Adding Up the Spending: Fiscal Disparities and Philanthropy among New York City Charter Schools

This brief explores the financial resources of New York City charter schools. It also addresses differences in student population characteristics and student outcomes across New York City (NYC) charter schools, and evaluates how financial resources translate to other schooling inputs, such as more or less experienced teachers and smaller or larger class sizes.These schools are examined within the broader context of school funding equity and factors that other research has shown to have the potential to advance or disrupt educational equity. In American public education, funding equity involves multiple levels, linked to the multiple levels of our school systems. State systems govern local public school districts, with schools nested within districts. Public charter schools are either nested within districts or operate as independent entities.NYC charter schools are of particular interest to national audiences mainly because they have been used to argue that charter schools outperform public schools and that New York's experience with charter schools suggests a transferable, nationally scalable policy option. Three studies concerning NYC charter schools in particular are frequently cited: Dobbie & Fryer, 2009; Hoxby, Murarka and Kang, 2009; and CREDO, 2009.It is important to note, however, that the NYC context may be unique in terms of the role played by philanthropy and so-called venture philanthropy. Significant philanthropic attention has been focused on charter management organizations like the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) and Achievement First, which manage charter schools in NYC and elsewhere. NYC charter schools are both touted and blasted in the popular media as being the new favored charities of, for example, wealthy hedge fund managers. The extent that NYC charters have become philanthropic favorites means that NYC charter schools may be quite different from those in places like Missouri or Arizona, distant from the NYC philanthropic culture. In fact, even charter schools in Albany and Buffalo or across the river in New Jersey may be insulated from this unique financial setting. Therefore, additional philanthropic resources may explain a great deal of the claimed success of NYC charter schools. If this is the case, attempts to replicate or scale up these supposed successes would be more difficult and costly than assumed.This brief offers concrete information about NYC charters and their finances to help ground these important policy discussions.This brief is published by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), and is one of a series of briefs made possible in part by funding from The Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice

Alternatives for Measuring Hazardous Waste Reduction

PTI Project number 233U-4913FRHWRIC Project Number 89006

Optimal Control of Spreading Biological Invasions: For How Long Should We Apply the Brake?

Identifying the optimal switching point between different invasive alien species (IAS) management policies is a very complex task and policy makers are in need of modelling tools to assist them. In this paper we develop an optimal control bioeconomic model to estimate the type of optimal policy and switching point of control efforts against a spreading IAS. We apply the models to the case study of Colorado potato beetle in the UK. The results demonstrate that eradication is optimal for small initial sizes of invasion at discovery. High capacity of the agency to reduce spread velocity for several years leads to smaller total overall costs of invasion and makes eradication optimal for larger sizes of initial invasion. In many cases, it is optimal to switch from control to acceptance within the time horizon. The switching point depends on the capacity of the agency, initial size of invasion, spread velocity of the IAS and the ratio of unit cost of damage and removal. We encourage the integration of the dispersal patterns of the invader and the geometry of the invasion in the theoretical development of the economics of IAS invasion management.barrier zone, biosecurity, dynamic optimization, eradication, Leptinotarsa decemlineata, pest risk analysis, reaction-diffusion., Risk and Uncertainty, Q1, Q28, Q57,

An integrated care pathway for menorrhagia across the primary–secondary interface : patients' experience, clinical outcomes, and service utilisation

Background: ‘‘Referral’’ characterises a significant area of interaction between primary and secondary care. Despite advantages, it can be inflexible, and may lead to duplication. Objective: To examine the outcomes of an integrated model that lends weight to general practitioner (GP)-led evidence based care. Design: A prospective, non-random comparison of two services: women attending the new (Bridges) pathway compared with those attending a consultant-led one-stop menstrual clinic (OSMC). Patients’ views were examined using patient career diaries, health and clinical outcomes, and resource utilisation. Follow-up was for 8 months. Setting: A large teaching hospital and general practices within one primary care trust (PCT). Results: Between March 2002 and June 2004, 99 women in the Bridges pathway were compared with 94 women referred to the OSMC by GPs from non-participating PCTs. The patient career diary demonstrated a significant improvement in the Bridges group for patient information, fitting in at the point of arrangements made for the patient to attend hospital (ease of access) (p,0.001), choice of doctor (p = 0.020), waiting time for an appointment (p,0.001), and less ‘‘limbo’’ (patient experience of non-coordination between primary and secondary care) (p,0.001). At 8 months there were no significant differences between the two groups in surgical and medical treatment rates or in the use of GP clinic appointments. Significantly fewer (traditional) hospital outpatient appointments were made in the Bridges group than in the OSMC group (p,0.001). Conclusion: A general practice-led model of integrated care can significantly reduce outpatient attendance while improving patient experience, and maintaining the quality of care

Local lung responses following endobronchial elastase and lipopolysaccharide instillation in sheep

Chronic lipopolysaccharide (LPS) exposure may contribute to the pathogenesis of a number of lung diseases including COPD and emphysema. We sought to develop a large- animal model of emphysema using repeated LPS administration into sheep lung segments. An experimental protocol was designed to facilitate comparisons with elastase-treated and control segments within the same lung of individual sheep. Histopathologic evaluation of segments treated with LPS demonstrated low-grade inflammation characterized by an increase in the number of intra-alveolar macrophages and lymphocytes. Treated segments demonstrated a significant reduction in airspace surface area (ASA), an increase in percent disrupted alveolar attachments and the distance between normal alveolar attachments, and a reduction in the number of normal alveolar attachments surrounding nonrespiratory bronchioles. Coefficient of variation of individual ASA measurements in elastase-treated segments was indicative of a heterogeneous parenchymal response, in contrast to that associated with chronic LPS treatment. Our results demonstrate that chronic LPS treatment of individual lung segments in sheep induces microscopic emphysema qualitatively and quantitatively consistent with both accepted pathologic definitions of this condition and with that produced by airway instillation of elastolytic enzymes. Development of this phenotype is associated with evidence of downregulated activation of transforming growth factor beta

