Access to Effective Teaching for Disadvantaged Students

Recent federal initiatives in education, such as Race to the Top, the Teacher Incentive Fund, and the flexibility policy for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act are designed in part to ensure that disadvantaged students have equal access to effective teaching. The initiatives respond to the concern that disadvantaged students may be taught by less effective teachers and that this could contribute to the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and other students. To address the need for evidence on this issue, the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education initiated a study to examine access to effective teaching for disadvantaged students in 29 diverse school districts. Mathematica Policy Research and its partner, the American Institutes for Research, conducted the study, which focused on English/ language arts (ELA) and math teachers in grades 4 through 8 from the 2008 -- 2009 to the 2010 -- 2011 school year

State of the climate in 2018

In 2018, the dominant greenhouse gases released into Earth’s atmosphere—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—continued their increase. The annual global average carbon dioxide concentration at Earth’s surface was 407.4 ± 0.1 ppm, the highest in the modern instrumental record and in ice core records dating back 800 000 years. Combined, greenhouse gases and several halogenated gases contribute just over 3 W m−2 to radiative forcing and represent a nearly 43% increase since 1990. Carbon dioxide is responsible for about 65% of this radiative forcing. With a weak La Niña in early 2018 transitioning to a weak El Niño by the year’s end, the global surface (land and ocean) temperature was the fourth highest on record, with only 2015 through 2017 being warmer. Several European countries reported record high annual temperatures. There were also more high, and fewer low, temperature extremes than in nearly all of the 68-year extremes record. Madagascar recorded a record daily temperature of 40.5°C in Morondava in March, while South Korea set its record high of 41.0°C in August in Hongcheon. Nawabshah, Pakistan, recorded its highest temperature of 50.2°C, which may be a new daily world record for April. Globally, the annual lower troposphere temperature was third to seventh highest, depending on the dataset analyzed. The lower stratospheric temperature was approximately fifth lowest. The 2018 Arctic land surface temperature was 1.2°C above the 1981–2010 average, tying for third highest in the 118-year record, following 2016 and 2017. June’s Arctic snow cover extent was almost half of what it was 35 years ago. Across Greenland, however, regional summer temperatures were generally below or near average. Additionally, a satellite survey of 47 glaciers in Greenland indicated a net increase in area for the first time since records began in 1999. Increasing permafrost temperatures were reported at most observation sites in the Arctic, with the overall increase of 0.1°–0.2°C between 2017 and 2018 being comparable to the highest rate of warming ever observed in the region. On 17 March, Arctic sea ice extent marked the second smallest annual maximum in the 38-year record, larger than only 2017. The minimum extent in 2018 was reached on 19 September and again on 23 September, tying 2008 and 2010 for the sixth lowest extent on record. The 23 September date tied 1997 as the latest sea ice minimum date on record. First-year ice now dominates the ice cover, comprising 77% of the March 2018 ice pack compared to 55% during the 1980s. Because thinner, younger ice is more vulnerable to melting out in summer, this shift in sea ice age has contributed to the decreasing trend in minimum ice extent. Regionally, Bering Sea ice extent was at record lows for almost the entire 2017/18 ice season. For the Antarctic continent as a whole, 2018 was warmer than average. On the highest points of the Antarctic Plateau, the automatic weather station Relay (74°S) broke or tied six monthly temperature records throughout the year, with August breaking its record by nearly 8°C. However, cool conditions in the western Bellingshausen Sea and Amundsen Sea sector contributed to a low melt season overall for 2017/18. High SSTs contributed to low summer sea ice extent in the Ross and Weddell Seas in 2018, underpinning the second lowest Antarctic summer minimum sea ice extent on record. Despite conducive conditions for its formation, the ozone hole at its maximum extent in September was near the 2000–18 mean, likely due to an ongoing slow decline in stratospheric chlorine monoxide concentration. Across the oceans, globally averaged SST decreased slightly since the record El Niño year of 2016 but was still far above the climatological mean. On average, SST is increasing at a rate of 0.10° ± 0.01°C decade−1 since 1950. The warming appeared largest in the tropical Indian Ocean and smallest in the North Pacific. The deeper ocean continues to warm year after year. For the seventh consecutive year, global annual mean sea level became the highest in the 26-year record, rising to 81 mm above the 1993 average. As anticipated in a warming climate, the hydrological cycle over the ocean is accelerating: dry regions are becoming drier and wet regions rainier. Closer to the equator, 95 named tropical storms were observed during 2018, well above the 1981–2010 average of 82. Eleven tropical cyclones reached Saffir–Simpson scale Category 5 intensity. North Atlantic Major Hurricane Michael’s landfall intensity of 140 kt was the fourth strongest for any continental U.S. hurricane landfall in the 168-year record. Michael caused more than 30 fatalities and $25 billion (U.S. dollars) in damages. In the western North Pacific, Super Typhoon Mangkhut led to 160 fatalities and$6 billion (U.S. dollars) in damages across the Philippines, Hong Kong, Macau, mainland China, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Tropical Storm Son-Tinh was responsible for 170 fatalities in Vietnam and Laos. Nearly all the islands of Micronesia experienced at least moderate impacts from various tropical cyclones. Across land, many areas around the globe received copious precipitation, notable at different time scales. Rodrigues and Réunion Island near southern Africa each reported their third wettest year on record. In Hawaii, 1262 mm precipitation at Waipā Gardens (Kauai) on 14–15 April set a new U.S. record for 24-h precipitation. In Brazil, the city of Belo Horizonte received nearly 75 mm of rain in just 20 minutes, nearly half its monthly average. Globally, fire activity during 2018 was the lowest since the start of the record in 1997, with a combined burned area of about 500 million hectares. This reinforced the long-term downward trend in fire emissions driven by changes in land use in frequently burning savannas. However, wildfires burned 3.5 million hectares across the United States, well above the 2000–10 average of 2.7 million hectares. Combined, U.S. wildfire damages for the 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons exceeded $40 billion (U.S. dollars)

