Promoting Equity In A Local Urban School Setting

Zoning can impact quality in the education of students, particularly students of color and of lower socio-economic status. An impact of zoning involves family access to quality schools. This is an issue that affects many students locally and throughout the country and may lead to a form of de facto segregation. School segregation as a byproduct of zoning can impact families and children in socioeconomic level and ethnic identification as important factors. The problem is that students who attend schools located in affluent communities typically have access to more school resources and modern facilities compared to students who attend schools in areas where families have low incomes, typically neighborhoods where zoning is established. This type of segregation contributes to inequality that may manifest itself in school quality. The purpose of this study is to identify how school personnel can promote equity given the circumstances of the local school setting, specifically in schools that serve English language learners. The review of the literature reveals that school segregation based on zoning factors contributes to the disparity in the allotment of resources given to different schools based on family wealth. Educational personnel including administrators and classroom teachers in an elementary school were interviewed for their perspectives on ways to promote equity within the context of de facto segregation at school. Keywords: equity, inequity, zoning, segregation, resource

Writing Space, Righting Place: Language as a Heterotopic Space in Olaudah Equiano\u27s Interesting Narrative

Olaudah Equiano or Gustavas Vassa may have had abolitionist motivations when writing The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavas Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, but the function of the text is much different and self-serving. Specifically, in looking closely at the wording of the text, with its language of we versus they, in group versus out group, ours versus theirs, Equiano clearly feels he at no time belongs fully to any specific group or place; rather, he only partially belongs anywhere, and thus, creates this work of autobiography and appropriation of fiction and oral tradition to negotiate and cultivate his own liminal, or even heterotopic, space. In other words, I suggest he may have used the writing of this text to define his sense of self, creating a space in which he was both in control and fully belonged

Il sistema di allenamento analogico/simbolico nello sport della pallavolo: Una valutazione delle componenti mnesitico/attentive

I benefici che l’attività motoria opera sia nell’età adulta che durante l’infanzia sono molteplici. Tra questi, si annoverano i miglioramenti delle abilità percettive, attentive e mnestiche. Lo scopo del presente lavoro è verificare se le capacità mnestiche ed attentive possano essere incrementate dalla messa in opera di un’offerta formativa specifica. Due gruppi di bambini, di età compresa tra i sei e i dieci anni sono stati avviati al gioco della pallavolo. Un gruppo è stato allenato con un metodo che carica di significati i movimenti corporei dell’allenatore e dei compagni al fine di associare tali movimenti allo svolgimento di future indicazioni da eseguire (Pittera, Pedata e Ligas, 2008). L’altro gruppo ha svolto esercizi propedeutici alla pallavolo attraverso la focalizzazione sull’apprendimento dei gesti tecnici. La differenza tra i dati raccolti all’inizio e alla fine del periodo di allenamento preso in esame evidenziarono un miglioramento della capacità di ricordare azioni motorie; nessun miglioramento apparve però per quanto ha riguardato il numero di posizioni spaziali o il numero di componenti verbali da ricordare. Sorprendentemente, poi, nessun miglioramento emerse nelle misure di attenzione sostenuta. I risultati suggeriscono come, focalizzando l’attenzione dei discenti sugli aspetti motori dell’esercizio, e facendo in modo che questi aumentino di significato al fine della successiva realizzazione di nuovi compiti, si possa aumentare una capacità basilare di ogni apprendimento sportivo, ovvero la capacità di ricordare nuove azioni

Student evaluations of teaching are not only unreliable, they are significantly biased against female instructors

A series of studies across countries and disciplines in higher education confirm that student evaluations of teaching (SET) are significantly correlated with instructor gender, with students regularly rating female instructors lower than male peers. Anne Boring, Kellie Ottoboni and Philip B. Stark argue the findings warrant serious attention in light of increasing pressure on universities to measure teaching effectiveness. Given the unreliability of the metric and the harmful impact these evaluations can have, universities should think carefully on the role of such evaluations in decision-making

Adaptive Polynomial Harmonic Distortion Compensation in Current and Voltage Transformers Through Iteratively Updated QR Factorization

Measuring current and voltage harmonics has paramount importance for improving the power quality of distribution grids. However, the achieved accuracy strongly depends on the adopted instrument transformer (IT). This article proposes an adaptive technique that enables an effective compensation of both the filtering behavior and the harmonic distortion (HD) introduced by current and voltage transformers (VTs), namely the strongest nonlinear effect at low-order harmonics. The approach is based on a flexible, linear in the parameters polynomial modeling of HD in the frequency domain. Model complexity can be different from one harmonic to the other, and it is selected through an automatic iterative process to suit the nonlinear behavior at each specific harmonic order, while avoiding overfitting. In particular, the number of parameters is increased by progressively updating the QR factorization of the regressor matrix trough Householder reflections until a convergence condition is reached. Experimental tests performed on an inductive VT and current transformer (CT) highlight the effectiveness of the approach