Nonexistence of conformally flat slices of the Kerr spacetime

Initial data for black hole collisions are commonly generated using the Bowen-York approach based on conformally flat 3-geometries. The standard (constant Boyer-Lindquist time) spatial slices of the Kerr spacetime are not conformally flat, so that use of the Bowen-York approach is limited in dealing with rotating holes. We investigate here whether there exist foliations of the Kerr spacetime that are conformally flat. We limit our considerations to foliations that are axisymmetric and that smoothly reduce in the Schwarzschild limit to slices of constant Schwarzschild time. With these restrictions, we show that no conformally flat slices can exist.Comment: 5 LaTeX pages; no figures; to be submitted to Phys. Rev.

Seasonal and spatial variations in the ocean-coupled ambient wavefield of the Ross Ice Shelf

© The Author(s), 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Baker, M. G., Aster, R. C., Anthony, R. E., Chaput, J., Wiens, D. A., Nyblade, A., Bromirski, P. D., Gerstoft, P., & Stephen, R. A. Seasonal and spatial variations in the ocean-coupled ambient wavefield of the Ross Ice Shelf. Journal of Glaciology, 65(254), (2019): 912-925, doi:10.1017/jog.2019.64.The Ross Ice Shelf (RIS) is host to a broadband, multimode seismic wavefield that is excited in response to atmospheric, oceanic and solid Earth source processes. A 34-station broadband seismographic network installed on the RIS from late 2014 through early 2017 produced continuous vibrational observations of Earth's largest ice shelf at both floating and grounded locations. We characterize temporal and spatial variations in broadband ambient wavefield power, with a focus on period bands associated with primary (10–20 s) and secondary (5–10 s) microseism signals, and an oceanic source process near the ice front (0.4–4.0 s). Horizontal component signals on floating stations overwhelmingly reflect oceanic excitations year-round due to near-complete isolation from solid Earth shear waves. The spectrum at all periods is shown to be strongly modulated by the concentration of sea ice near the ice shelf front. Contiguous and extensive sea ice damps ocean wave coupling sufficiently so that wintertime background levels can approach or surpass those of land-sited stations in Antarctica.This research was supported by NSF grants PLR-1142518, 1141916, 1142126, 1246151 and 1246416. JC was additionally supported by Yates funds in the Colorado State University Department of Mathematics. PDB also received support from the California Department of Parks and Recreation, Division of Boating and Waterways under contract 11-106-107. We thank Reinhard Flick and Patrick Shore for their support during field work, Tom Bolmer in locating stations and preparing maps, and the US Antarctic Program for logistical support. The seismic instruments were provided by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) through the PASSCAL Instrument Center at New Mexico Tech. Data collected are available through the IRIS Data Management Center under RIS and DRIS network code XH. The PSD-PDFs presented in this study were processed with the IRIS Noise Tool Kit (Bahavar and others, 2013). The facilities of the IRIS Consortium are supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement EAR-1261681 and the DOE National Nuclear Security Administration. The authors appreciate the support of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Automatic Weather Station Program for the data set, data display and information; funded under NSF grant number ANT-1543305. The Ross Ice Shelf profiles were generated using the Antarctic Mapping Tools (Greene and others, 2017). Regional maps were generated with the Generic Mapping Tools (Wessel and Smith, 1998). Topography and bathymetry data for all maps in this study were sourced from the National Geophysical Data Center ETOPO1 Global Relief Model (doi:10.7289/V5C8276M). We thank two anonymous reviewers for suggestions on the scope and organization of this paper

Observation of the cubic-field splitting of an excited S = 2 manifold in a cubic copper tetramer

EPR measurements on single crystals of Cu40Cl6(triphenylphosphine oxide)4 at liquid helium temperatures in the frequency ranges 14-17 and 34-35 GHz were fitted to a simple cubicS= 2 spin Hamiltonian with g = 2.10 ± 0.01 and a zero-field splitting of(0.53 ± 0.01) em - 1 • From the decrease in intensity of the S = 2 spectrum on cooling below 4.2 K and the absence of an S = 1 spectrum, the S = 2 manifold was deduced to lie ( 14 ± 1) em- 1 above a nonmagnetic ground state. The EPR results are used as a test of the various theories developed to explain the magnetic susceptibility of copper tetramer

Influence of Combinatorial Histone Modifications on Antibody and Effector Protein Recognition

SummaryIncreasing evidence suggests that histone posttranslational modifications (PTMs) function in a combinatorial fashion to regulate the diverse activities associated with chromatin. Yet how these patterns of histone PTMs influence the adapter proteins known to bind them is poorly understood. In addition, how histone-specific antibodies are influenced by these same patterns of PTMs is largely unknown. Here we examine the binding properties of histone-specific antibodies and histone-interacting proteins using peptide arrays containing a library of combinatorially modified histone peptides. We find that modification-specific antibodies are more promiscuous in their PTM recognition than expected and are highly influenced by neighboring PTMs. Furthermore, we find that the binding of histone-interaction domains from BPTF, CHD1, and RAG2 to H3 lysine 4 trimethylation is also influenced by combinatorial PTMs. These results provide further support for the histone code hypothesis and raise specific concerns with the quality of the currently available modification-specific histone antibodies