ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION: THE CRIMINALIZATION OF STUDENT BEHAVIOR

Public education was intended to give students a broad perspective to prepare them for living in a complex, diverse society. This article will examine a relatively recent development in public education: alternative education programs (AEPs). Using Texas public schools as a case study, this article argues that AEPs defeat public education’s goal of exposing students to a diverse student body. This is because AEPs segregate at-risk students-- usually Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans, and poor Whites--from the rest of the student population. This article deals with disciplinary AEPS, also known as DAEPs. Part I of the article will explore the legislative intent behind the Texas Education Code’s DAEP provisions. Part II will describe the Code’s DAEP provisions and how they have been supplemented by individual school district codes. Part III will describe how schools can boost their scores on accountability tests through the use of DAEPs. Part IV will discuss the author’s quantitative data on DAEPs, emphasizing the race, gender, and reading ability of students placed in DAEPs. Part V will give a qualitative description of a typical DAEP. The article will conclude by arguing that individual school districts have criminalized low student achievement by sending students with academic problems to DAEPs designed for student criminals

Ring graphs and complete intersection toric ideals

We study the family of graphs whose number of primitive cycles equals its cycle rank. It is shown that this family is precisely the family of ring graphs. Then we study the complete intersection property of toric ideals of bipartite graphs and oriented graphs. An interesting application is that complete intersection toric ideals of bipartite graphs correspond to ring graphs and that these ideals are minimally generated by Groebner bases. We prove that any graph can be oriented such that its toric ideal is a complete intersection with a universal Groebner basis determined by the cycles. It turns out that bipartite ring graphs are exactly the bipartite graphs that have complete intersection toric ideals for any orientation.Comment: Discrete Math., to appea

Bistability for asymmetric discrete random walks

We show that asymmetric time-continuous discrete random walks can display bistability for equal values of Jauslin's shifting parameters. The bistability becomes more pronounced at increased asymmetry parameterComment: Follow-up note to hep-th/9411026[PRE 51, 5112 (May 95)], one fig. include