Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis

Examines the rise in school suspensions; their effectiveness; the widening racial/ethnic discipline gap, especially for African-American boys; and the impact of suspensions on academic success and likelihood of incarceration. Makes policy recommendations

New and Developing Research on Disparities in Discipline

This briefing paper describes the results of new research in the area of disciplinary disparities, and identifies remaining gaps in the literature that can guide researchers and funders of research. The brief is organized into two sections:1) What Have we Learned? Key New Research Findings describes research from leading scholars across the nation commissioned by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA's Civil Rights Project with the support of the Collaborative, findings from projects supported by the Collaborative Funded Research Grant Program, and other new research on disproportionality in school discipline in the peer-reviewed literature.2) Future Research Needs describes gaps that remain in the research base. Although there has been considerable new knowledge generated in recent years, significant gaps remain, especially in identifying and evaluating intervention strategies that reduce inequity in discipline for all students

Tiers 2 & 3 Intervention: Anger Management

Conclusions Students who engage in aggressive behaviors often have cognitive distortions that can be addressed in a therapeutic setting. Anger management programs challenge these distortions with the goal of replacing aggressive reactions to peers and the environment with positive, adaptive, and prosocial reactions. There has been relatively little definitive research on this topic. Existing research on anger management programs is promising with several studies demonstrating that a variety of programs can lead to positive outcomes for youth. However, much of this research has been conducted by program developers, prompting calls for research confirming their promising findings. Anger management provides students with tools to control their actions and reactions in a potential conflict. In the short-term, anger management techniques have generally been shown to have positive effects on the delinquent and problem behaviors of aggressive students. Students who receive anger management training showed decreased drug and alcohol usage, increased self-esteem, and decreased problem behaviors, although the intervention did not change delinquent behavior. Long-term benefits of anger management training still need to be proven. The success of anger management training is, in part, dependent on the length of treatment and how the treatment is framed for the students. Students who engage in supplemental interventions, such as goal setting or aggression replacement training, show enhanced improvements in behavior and attitude. Overall, anger management is a promising intervention that can be used to help decrease disruptive and violent behavior in aggressive students. Implementation of anger management programs may prove challenging for schools, who face increasing demands on time and resources. Effective anger management programs are not likely to be brief interventions. Instead, school personnel would likely need to commit several hours a week to preparing and running a program. For this reason, researchers have typically relied on mental health professionals, including graduate students, school counselors, school psychologists, and social workers to implement their programs. Research has not yet identified the effectiveness of these interventions when conducted by classroom teachers. Despite these limitations, anger management programs are a promising avenue for addressing aggressive and other antisocial behaviors for students

Long nuclear spin polarization decay times controlled by optical pumping in individual quantum dots

Nuclear polarization dynamics are measured in the nuclear spin bistability regime in a single optically pumped InGaAs/GaAs quantum dot. The controlling role of nuclear spin diffusion from the dot into the surrounding material is revealed in pump-probe measurements of the nonlinear nuclear spin dynamics. We measure nuclear spin polarization decay times in the range of 0.2-5 s, strongly dependent on the optical pumping time. The long nuclear spin decay arises from polarization of the material surrounding the dot by spin diffusion for long (>5s) pumping times. The time-resolved methods allow the detection of the unstable nuclear polarization state in the bistability regime otherwise undetectable in cw experiments

(Re)theorising laddish masculinities in higher education

In the context of renewed debates and interest in this area, this paper reframes the theoretical agenda around laddish masculinities in UK higher education, and similar masculinities overseas. These can be contextualised within consumerist neoliberal rationalities, the neoconservative backlash against feminism and other social justice movements, and the postfeminist belief that women are winning the ‘battle of the sexes’. Contemporary discussions of ‘lad culture’ have rightly centred sexism and men¹s violence against women: however, we need a more intersectional analysis. In the UK a key intersecting category is social class, and there is evidence that while working class articulations of laddism proceed from being dominated within alienating education systems, middle class and elite versions are a reaction to feeling dominated due to a loss of gender, class and race privilege. These are important differences, and we need to know more about the conditions which shape and produce particular performances of laddism, in interaction with masculinities articulated by other social groups. It is perhaps unhelpful, therefore, to collapse these social positions and identities under the banner of ‘lad culture’, as has been done in the past