was recovered most often in sandy paths than any other habitat surveyed but there was no habitat differentiation for S. feltiae. Human traffic may be an important factor in the distribution of both EPN and their insect hosts on Bull Island

Quantum Connectivity of Space-Time and Gravitationally Induced Decorrelation of Entanglement

We discuss an alternative formulation of the problem of quantum optical fields in a curved space-time using localized operators. We contrast the new formulation with the standard approach and find observable differences for entangled states. We propose an experiment in which an entangled pair of optical pulses are propagated through non-uniform gravitational fields and find that the new formulation predicts de-correlation of the optical entanglement under experimentally realistic conditions