Lessons from Florida: School Choice Gives Increased Opportunities to Children with Special Needs

In 2000, Florida instituted an innovative school choice program for children with disabilities. During the 2000-01 school year, the McKay Scholarship Program for Students with Disabilities provided scholarships to more than 1,000 students who chose to attend private schools rather than remain in their neighborhood public schools. Currently, more than 8,000 special education students in Florida attend 464 private schools throughout the state. Critics of school choice often argue that school choice benefits only the best and brightest, leaving behind those children who are most difficult to educate. They also argue that vouchers lead to the establishment of "fly-by-night" schools and drain public schools of revenue. Florida disproves those claims. Private schools have proven their willingness to accept McKay scholarship students, and the fact that 89 percent of McKay students re-enrolled in their scholarship schools demon-strates that most parents are satisfied with their chosen private school. Policymakers in other states should look to Florida's experience to inform their school choice efforts. In addition, Congress should make school choice an integral component of any new legislation reauthorizing the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act. IDEA encumbers public schools with complex regulations that waste time and resources that could be better spent helping disabled children learn. Eliminating the regulatory burden created by IDEA for states that offer school choice to parents would encourage states to implement innovative reforms

Singer with a Song

The Twin Cities of Thuringowa and Townsville located in Tropical North Queensland have a noteworthy history of supporting Jazz musicians, and sustaining a diverse range of bands, clubs and organisations, as well as Jazz focused festivals and community events. This CD is a tribute to and acknowledgment of the talented players in this region

Some issues related to the practice of immunization

AbstractThis article reviews the basic principles of immunization, identifies the components of the practice of immunization, and points to some of the issues specific to that practice that will need to be taken into account as the vaccines of the future are coming close to availability. The purpose of immunization is to protect an individual from a specified infectious disease, from the earliest appropriate age, for as long as possible, using the fewest number of doses to achieve that immunity, and with the least possible risk from the procedure. For certain diseases, for example tetanus, the benefit of immunization is only to the vaccine recipient. In the case of vaccines such as polio vaccine, there is a wider purpose. As well as protecting immunized individuals, there can be community benefit to individuals not immunized. When sufficiently high coverage is reached, transmission is interrupted and individuals not immunized are further protected. For routine immunization against any vaccine-preventable disease, there needs to be the provision of routinely available processes that seek to promote the highest possible coverage in the target population; allow for the measurement of that achievement in an accurate and timely way; detect any possible adverse effects of the immunization; and sensitively and rapidly provide information on the target diseases. As the availability of existing resources for health programs comes under increasing scrutiny, countries in all stages in development will need to consider the most cost-effective use of resources, especially as countries are encouraged to become self-sufficient for financing their immunization programs. Finding the necessary resources for present vaccines, let alone the vaccines of the future, may be a considerable challenge

GIS Maps and the Amazon Borderlands

With training, GIS can be used by all sectors of Latin American society and is the mapping tool of choice for institutions ranging from the Inter-American Development Bank to remote communities in the Amazon rain forest. Geographic information systems are thus a tool of the powerful and the marginalized and the official and the unofficial. [...] In this chapter, we see how GIS maps can improve our ability to analyze conflict over resources and allow additional participation in the process of mapping, but we also confront some of the many political and technical challenges that must be overcome to construct a participatory GIS map

Overcoming marginality on the margins: mapping, logging, and coca in the Amazon borderlands

textThe ecologically and culturally rich Amazonian border zones are increasingly targeted for development and the exploitation of natural resources, even as these zones often double as existing or proposed sites for the conservation of biodiversity and protection of indigenous lands. Governmental and Non-Governmental Organizations alike project their goals from central offices onto borderland landscapes assumed to be empty of local people but full of valuable resources, biodiversity or development potential. Simultaneously, loggers, miners, drug traffickers, and others operate illegally or quasi-legally within these border zones and, in the absence of a strong governmental presence, cultivate the borderland's reputation as a violent hinterland. Within this complex borderland reality, the local people (indigenous and non-indigenous), largely invisible to authorities, struggle to survive with subsistence strategies while either negotiating with illegal interlopers to supplement their income or resisting them for their very survival. The resulting landscape is a tangle of overlapping and competing concessions, conservation units, and indigenous territories whose contestation and resulting confusion advances the agenda of illegal extractivists and drug traffickers. This study highlights the continued importance of fieldwork in geography. Here, field-based research provides insight into the poorly understood borderlands of Peru and Brazil. Research used a combination of participatory methods, Geographic Information Systems, ethnography, document research, and remote sensing to analyze mapping, logging, and coca cultivation within four borderland watersheds. These data were combined with regional data on coca eradication, resource concessions, conservation units, and indigenous territories from both Brazil and Peru. Field-based results demonstrate these borderlands to be highly contested and poorly mapped with an exploitative and poorly managed timber industry and a dynamic front of coca cultivation contributing to social disruption and environmental degradation. More fieldwork is needed to generate the geographic information necessary for sustainable development and conservation planning and to help local people defend their territory from illegal operators and the imposition of state resource concessions. Ecological Economic Zoning is recommended as a participatory policy framework to improve geographic information and long term planning.Geography and the Environmen

