How Racially Diverse Schools and Classrooms Can Benefit All Students

A growing number of parents, university officials, and employers want our elementary and secondary schools to better prepare students for our increasingly racially and ethnically diverse society and the global economy. But for reasons we cannot explain, the demands of this large segment of Americans have yet to resonate with most of our federal, state, or local policymakers. Instead, over the past forty years, these policy makers have completely ignored issues of racial segregation while focusing almost exclusively on high-stakes accountability, even as our schools have become increasingly segregated and unequal.This report argues that, as our K -- 12 student population becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, the time is right for our political leaders to pay more attention to the evidence, intuition, and common sense that supports the importance of racially and ethnically diverse educational settings to prepare the next generation. It highlights in particular the large body of research that demonstrates the important educational benefits -- cognitive, social, and emotional -- for all students who interact with classmates from different backgrounds, cultures, and orientations to the world. This research legitimizes the intuition of millions of Americans who recognize that, as the nation becomes more racially and ethnically complex, our schools should reflect that diversity and tap into the benefits of these more diverse schools to better educate all our students for the twenty-first century.The advocates of racially integrated schools understand that much of the recent racial tension and unrest in this nation -- from Ferguson to Baltimore to Staten Island -- may well have been avoided if more children had attended schools that taught them to address implicit biases related to racial, ethnic, and cultural differences. This report supports this argument beyond any reasonable doubt

Investigation of Unusual Mineral Occurrences in Southern Ohio and Their Possible Relation to the Mineralization of Serpent Mound

This project focuses on a mine prospect site I recently located in Ross County, Ohio, dating back to the 1930's, which is an area of unusual and heretofore undocumented mineralization. Limestone concretions and samples of crystalline quartz and pyrite occur in sizes and quantities which are quite uncommon in the state of Ohio. The goals of the project were, through field observation and laboratory analysis, to identify the nature and extent of mineralization in the study area, find its relation to other mineral localities in south-central Ohio, and determine what role unrecognized faults and/or hydrothermal activity in the area have played in the genesis of the unusual mineralization. The area lies along the unconformable contact between upper Silurian and middle Devonian bedrock, and also includes ground and end moraines from both the Wisconsinan and Illinoian glaciations. Sulfide mineralization in the middle Devonian Ohio Shale occurs as nodules of pyrite and marcasite, with trace barite, up to ten centimeters in diameter embedded in black shale. This unit has also yielded crystalline quartz lining contorted cavities in large limestone concretions up to one meter across. Traces of barite, marcasite, pyrite, galena, and glacial gold have been found in stream sediments throughout the area. Aerial photographs, verified in the field, show a lineation extending northward through the study area in Ross County, which may be related to radiating faults from the Serpent Mound Disturbance in Adams County, 30km to the south.No embargoAcademic Major: Geological Science

School Choice Policies and Racial Segregation: Where White Parents’ Good Intentions, Anxiety, and Privilege Collide

A growing body of school choice research has shown that when school choice policies are not designed to racially or socioeconomically integrate schools, that is, are “colorblind” policies, they generally manage to do the opposite, leading to greater stratification and separation of students by race and ethnicity across schools and programs. Since white, advantaged parents are more likely to get their children into the highest-status schools regardless of the school choice policy in place, we believed that more research was needed on how those parents interact with school choice policies and whether they would support changes to those policies that would lead to less segregation across schools. Our interviews with advantaged New York City parents suggest that many are bothered by the segregation but that they are concerned that their children gain access to the “best” (mostly white) schools. The contradictions inherent in their choices are reconcilable, we argue, by offering more diverse and undivided school options

The Worldwide Market for Sex: A Review of International and Regional Legal Prohibitions Regarding Trafficking in Women

This essay considers whether international treaty law is a useful weapon in the battle against the global sex trade. The introduction to this essay surveys the extent of global sex trafficking. Part I of this essay discusses the international legal conventions that address the issue of trafficking in women. Part II of this essay assesses the effectiveness of these international instruments and considers why they have failed to and the world sex trade. In Part III, this essay describes the European and Inter-American human rights systems, focusing upon substantive law in the regional systems that might be relevant to the issue of prostitution. It then briefly examines the procedures through which this substantive law could be enforced

Seeing Past the “Colorblind” Myth of Education Policy

This policy brief presents the most significant evidence-based critique of ostensibly “colorblind” education policies by highlighting their relationship to past and present racial/ethnic inequality and their failure to address the rapidly changing demographics of our school-age population, which could be considered an asset if we were not “blind” to it. The author argues that even when education policies are “colorblind” on the surface, they interact with school systems and residential patterns in which race is a central factor in deciding where students go to school, what resources and curricula they have access to, whether they are understood and appreciated by their teachers and classmates, and how they are categorized across academic programs. Such policies are also at odds with a multi-racial and ethnic society in which a growing number of parents and educators see the potential educational benefits of paying attention to diversity and difference as a pedagogical tool. The author recommends that policymakers address race-conscious policies, practices and conditions that perpetuate segregation and inequality while simultaneously tapping into the changing racial attitudes of Americans by supporting racially diverse schools

Diverse Housing, Diverse Schooling: How Policy Can Stabilize Racial Demographic Change in Cities and Suburbs

This policy brief provides a review of the social science evidence on the housing-school nexus, highlighting the problem of reoccurring racial segregation and inequality absent strong, proactive federal or state integration policies. Three areas of research are covered: (a) the nature of the housing-school nexus, (b) the impact of school desegregation and housing integration policies on the nexus, and (c) the connection between the implicit racial biases literature (the “perceptions of place”) to research on school and housing choices

Implications of the Partial Width Z->bb for Supersymmetry Searches and Model-Building

Assuming that the actual values of the top quark mass at FNAL and of the ratio of partial widths Z->bb/Z->hadrons at LEP are within their current one-sigma reported ranges, we present a No-Lose Theorem for superpartner searches at LEP II and an upgraded Tevatron. We impose only two theoretical assumptions: the Lagrangian is that of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model with arbitrary soft-breaking terms, and all couplings remain perturbative up to scales of order 10^16 GeV; there are no assumptions about the soft SUSY breaking parameters, proton decay, cosmology, etc. In particular, if the LEP and FNAL values hold up and supersymmetry is responsible for the discrepancy with the SM prediction of the partial width of Z->bb, then we must have charginos and/or top squarks observable at the upgraded machines. Furthermore, little deviation from the SM is predicted within "super-unified" SUSY. Finally, it appears to be extremely difficult to find any unified MSSM model, regardless of the form of soft SUSY breaking, that can explain the partial width for large tan(beta); in particular, no model with top-bottom-tau Yukawa coupling unification appears to be consistent with the experiments.Comment: 15 pages, University of Michigan preprint UM-TH-94-23. LaTeX file with 4 uuencoded figures sent separately. Compressed PS file (114Kb) available by anonymous FTP from 141.211.96.66 in /pub/preprints/UM-TH-94-23.ps.