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

End It, Don't Mend It: What to Do with No Child Left Behind

The looming expiration of the federal No Child Left Behind Act has prompted a flood of commission reports, studies, and punditry. Virtually all of those analyses have assumed that the law should and will be reauthorized, disagreeing only over how it should be revised. They have accepted the law's premises without argument: that government-imposed standards and bureaucratic "accountability" are effective mechanisms for improving American education and that Congress should be involved in their implementation. In this paper, we put those preconceptions under a microscope and subject NCLB to a thorough review. We explore its effectiveness to date and ask whether its core principles are sound. We find that No Child Left Behind has been ineffective in achieving its intended goals, has had negative unintended consequences, is incompatible with policies that do work, is at the mercy of a political process that can only worsen its prospects, and is based on premises that are fundamentally flawed. We further conclude that NCLB oversteps the federal government's constitutional limits -- treading on a responsibility that, by law and tradition, is reserved to the states and the people. We therefore recommend that NCLB not be reauthorized and that the federal government return to its constitutional bounds by ending its involvement in elementary and secondary education

The pathophysiology of fluid and electrolyte balance in the older adult surgical patient

Background & aims: Age-related physiological changes predispose even the healthy older adult to fluid and electrolyte abnormalities which can cause morbidity and mortality. The aim of this narrative review is to highlight key aspects of age-related pathophysiological changes that affect fluid and electrolyte balance in older adults and underpin their importance in the perioperative period. Methods: The Web of Science, MEDLINE, PubMed and Google Scholar databases were searched using key terms for relevant studies published in English on fluid balance in older adults during the 15 years preceding June 2013. Randomised controlled trials and large cohort studies were sought; other studieswere used when these were not available. The bibliographies of extracted papers were also searched for relevant articles. Results: Older adults are susceptible to dehydration and electrolyte abnormalities, with causes ranging from physical disability restricting access to fluid intake to iatrogenic causes including polypharmacy and unmonitored diuretic usage. Renal senescence, as well as physical and mental decline, increase this susceptibility. Older adults are also predisposed to water retention and related electrolyte abnormalities, exacerbated at times of physiological stress. Positive fluid balance has been shown to be an independent risk factor for morbidity and mortality in critically ill patients with acute kidney injury. Conclusions: Age-related pathophysiological changes in the handling of fluid and electrolytes make older adults undergoing surgery a high-risk group and an understanding of these changes will enable better management of fluid and electrolyte therapy in the older adult

Frequency of the C9orf72 hexanucleotide repeat expansion in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia: a cross-sectional study.

We aimed to accurately estimate the frequency of a hexanucleotide repeat expansion in C9orf72 that has been associated with a large proportion of cases of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD)

Classification Criteria for Tubulointerstitial Nephritis With Uveitis Syndrome

PURPOSE: To determine classification criteria for tubulointerstitial nephritis with uveitis (TINU). DESIGN: Machine learning of cases with TINU and 8 other anterior uveitides. METHODS: Cases of anterior uveitides were collected in an informatics-designed preliminary database, and a final database was constructed of cases achieving supermajority agreement on the diagnosis, using formal consensus techniques. Cases were split into a training set and a validation set. Machine learning using multinomial logistic regression was used on the training set to determine a parsimonious set of criteria that minimized the misclassification rate among the anterior uveitides. The resulting criteria were evaluated on the validation set. RESULTS: One thousand eighty-three cases of anterior uveitides, including 94 cases of TINU, were evaluated by machine learning. The overall accuracy for anterior uveitides was 97.5% in the training set and 96.7% in the validation set (95% confidence interval 92.4, 98.6). Key criteria for TINU included anterior chamber inflammation and evidence of tubulointerstitial nephritis with either (1) a positive renal biopsy or (2) evidence of nephritis (elevated serum creatinine and/or abnormal urine analysis) and an elevated urine beta-2 microglobulin. The mis-classification rates for TINU were 1.2% in the training set and 0% in the validation set. CONCLUSIONS: The criteria for TINU had a low mis-classification rate and seemed to perform well enough for use in clinical and translational research. (C) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Classification Criteria for Cytomegalovirus Anterior Uveitis

PURPOSE: To determine classification criteria for cytomegalovirus (CMV) anterior uveitis. DESIGN: Machine learning of cases with CMV anterior uveitis and 8 other anterior uveitides. METHODS: Cases of anterior uveitides were collected in an informatics-designed preliminary database, and a final database was constructed of cases achieving supermajority agreement on the diagnosis, using formal consensus techniques. Cases were split into a training set and a validation set. Machine learning using multinomial logistic regression was used on the training set to determine a parsimonious set of criteria that minimized the misclassification rate among the anterior uveitides. The resulting criteria were evaluated on the validation set. RESULTS: One thousand eighty-three cases of anterior uveitides, including 89 cases of CMV anterior uveitis, were evaluated by machine learning. The overall accuracy for anterior uveitides was 97.5% in the training set and 96.7% in the validation set (95% confidence interval 92.4, 98.6). Key criteria for CMV anterior uveitis included unilateral anterior uveitis with a positive aqueous humor polymerase chain reaction assay for CMV. No clinical features reliably diagnosed CMV anterior uveitis. The misclassification rates for CMV anterior uveitis were 1.3% in the training set and 0% in the validation set. CONCLUSIONS: The criteria for CMV anterior uveitis had a low misclassification rate and seemed to perform sufficiently well for use in clinical and translational research. (C) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved