Breaking The Spell of Tax Budget Magic

To date, tax scholars have responded to the proliferation of so-called temporary or sunset tax expenditure legislation by staking claims either for or against it, focusing on its relative merits and shortcomings. In this Article, I argue that these positions are analytically incomplete. Rather than address the underlying deficiencies in the budget process that have led to the preference for temporary tax provisions, the advocacy of the use (or non-use) of temporary provisions simply asks which type of provision will yield the least problematic results. This Article seeks to help fill a gap in the literature by focusing on remedies meant to address the source of many issues related to both temporary and permanent tax expenditure legislation. In particular, I propose the adoption of a bundle of new budget rules that will work as precommitment devices to restrain lawmakers from exploiting weaknesses in the existing process. I argue that these proposed rules would still give lawmakers the flexibility to adopt either temporary or permanent tax legislation as appropriate. However, the proposed rules would help to decrease opportunities for budget manipulations, impose more fiscal restraint on lawmakers, achieve greater legislative transparency, help loosen the hold of special interest groups on lawmakers, and enhance legislative stability

Confronting Systemic Racism in Occupational Therapy: A Mixed Methods Study

This study aimed to examine how occupational therapists and students perceive systemic racism in occupational therapy practice and the effectiveness and impact of the delivery of a keynote address on confronting systemic racism in practice delivered to occupational therapists and students. The study aimed to help inform future efforts in creating a more diverse and inclusive profession at the practice, policy, and education level by providing input into the challenges and opportunities that occupational therapists and students face when reckoning with issues of racism in practice. A mixed methodology research design was used with Likert-style scale and open-ended questions delivered via online survey. Eighty-nine occupational therapists and students completed the online survey. Most of the respondents reported responding favorably to the keynote address and shared sentiment that it could be a difficult and uncomfortable topic, yet it was important to discuss because of its impact on the profession and the clients occupational therapists serve

Advocacy in Ideas: Legal Education and Social Movements

Panel moderated by Professor Olatunde Johnson, featuring Professors Monica Bell, Tanya K. Hernández, Solangel Maldonado, and Chantal Thomas. Introduced by Elise Lopez. This panel is really an opportunity to explore the role of women of color in shaping ideas in the legal academy and in legal discourse more broadly. Everyone on this panel today is a professor and has joined legal academia, but what I think we really want to emphasize through this is that for many of us it begins in law school, where you can engage in shaping ideas through the writing that you do in your courses and in journals, in taking leadership positions in journals, and in organizing conferences like this

DISCOURSE IN INQUIRY SCIENCE CLASSROOMS (DiISC): REFERENCE MANUAL

One of the greatest challenges facing scholars and funding agencies interested in reform is determining the impact of classroom practice on student achievement. The degree to which this effect can be determined is contingent upon instruments that measure teachers’ ability to enact specific instructional strategies. Frequently, a general instrument will not do because it was not designed to measure the unique focus of a professional development program or a set of variables of interest to researchers. Consequently, specific instruments should be developed to allow researchers to measure fidelity of classroom implementation. Fidelity of implementation is always the first step in determining effectiveness. For without fidelity of implementation, it is impossible to determine whether what the teacher does has an impact on student achievement. This manual reports on the development of just such an instrument, called the Discourse in Inquiry Science Classrooms (DiISC). The instrument was developed to measure teachers’ use of strategies in their classrooms to foster a science classroom discourse community (SCDC) as a way of furthering achievement in science. The DiISC instructional strategies that support the creation of a SCDC address oral and written discourse, and academic language development embedded in inquiry and they also reflect learning principles. We believe that the creation of the DiISC is especially timely for two reasons. First, science educators are beginning to focus on communication in science as a learning tool to increase students’ conceptual understanding and achievement in science. Second, we need an instrument to measure teachers’ ability to support the academic language development in science of the increasing number of English Language Learners (ELLs) in our schools. The DiISC is an instrument for observing teachers, not students. It describes what teachers do and focuses on five sets of instructional strategies that form the scales of the DiISC. These scales are Inquiry, Oral Discourse, Writing, Academic Language Development and Learning Principles. Consequently, the stems of many of the items start with the phrase, The teacher… , as in “The teacher creates an environment that supports inquiry”