Confronting Systemic Inequity in Education: High Impact Strategies for Philanthropy

Each year, foundations pour in billions of dollars to support education, and yet, the education inequity crisis in this country continues. Philanthropy can be more effective at being part of the solution and finally bring access to quality education for all students. This report serves as an eye-opener to foundation leaders about the ineffectiveness of current grantmaking practices. It also encourages conversations within and among education grantmakers, and provides six helpful discussion questions

Contextualizing Homeschooling Data: A Response to Rudner

Rudner (1999) presents the results of a survey and testing program, administered by Bob Jones University (BJU), for homeschooling students. In this response, we applaud Rudner's contribution to building a greater understanding of the homeschooling movement. However, we also voice a strong concern that what Rudner contributed with one hand, he took back with the other. We contend that Rudner's analysis of the BJU data fails to offer a straightforward explanation of important and striking limitations. The unfortunate result is an inaccurate portrayal of homeschoolers as a white, Christian, monolithic population. Although the results of Rudner's analyses are likely valid for the particular population he studied, his insufficient attention to the data's bias has led to an erroneous picture of homeschooling

Universal Access to a Quality Education: Research and Recommendations for the Elimination of Curricular Stratification

This policy brief makes the case for schools across the country to put an end to policies that cast off students into unchallenging, low-track classrooms. The authors recommend a clear process for the phasing out of curricular stratification in grades K-10, beginning with the lowest track and granting meaningful access to AP and IB courses to all students. The brief includes model statutory language to implement its recommendations

Alien Registration- Welner, Bessie A. (Portland, Cumberland County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/23135/thumbnail.jp

Premature celebrations: The persistence of inter-district funding disparities

Two interlocking claims are being increasing made around school finance: that states have largely met their obligations to resolve disparities between local public school districts and that the bulk of remaining disparities are those that persist within school districts. These local decisions are described as irrational and unfair school district practices in the allocation of resources between individual district schools. In this article, we accept the basic contention of within-district inequities. But we begin with a critique of the empirical basis for the claims that within-district disparities are the dominant form of persistent disparities in school finance, finding that claims to this effect are largely based on one or a handful of deeply flawed analyses. Next, we present empirical analysis, using national data, of 16-year trends (1990 to 2005) and recent patterns (2005 to 2007) of between-district disparities, finding that state efforts to resolve between-district disparities are generally incomplete and inadequate and that in some states, between-district disparities have actually increased over time

Unravelling the relationship between substrate selectivity and primary sequence of UDP-glycosyltransferases

Plant natural products (NPs) are widely utilized in biotechnology, for example as fragrances, aromas, dyes and medicine. Although nature provides thousands of different NPs, only a small fraction of them is currently used in applications, partly because of problems in solubility and stability. These properties can be enhanced through glycosylation, but synthesis of glycosylated natural products is challenging. Enzymatic route to NP glycosylation is therefore of high interest. In plants, the enzymes responsible for NP glycosylation are called UDP-glycosyltransferases (UGTs) since they use UDP activated sugars as sugar donors. A single plant can have hundreds of UGTs allowing glycosylation of different compound groups. Understanding the bases of substrate selectivity would be important in allowing efficient engineering of UGTs for specific substrates and/or higher catalytic activities. Although UGTs have conserved tertiary structures, the relationship between UGT primary sequence and acceptor substrate is not well understood making enzyme engineering challenging. Main obstacles in creating a predictive model for substrate selectivity is the lag of UGT structures (currently nine plant UGT structures are available through PDB) and the lag of comparable information of UGT selectivity. Interestingly, it has been shown that UGT substrate selectivity is not related to phylogeny. Therefore, we wondered if more insights would be gained from comparing different phylogenetic groups to each other rather than trying to create a common predictive model for the whole enzyme group. By comparing structural information and sequence alignments, we indeed observed differences in substrate binding pocket folding when comparing UGTs from different phylogenetic groups. We hypothesize that this variation has led to difficulties in predicting substrate selectivity from UGT primary sequence, since some residues lining the binding pocket vary from one phylogenetic group to another. Therefore, it might be more feasible to predict substrate selectivity for each UGT phylogenetic group independently instead of the whole enzyme family