High School Choice in New York City: A Report on the School Choices and Placements of Low-Achieving Students

School choice policies, a fixture of efforts to improve public education in many cities. aim to enable families to choose a school that they believe will best meet their child's needs. In New York City, choice and the development of a diverse portfolio of options have played central roles in the Department of Education's high school reform efforts. This report examines the choices and placements of New York City's lowest-achieving students: those scoring among the bottom 20 percent on standardized state tests in middle school. Focusing on data from 2007 to 2011, the report looks at who these low-achieving students are, including how their demographics compare to other students in NYC, the educational challenges they face, and where they live. The bulk of the report reviews low-achieving students' most preferred schools and the ones to which they were ultimately assigned, assessing how these schools compare to those of their higher-achieving peers. The findings show that low-achieving students attended schools that were lower performing, on average, than those of all other students. This was driven by differences in students' initial choices: low-achieving students' first-choice schools were less selective, lower-performing, and more disadvantaged. Overall, lower-achievingand higher-achieving students were matched to their top choices at the same rate. Importantly, both low- and higher-achieving students appear to prefer schools that are close to home, suggesting that differences in students' choices likely reflect, at least in part, the fact that lower-achieving students are highly concentrated in poor neighborhoods, where options may be more limited

Turbulence, spatial transport, and heating of the solar wind

A phenomenological theory describes radial evolution of plasma turbulence in the solar wind from 1 to 50 astronomical units. The theory includes a simple closure for local anisotropic magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, spatial transport, and driving by large-scale shear and pickup ions. Results compare well to plasma and magnetic field data from the Voyager 2 spacecraft, providing a basis for a concise, tractable description of turbulent energy transport in a variety of astrophysical plasmas

K12 Science Education in the United States: A Landscape Study for Improving the Field

This report assesses progress toward the vision of science instruction provided a decade ago by the National Research Council with support from the Corporation. In order to elevate the status of science education in the U.S. and to broaden the involvement of underrepresented groups in ongoing reform efforts, a field-level agenda for change is necessary. To that end, the report includes recommendations to inform improvements over the next 10 years in service of making science education a priority for all

Pathways to an Elite Education: Exploring Strategies to Diversify NYC's Specialized High Schools

NYC's specialized high schools are well known for their elite academics, but also heavily criticized for their lack of diversity. Indeed, girls and, most starkly, Black and Latino students are under-represented at the schools. A central question has been the extent to which the schools' admissions policy -- which admits students solely based on their performance on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) -- is to blame.This brief examines students' pathways from middle school to matriculation at a specialized high school, and simulates the effects of various admissions criteria that have been proposed as alternatives to the current policy. Analyzing data from 2005 to 2013, we found that while the SHSAT is (by design) the most important factor determining who attends the specialized high schools, it is not the only factor. Many students -- including many high-achieving students -- do not take the SHSAT at all, and some of those offered admission decide to go to high school elsewhere.Overall, our findings show that the disparities in the specialized high schools largely reflect system-wide inequalities. By any standardized measure, Black, Latino and low-income students are under-represented among the City's "highest achievers." Future Research Alliance work will dig into these systemic inequalities, aiming to identify strategies to expand access for traditionally disadvantaged students

YASIR: A Low-Latency, High-Integrity Security Retrofit for Legacy SCADA Systems

We construct a bump-in-the-wire (BITW) solution that retrofits security into time-critical communications over bandwidth-limited serial links between devices in Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. Previous BITW solutions fail to provide the necessary security within timing constraints; the previous solution that does provide the necessary security is not BITW. At a comparable hardware cost, our BITW solution provides sufficient security, and yet incurs minimal end-to-end communication latency. A microcontroller prototype of our solution is under development

Pathways to an Elite Education: Application, Admission, and Matriculation to New York City's Specialized High Schools (Working Paper)

New York City's elite public specialized high schools have a long history of offering a rigorous college preparatory education to the City's most academically talented students. Though immensely popular and highly selective, their policy of admitting students on the basis of a single entrance exam has been heavily criticized. Many argue, for example, that the policy inhibits diversity at the schools, which are predominately Asian, White, and male. In this paper, we provide a descriptive analysis of the "pipeline" from middle school to matriculation at a specialized high school, identifying group-level differences in rates of application, admission, and enrollment unexplained by measures of prior achievement. These differences serve to highlight points of intervention to improve access for under-represented groups. We also look at the role of middle schools in the pipeline, examining the distribution of offers across middle schools and testing for middle school effects on application and admission. Finally, we simulate the effects of alternative admissions rules on the composition of students at the specialized high schools

YASIR: A Low-Latency, High-Integrity Security Retrofit for Legacy SCADA Systems (Extended Version)

We construct a bump-in-the-wire (BITW) solution that retrofits security into time-critical communications over bandwidth-limited serial links between devices in legacy Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, on which the proper operations of critical infrastructures such as the electric power grid rely. Previous BITW solutions do not provide the necessary security within timing constraints; the previous solution that does is not BITW. At a hardware cost comparable to existing solutions, our BITW solution provides sufficient security, and yet incurs minimal end-to-end communication latency

PPAA: Peer-to-Peer Anonymous Authentication (Extended Version)

In the pursuit of authentication schemes that balance user privacy and accountability, numerous anonymous credential systems have been constructed. However, existing systems assume a client-server architecture in which only the clients, but not the servers, care about their privacy. In peer-to-peer (P2P) systems where both clients and servers are peer users with privacy concerns, no existing system correctly strikes that balance between privacy and accountability. In this paper, we provide this missing piece: a credential system in which peers are {\em pseudonymous} to one another (that is, two who interact more than once can recognize each other via pseudonyms) but are otherwise anonymous and unlinkable across different peers. Such a credential system finds applications in, e.g., Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANets) and P2P networks. We formalize the security requirements of our proposed credential system, provide a construction for it, and prove the security of our construction. Our solution is efficient: its complexities are independent of the number of users in the system

HOLLYWOOD:The political economy and global citation of an emblematic language object

The HOLLYWOOD sign is arguably the world's most famous language object. Emblematic of prestige and cultural capital, the sign can be found not just in Los Angeles, but in citations all over the world. Beginning with the history of its valorization, HOLLYWOOD is shown to emanate symbolic value through a set of enregistered semiotic features. Drawing upon a set of globally sourced citations of HOLLYWOOD, the circulation and stratified bundling of size, emplacement, alignment, typeface, and color indicates how the citation of language objects is mediated by political economy. A process of diffuse citation is further observed, in which the quotation of language features is not overt, but the source of emanation is still tangible, revealing HOLLYWOOD as the source of a global linguistic-semiotic register. As this register circulates in citations overt and diffuse, language objects are revealed as key sites for the reproduction of commodity values. (The Hollywood sign, language object, citation, enregisterment, global emblems, recontexualization)