Seven perceptions influencing novice teachers’ efficacy and cultural competence

Novice teachers believe and behave according to perceptions about teaching, learning, and schooling they formed during childhood and adult experiences with families, classrooms, communities, media, and teacher education programs. Perceptions build funds of knowledge shaping teacher efficacy that influence their development of cultural competence–the processes of acquiring, accepting, and applying requisite knowledge, skills, and dispositions for ensuring educational equity and excellence for all learners. Through their words, actions, and interactions, novice teachers socially reproduce their interpretations of perceptions influencing their cultural competence visible through their generational perpetuation of practice. Survey research with novice teachers reveals the importance of their critical thinking substantiated with novice teachers’ benefits and limitations for each perception. Implications for personal, professional, and pedagogical growth are supported by novice teachers’ voices

Characteristics of Private Schools in the United States: Results From the 2011-12 Private School Universe Survey

In 1988, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) developed a private school data collection that improved on the sporadic collection of private school data dating back to 1890 bydeveloping an alternative to commercially available private school sampling frames. Since 1989, the U.S. Bureau of the Census has conducted the biennial Private School Universe Survey (PSS) for NCES. The PSS is designed to generate biennial data on the total number of private schools, students, and teachers, and to build a universe of private schools to serve as a sampling frame of private schools for NCES sample surveys. For more information about the methodology and design of the PSS, please see the Technical Notes in appendix B of this report. The target population for the PSS is all schools in the 50 states and the District of Columbia that are not supported primarily by public funds, provide classroom instruction for one or more of grades kindergarten through 12 (or comparable ungraded levels), and have one or more teachers. Organizations or institutions that provide support for home schooling, but do not provide classroom instruction, are not included. The 2011 -- 12 PSS data were collected between September 2011 and May 2012. All data are for the 2011 -- 12 school year except the high school graduate data, which are for the 2010 -- 11 school year.Because the purpose of this report is to introduce new NCES survey data through the presentation of tables containing descriptive information, only selected findings are listed below. These findings are purely descriptive in nature and are not meant to imply causality. These findings have been chosen to demonstrate the range of information available from the 2011 -- 12 PSS rather than to discuss all of the observed differences, emphasize any particular issue, or make comparisons over time.The tables in this report contain counts and percentages demonstrating bivariate relationships. All of the results have been weighted to reflect the sample design and to account for nonresponse and other adjustments. Comparisons drawn in the selected findings have been tested for statistical significance at the .05 level using Student's t statistics to ensure that the differences are larger than those that might be expected due to sampling variation. No adjustments were made for multiple comparisons. Many of the variables examined are related to one another, and complex interactions and relationships have not been explored. Statistical Analysis Software (SAS 9.2) and SUDAAN (10.0) were used to compute the statistics for this report

The frequency of muscle protein polymorphism in Menidia menidia (Atherinidae) along the Atlantic coast

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International Reserve Holdings with Sovereign Risk and Costly Tax Collection

This paper analyzes the international reserve-holding behavior of developing countries. It shows that political-economy considerations modify the optimal reserve level determined by efficiency criteria. A country characterized by volatile output, inelastic demand for fiscal outlays, high tax collection costs and sovereign risk will want to accumulate international reserves as well as external debt. Efficiency considerations imply that reserves are optimal when the benefits they provide for intertemporal consumption and distortion smoothing equal the costs of acquiring them. However, a greater chance of opportunistic behavior by future policy makers reduces the demand for international reserves and increases external borrowing. Political corruption also reduces optimal reserve holdings. We provide some evidence to support these findings. Consequently, the debt-to-reserves ratio may be less useful as a vulnerability indicator. A version of the Lucas Critique suggests that if a high debt-to-reserves ratio is a symptom of opportunistic behavior, a policy recommendation to increase international reserve holdings may be welfare-reducing.

The high demand for international reserves in the Far East: what's going on?

This paper explores econometric and theoretical interpretations for the relatively high demand for international reserves by countries in the Far East and the relatively low demand by some other developing countries. Using a sample of about 125 developing countries, we show that reserve holdings over the 1980-1996 period seem to be the predictable outcome of a few key factors, such as the size of international transactions, their volatility, the exchange-rate arrangement, and political considerations. The estimating equation also does a good job of predicting reserve holdings in Asia before the 1997 financial crisis. After the crisis, the estimating equation significantly under-predicts the reserve holdings of several key Far East countries, as one might expect from the Lucas Critique. This under-prediction is consistent with models explaining the demand for international reserves by developing countries. Specifically, we show that sovereign risk and costly tax collection to cover fiscal liabilities lead to a relatively large demand for international reserves. In the aftermath of a crisis, countries that have to deal with higher perceived sovereign risk and higher fiscal liabilities (both funded and unfunded) will opt to increase their demand for reserves. The models also help us understand why some developing countries do not hold large precautionary reserve balances in the aftermath of crises. Countries with high discount rates, political instability or political corruption find it optimal to hold much smaller precautionary balances. We also show that models that incorporate loss aversion predict a relatively large demand for international reserves. Hence, if a crisis increases the volatility of shocks and/or loss aversion, it will greatly increase in the demand for international reserves. Consequently, we conclude that the ‘puzzling’ pattern in international reserve holdings is reasonably explained by the extended models described in this paper.

Uncertainty and the Disappearance of International Credit

We show that increased uncertainty about the size of an emerging market's external debt has a nonlinear and potentially large adverse effect on the supply of international credit offered to them. We also show that if international creditors are first- order risk averse, attaching greater weight to utility derived from bad outcomes than from good ones, a moderate increase in uncertainty about debt overhang or about other relevant factors affecting repayment prospects-- can cause the supply of credit to dry up completely. We therefore offer one possible explanation for why emerging markets may find themselves suddenly cut off from international capital markets.