Extractive Reserves

Extractive reserves are territories dedicated to environmental protection and the sustainable use of nature resources by traditional populations. Reserves follow a traditional land tenure model based on individual family and communal property rights to common areas, such as forest trails used to extract or harvest nontimber forest products. Although the extractive reserve concept originates in the tropical forests of the Brazilian Amazon, reserves have also been created in aquatic, floodplain, and savanna landscapes throughout Brazil. There are now 50 extractive reserves covering more than 10 million hectares, an area larger than Portugal, and more continue to be created. Despite their growing areal extent, the success of these areas for reconciling conservation and development is still being debated. However, the reserves remain popular with policymakers in part because they address both the land tenure concerns of the local people and the environmental concerns of conservationists. This entry focuses on the forested extractive reserves of Amazonia

If the Strategy Fits, Wear It: Matching Strategic Change Efforts with IT Efforts

Many organizations find themselves in a position of needing to change the manner in which they operate. Organizations may attempt to take advantage of opportunities in their environment or they may try to limit the impact of threats from the environment, and they have a variety of options from which to choose in order to successfully change. From a resource-based perspective (RBV), an organization could reconfigure existing resources, reconfigure with new resources, acquire new resources without reconfiguring them, or simply maintain a business as usual strategy. IT can benefit these change strategies in a variety of ways through knowledge creation, transfer, and protection. However, these four strategies have different characteristics that make certain types of IT use more appropriate than other types. Two characteristics explored in this paper, the degree of knowledge creation, transfer and protection and the degree of tacitness of the organization’s knowledge, are considered the most influential in determining the success of the use of IT in facilitating strategic change

A Qualitative Analysis of Structural Emergence and Ascendant Leadership in Technological Appropriation

Recent scholarship on the appropriation of advanced information technology in professional settings has utilized adaptive structuration theory (AST) to move beyond voluntaristic and deterministic perspectives on workplace interaction. Our study seeks to advance the paradigm of adaptive structuration in both theoretical and empirical terms. First, we make a case for a reconceptualization of the duality of structure in AST by integrating insights from William Sewell’ s (1992) perspective on this important facet of structuration. Sewell suggests that structures are composed of both schemata (transposable recipes for social action) and resources (animate or inanimate objects actors use to exercise power). Second, we reveal how this reconceptualization of the duality of structure can open up new avenues for research on the appropriation of group decision support systems (GDSS) among work teams. To this end, we analyze interaction fragments—i.e., conversational and gestural exchanges—observed in a sample (N = 10) of over 60 video recorded sessions of GDSS appropriation in quasi-experimental workgroups. In five of the workgroups, the technology was introduced by a facilitator (restrictive treatment); the other five groups were introduced to the GDSS by a chauffeur (non-restrictive treatment). Preliminary results, which we will continue to pursue with an analysis of the full slate of 60 video recordings, reveal how participants transpose culturally meaningful interaction strategies—schemata—to consolidate animate and inanimate resources in the GDSS environment. We term this process “ascendant leadership” and provide rich descriptions of the ways in which such power is exercised and contested across these two different treatment contexts

It’s Not IF but WHEN: Three Challenges to Handcuffing Cybercrime

As a cybersecurity researcher and a millennial lawyer with a strong concentration on cyberspace law, blockchain technology, and digital monies, we discuss the three main challenges law enforcement currently faces when attempting to bring cybercriminals to justice