Limited Choices: How the School-Choice Paradigm Subverts Equal Education for Students with Disabilities

While there is no absolute right to education in the Constitution of the United States, legislation and litigation have created and elucidated specific rights of children to, at a minimum, equal opportunity in education. For students with disabilities, the right to equality in educational opportunity can be found in both federal statutes and under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Rapidly developing education policy currently promotes increasing options for parents to use federal and state funds to send their children to schools other than their neighborhood public schools (“school choice”). However, the specific rights of students with disabilities have been largely overlooked. This Article will explain the ways in which school-choice laws and the rights of students with disabilities overlap and interact, expose gaps that leave students with disabilities vulnerable, and suggest actions that legislators and litigators can take to mitigate that vulnerability and ensure equal opportunity in education

Introduction

This issue of Library Trends, on the theme of Research Into Practice, has been designed with two aims in mind. Published in 2013, it marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Information School (iSchool) at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom by presenting a selection of papers that demonstrate the creativity and variety of research undertaken in the field of librarianship and share a unifying concern to make links, as well as establish meaningful connections, between research and practice. The issue is dedicated to Bob Usherwood, now an emeritus professor in the school, whose work and legacy at Sheffield are distinguished by an exemplary commitment to putting research into practice, and it is especially pleasing for us to be able offer this tribute to Bob in the year when he is due to celebrate his seventieth birthday. We also believe that an issue on this theme is timely and important for our profession. There has been a strong drive lately to promote evidence-based practice in library and information work and to develop a research culture in the practitioner community, exemplified in the United Kingdom by the DREaM project, amid continuing concerns about the disconnect between the research and practitioner communities

Delocalized, non-SUSY pp-branes, tachyon condensation and tachyon matter

We construct non-supersymmetric $p$-brane solutions of type II supergravities in arbitrary dimensions ($d$) delocalized in one of the spatial transverse directions. By a Wick rotation we convert these solutions into Euclidean $p$-branes delocalized in the transverse time-like direction. The former solutions in $d=10$ nicely interpolate between the $(p+1)$-dimensional non-BPS D-branes and the $p$-dimensional BPS D-branes very similar to the picture of tachyon condensation for the tachyonic kink solution on the non-BPS D-branes. On the other hand the latter solutions interpolate between the $(p+1)$-dimensional non-BPS D-branes and the tachyon matter supergravity configuration very similar to the picture of rolling tachyon on the non-BPS D-branes.Comment: 15 pages, typos correcte

Ergodicity from Nonergodicity in Quantum Correlations of Low-dimensional Spin Systems

Correlations between the parts of a many-body system, and its time dynamics, lie at the heart of sciences, and they can be classical as well as quantum. Quantum correlations are traditionally viewed as constituted out of classical correlations and magnetizations. While that of course remains so, we show that quantum correlations can have statistical mechanical properties like ergodicity, which is not inherited from the corresponding classical correlations and magnetizations, for the transverse anisotropic quantum XY model in one-, two-, and quasi two-dimension, for suitably chosen transverse fields and temperatures. The results have the potential for applications in decoherence effects in realizable quantum computers.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, RevTeX 4.

Symplectic Manifolds, Coherent States and Semiclassical Approximation

We describe the symplectic structure and Hamiltonian dynamics for a class of Grassmannian manifolds. Using the two dimensional sphere ($S^2$) and disc ($D^2$) as illustrative cases, we write their path integral representations using coherent state techniques. These path integrals can be evaluated exactly by semiclassical methods, thus providing examples of localisation formula. Along the way, we also give a local coordinate description for a class of Grassmannians.Comment: 17 pages, preprint TCD-4-93, UR-1324,ER40685-77

Protocols for characterizing quantum transport through nano-structures

In this work, we have analyzed the exact closed-form solutions for transport quantities through a mesoscopic region which may be characterized by a polynomial functional of resonant transmission functions. These are then utilized to develop considerably improved protocols for parameters relevant for quantum transport through molecular junctions and quantum dots. The protocols are shown to be experimentally feasible and should yield the parameters at much higher resolution than the previously proposed ones.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure