Equal or Fair? A Study of Revenues and Expenditures in American Charter Schools

A new study finds that charter schools typically get less funding than traditional public schools. And it also reveals that the primary reason charters tend to get less funding is because traditional public schools must offer far more special education, transportation and student support services. Spending on those programs and services -- often not available in charter schools -- accounts for much or all of the difference in funding each receives. This finding is one of several that Professor Gary Miron and his co-author Jessica Urschel make in Equal or Fair? A Study of Revenues and Expenditures in American Charter Schools, released today by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice. The study comes amid a growing debate over the question of whether charter schools are inadequately funded compared with traditional public schools. In recent years, numerous charter school advocates have cited the purported funding gap to help explain charter schools' achievement results compared with traditional public schools. Miron and Urshel point out that, compared with traditional public schools, charter schools spend proportionally more on administration -- in the percentage of overall spending that goes to administrative costs, as well as in the salaries they pay administrative personnel. Overall, however, charter schools spend less than traditional public schools: less on instruction, less on student support services and less on teacher salaries and benefits. Equal or Fair? is the most comprehensive study to date on the question. It uses data from the U.S. Department of Education on revenue sources and spending patterns of charter schools and traditional public schools and districts across the nation. It also examines patterns across nine different comparison groups, ranging from traditional public schools to various sub-groups of charter schools. "On first appearance, charter schools receive less revenue per pupil ($9,883) than traditional public schools ($12,863)," Miron and Urschel find. Yet, they add, this direct comparison "may be misleading." States vary considerably in the way they channel funds to charter schools. Moreover, public schools provide -- and receive funds for -- certain services that most charter schools do not provide (or spend far less on) including special education, student support services and transportation and food services. This largely explains the differences in revenues and expenditures for charters compared with traditional schools. "When charter schools and traditional public schools have similar programs and services and when they serve similar students, funding levels should be equal in order to be considered fair," they write. "However, as long as traditional public schools are delivering more programs, serving wider ranges of grades, and enrolling a higher proportion of students with special needs, they will require relatively higher levels of financial support. Under these circumstances, differences or inequality in funding can be seen as reasonable and fair.

Induced coherence with and without induced emission

We analyze signal coherence in the setup of Wang, Zou and Mandel, where two optical downconverters have indistinct idler modes. Quantum interference, caused by indistinguishability of paths, has a visibility proportional to the transmission amplitude between idlers. Classical interference, caused by induced emission, may be complete for any finite transmission.Comment: 3 pages, including 2 postscript figure

On the Approximation of Laplacian Eigenvalues in Graph Disaggregation

Graph disaggregation is a technique used to address the high cost of computation for power law graphs on parallel processors. The few high-degree vertices are broken into multiple small-degree vertices, in order to allow for more efficient computation in parallel. In particular, we consider computations involving the graph Laplacian, which has significant applications, including diffusion mapping and graph partitioning, among others. We prove results regarding the spectral approximation of the Laplacian of the original graph by the Laplacian of the disaggregated graph. In addition, we construct an alternate disaggregation operator whose eigenvalues interlace those of the original Laplacian. Using this alternate operator, we construct a uniform preconditioner for the original graph Laplacian.Comment: 19 page

Making progress with Wittgenstein and popular genre film

This study concerns ways of conceptualising what it means to use genre patterns in narrative film critically and creatively. The introduction begins by analysing the opening scene of a regular episode of a German television crime drama episode, Polizeiruf 110: Er sollte tot… (Germany 2006), directed by Dominik Graf, whose work challenges rigid and narrow definitions of genres and theories in film and genre studies. Before returning to Graf in the last two chapters, the intermediary chapters outline the philosophical and conceptual scaffolding of the investigation: Chapter 2 sets the stage by outlining central concepts of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, which I employ in later chapter for a critical, challenging and pluralistic method of thinking about conventional film forms, genres, and techniques. With help by the Coen brothers and their film A Serious Man (USA 2010), chapter 3 acknowledges some ways in which Wittgenstein’s method be abused. The film exemplifies ways in which Wittgensteinian approaches to thinking about culture can misfire, and as such contributes to a Wittgensteinian practice of self-reflection. Thus prepared, chapter 4 looks more closely at Dominik Graf’s films, challenging existing uses of Wittgenstein’s philosophy in genre studies, arguing that defining genre as a family resemblance concept does not sufficiently account for the dynamic and enabling force of genre conventions. Problems can be overcome by turning to Wittgenstein’s concept of language-games, which helps to clarify the status of genre rules and brings into view differences between their practical uses in everyday life. The final chapter analyses Graf’s Die Freunde der Freunde (Germany 2002) by sketching film language games: Various aspects of genre film can be clarified using the concept of grammar. The conclusion then ties the threads of the argument together, reflecting on the potential of Wittgenstein’s method for a defense of popular film and as providing a model of criticism that does not subvert itself