Panel. Faulkner\u27s Afterlives: Parody and Adaptation

Faulkner’s Post-Modern Heirs: Reading Faulkner in Light of the Coen Brothers / Phillip Davis, China University of Petroleum, BeijingThis paper will read William Faulkner’s Light in August in conjunction with the Coen Brother 2001 film O Brother Where Art Thou. It will argue that while Faulkner and the Coens are divided by Faulkner’s modernism and the Coen Brothers’ post-modernism, that their work performs many of the same functions. Specifically, both Faulkner and the Coen Brothers utilize the motifs of Southern regionalism to underscore the complexities of their respective historical periods. Faulkner’s observations about the modernizing South of the 1930s relate directly to the Coens’ sly and oblique treatment of globalization in their “Southern” film. The paper will also argue that while the Coens were influenced by Faulkner, that we can discover previously unseen aspects of Faulkner’s works by studying their films. The Quintessential Faulkner? Faulkner Parody into the 21st Century / Frank P. Fury, Monmouth UniversityLev Manovich has written that the 21st century boasts a culture of remixability, with innovation in the arts and in popular media often amounting to reintroducing past works in new contexts. This sort of innovation produces, as described in the OED\u27s definition of mash-up, a mixture or fusion of disparate elements. The recent success of such quirky titles as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies should give parodists--whose trade is very much rooted in the creative act of fusing disparate elements--pause and compel them to ask, what exactly is the task of the parodist in the 21st century? In light of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of William Faulkner--one of the most parodied of our writers--an occasion in which we find ourselves resurrecting his works amid new theoretical frameworks, the above-posed question seems particularly apt. Through a selection of recent Faulkner parodies from both literary and other popular sources, this essay seeks both to ground Faulkner parody--and by extension parody as a literary mode--within our digital age of reinvention and consider whether Faulkner parody brings us closer to (re)discovering the quintessential Faulkner. Adapting Soldiers’ Pay for the Screen: Why Faulkner Still Resonates / Michie GleasonThis presentation will explore my recent screen adaptation of “Soldiers’ Pay.” I’ll discuss two themes in the novel which have contemporary resonance: (1) Returning from World War I, Faulkner’s young veterans were expected to transition to a civilized society that hadn’t a clue about the horrors of trench warfare. A similar disconnect faces young veterans today returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and (2) Faulkner’s three principal female characters, all under the age of 25, are not the girls those boys left behind. Caught up in social upheaval that promises to expand their roles in society, and thus threaten social mores, they are thoroughly modern heroines. I will use examples from the novel and examples from my screenplay to illustrate the mechanics of adaptation and choices I made, moving Faulkner’s story from one medium to another

Case Series of Three Patients with Disseminated Gonococcal Infection and Endocarditis

Introduction: The increasing incidence of Neisseria gonorrhoeae infections and emergence of cephalosporin-resistant strains means the threat of disseminated gonococcal infection and endocarditis needs to be reimagined into the differential diagnosis for patients treated in the emergency department (ED) for sexually transmitted infections and for endocarditis itself. Only 70 cases of disseminated gonococcal infection (DGI) with endocarditis had been reported through 2014.1-4 In 2019, however, an outbreak of DGI with one case of endocarditis was reported.5 This case series of three patients with DGI and endocarditis, in addition to the recent outbreak, may represent a warning sign for reemergence of this threat.Case Report: We describe three cases within a recent three-year period of gonococcal endocarditis as seen and treated at our institution. These cases show divergent presentations of this insidious disease with both classical and atypical features. One case displayed a classic migratory rash with positive urine testing and a remote history of sexually transmitted infections, while another patient developed isolated culture-confirmed endocarditis with negative cervical testing and imaging, and the final case was a male patient who presented to the ED with fulminant endocarditis as the first ED presentation of infection.Conclusion: Secondary to an overall rise in incidence and possibly due to increasing antibiotic- resistance patterns, gonococcal endocarditis should be included in the differential diagnosis of any case of endocarditis. Reciprocally, increased vigilance should surround the evaluation of any patient for sexually transmitted diseases while in the ED for both the development of DGI and endocarditis