Vouchers and the Cleveland Scholarship Program: little progress so far

Voucher programs are intended to raise the academic achievement of students, but, unfortunately, so far the evidence suggests that Cleveland’s voucher students perform no better than their counterparts in public schools.Educational vouchers ; School choice

Should Ohio invest in universal preschooling?

A growing body of evidence shows that quality preschooling is associated with a host of benefits to students, schools, and society at large. These benefits can have a positive impact on a state’s budget, too: Children who attend preschool are not only more successful throughout their school careers, they also graduate and go on to college more often, commit fewer crimes, and earn higher wages once they enter the workforce. Research suggests that making public pre-schooling available to all children would be a cost-effective way to improve academic performance. This Commentary explains why making public preschooling available to all children in the state would be a wise investment for Ohio.Education - Ohio

Education vouchers and the Cleveland Scholarship Program

Educational vouchers

Unions, Training, and Firm Performance

The present paper uses a combination of workplace and linked employee-workplace data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey and the 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey to examine the impact of unions on training incidence, training intensity/coverage, and training duration. It also examines the impact of unions and training on earnings and a measure of establishment labour productivity. In addition, the implications of training for the firm’s bottom line are evaluated. Union effects on training emerge as fairly subtle, and are more positive when using individual rather than plant-wide training data. A positive impact of training on earnings is detected in both the individual and plant-wide wage data, albeit only for the earlier survey. Consistent with other recent findings, the effects of union recognition on earnings are today rather muted, while union-training interaction effects vary greatly. Instrumenting training provides positive results for the labour productivity outcome and, in the case of the earlier survey, for the financial performance indicator as well. However, some negative effects of unions are now also detected.earnings, training duration, training intensity/coverage, training Incidence, employer-provided training, bargaining structure, union recognition, financial performance, labour productivity

Entanglement in quantum catastrophes

We classify entanglement singularities for various two-mode bosonic systems in terms of catastrophe theory. Employing an abstract phase-space representation, we obtain exact results in limiting cases for the entropy in cusp, butterfly, and two-dimensional catastrophes. We furthermore use numerical results to extract the scaling of the entropy with the non-linearity parameter, and discuss the role of mixing entropies in more complex systems.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure

Early childhood development and social mobility

Steven Barnett and Clive Belfield examine the effects of preschool education on social mobility in the United States. They note that under current policy three- and four-year-old children from economically and educationally disadvantaged families have higher preschool attendance rates than other children. But current programs fail to enroll even half of poor three-and four-year olds. Hispanics and children of mothers who drop out of school also participate at relatively low rates. The programs also do little to improve learning and development. Barnett and Belfield point out that preschool programs raise academic skills on average, but do not appear to have notably different effects for different groups of children, and so do not strongly enhance social mobility. In such areas as crime, welfare, and teen parenting, however, preschool seems more able to break links between parental behaviors and child outcomes. Increased investment in preschool, conclude Barnett and Belfield, could raise social mombility. Program expansions targeted to disadvantaged children would help them move up the ladder, as would a more universal set of policies from which disadvantaged children gained disproportionately. Increasing the educational effectiveness of early childhood programs would provide for greater gains in social mobility than increasing participation rates alone. The authors observe that if future expansions of preschool programs end up serving all children, not just the poorest, society as a whole would gain. Benefits would exceed costs and there would be more economic growth, but relative gains for disadvantaged children would be smaller than absolute gains because there would be some (smaller) benefits to other children.early childhood education; social mobility; benefit/cost analyses; income disparity; disadvantaged children

Wanted: Lunar detectives to unravel the mysteries of the Moon! Crime to be solved: Mass extinctions on the Moon by meteorite impact!

The criteria and clues for identifying meteorite contamination are outlined to aid in the quest for more knowledge regarding the evolution of the Moon and the early Earth. The Warren and Wasson seven criteria for establishing the pristine nature of highland rocks are presented. Other topics covered include iron/nickel metals, monomict nature, and lunar glasses. The major conclusion is that pristinity should not be the primary consideration in the study of lunar rocks. The most important criterion to establish is whether or not the lunar sample contains more than one lunar rock type. Even if a sample is non-pristine, as long as only one lunar rock type is present, petrogenetic interpretation can still be carried out

The Apollo 17 mare basalts: Serenely sampling Taurus-Littrow

As we are all aware, the Apollo 17 mission marked the final manned lunar landing of the Apollo program. The lunar module (LM) landed approximately 0.7 km due east of Camelot Crater in the Taurus-Littrow region on the southwestern edge of Mare Serenitatis. Three extravehicular activities (EVA's) were performed, the first concentrating around the LM and including station 1 approximately 1.1 km south-southeast of the LM at the northwestern edge of Steno Crater. The second traversed approximately 8 km west of the LM to include stations 2, 3, 4, and 5, and the third EVA traversed approximately 4.5 km to the northwest of the LM to include stations 6, 7, 8, and 9. This final manned mission returned the largest quantity of lunar rock samples, 110.5 kg/243.7 lb, and included soils, breccias, highland samples, and mare basalts. This abstract concentrates upon the Apollo 17 mare basalt samples

Unions, training and firm performance

"This paper uses data from two British workplace surveys to examine the impact of unions on several training measures. It also evaluates the impact of unions and training on earnings and two measures of firm performance. Union effects on training emerge as fairly subtle, and are more positive when using individual rather than plant-wide training data. A positive impact of training on earnings is detected in individual and plant-wide wage data, albeit for one of the datasets. Union influence on wages is also muted and union-training interaction effects vary greatly. However, instrumenting training provides positive results for labour productivity and, again for one survey, for financial performance as well." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en)) Additional Information Kurzfassung (deutsch) Executive summary (English)betriebliche Weiterbildung, Gewerkschaftspolitik - Auswirkungen, Lohnhöhe, Unternehmenserfolg, Großbritannien

Using Apollo 17 high-Ti mare basalts as windows to the lunar mantle

The Apollo 17 high-Ti mare basalts are derived from source regions containing plagioclase that was not retained in the residue. Ilmenite appears to remain as a residual phase, but plagioclase is exhausted. The open-system behavior of the type B2 basalts results in slightly higher Yb/Hf and La/Sm ratios. The nature of the added component is not clear, but may be a KREEP derivative or residue. The recognition of plagioclase in the source(s) of these basalts suggests that the location of the source region(s) would be more likely to be less than 150 km (i.e., closer to the plagioclase-rich crust), which would allow incorporation of plagioclase into the source through incomplete separation of crustal feldspar