Preparing student teachers for Teaching Practice: early placements in Initial Teacher Education

This paper reports a pilot project of ten initial teacher training students engaged on a three-year undergraduate programme leading to BA(hons) in English with QTS. In the first two years of their programme, student teachers normally receive academic input only, embarking on a one-year practicum stage in the third year of their programme. The project allowed student teachers to become closely associated with one of the University’s partnership schools to enable them to understand the daily life in schools and begin to engage with teaching. In addition they used secure social networking through the Mahara e-portfolio system to exchange ideas and experiences. The project proved highly successful in reducing isolation, enhancing communication and it helped student teachers to decide which kind of school they wished to work with in the future

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

Deception

Prose by Stephen Neal

Simulation based sequential Monte Carlo methods for discretely observed Markov processes

Parameter estimation for discretely observed Markov processes is a challenging problem. However, simulation of Markov processes is straightforward using the Gillespie algorithm. We exploit this ease of simulation to develop an effective sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithm for obtaining samples from the posterior distribution of the parameters. In particular, we introduce two key innovations, coupled simulations, which allow us to study multiple parameter values on the basis of a single simulation, and a simple, yet effective, importance sampling scheme for steering simulations towards the observed data. These innovations substantially improve the efficiency of the SMC algorithm with minimal effect on the speed of the simulation process. The SMC algorithm is successfully applied to two examples, a Lotka-Volterra model and a Repressilator model.Comment: 27 pages, 5 figure

Congress, the FCC, and the Search for the Public Trustee

The features of constitutional politics involving independent agencies are discussed through an examination of FCC efforts to repudiate regulatory initiatives designed to facilitate diversity in broadcasting

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

The Redactor

Artist Publication. Printed for and commissioned by Antony Hudek for the exhibition 'The Incidental Person' at Apexart, New York, 2010. One of a series of artist publications produced by Office of Experiments. The publication represents research into autonomous forms of research and individual artists dealing with research outside of institutions. In many cases this work seeks to examine information that has been censored or redacted, generating speculation and evidence as it does so . Artist were selected on the basis that they create their own structures - such as Rich Pell and his Center for Post Natural History. Office of Experiments is another example of this. Other featured researchers were involved with Office of Epxeriments own research projects and occupy a contested space between official research and secrecy. All have questioned the authenticity of institutions in relation to knowledge and the work is set in the context of institutional critique. The research reflects Whites work as a former Director of O+I, the group which took over from the Artist Placement Group and on whose ideas Antony Hudek used for the exhibition 'The Incidental Person'