Policy Barriers to School Improvement: What's Real and What's Imagined?

Some of the most promising reforms are happening where school leaders are thinking differently about how to get the strongest student outcomes from the limited resources available. But even principals who use their autonomy to aggressively reallocate resources say that persistent district, state, and federal barriers prohibit them from doing more.What are these barriers? What do they block principals from doing? Is there a way around them?CRPE researchers probed these questions with principals in three states (NH, CT, MD). These principals cited numerous district, state, and federal barriers standing in the way of school improvement. The barriers, 128 in all, fell into three categories: 1) barriers to instructional innovations, 2) barriers to allocating resources differently, and 3) barriers to improving teacher quality.Upon investigation, researchers found that principals have far more authority than they think. Only 31% of the barriers cited were "real" -- immovable statutes, policies, or managerial directives that bring the threat of real consequences if broken.The report recommends educating principals on the authority they already possess, to help them find workarounds to onerous rules. The report also outlines a number of specific state and district policy changes to grant schools the autonomy they need to improve student outcomes

Censusing manatees: a report on the feasibility of using aerial surveys and mark and recapture techniques to conduct a population survey of the West Indian Manatee

This report results from an invitation to review the needs and prospects for capture-recapture and aerial census studies of the manatee (Trichechus manatus) in Florida. Three aerial reconnaissance flights provided a first hand view of manatee habitats, as follows: May 3, Suwannee River to Kings Bay and Crystal River (Rathbun, Eberhardt), May 4, Vero Beach to Ft. Lauderdale and Ft. Myers by way of Whitewater Bay (Rose, Percival, Eberhardt), and May 5, Cape Canaveral to Jacksonville, St. Johns River and Blue Spring (Rose, Kinnaird, Eberhardt). (24 page document

Modeling effects of nonbreeders on population growth estimates

Acknowledgements We thank the Beissinger lab and reviewers for helpful comments on manuscript drafts. This research was funded by a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Programme (project NON- BREEDERS). The contents of this paper reflect the views of the researchers, not the views of the European Commission. Data Accessibility R-code available from the Dryad Digital Repository: http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.t56cn (Lee, Reid & Beissinger, 2016).Peer reviewedPostprin

Asian Americans and the 2008 Election

Presents results of a survey of Asian Americans' views on the 2008 election and political participation. Examines candidate preferences, issues of concern, and percentages of likely voters, by party affiliation, voting record, ethnic group, and state

Innovation in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises: A Study of Businesses in New South Wales, Australia

This paper examines the process of innovation within SMEs, focusing on a sample of firms in New South Wales, Australia. The trend of the last several decades towards increased integration of global markets, or globalization, has meant that many firms are experiencing continuously increasing pressure to remain viable as their markets expand, and they begin competing with a larger number of firms. SMEs, in particular, are vulnerable to this pressure, since they tend to be disadvantaged relative to larger firms that generally have better access to funding and other resources. The ways in which SMEs operate to remain economically viable, and contribute to economic performance, is of especial interest to governments given the prominent roles that they play in most economies. One way of doing so is through innovation. In this paper, we present a more complex model of the innovation process than the traditional linear model involving R&D investment, what we term the "Ripple Effect Model", building upon recent developments in the literature. The Ripple-Effect Model appears to be substantially supported.small and medium enterprises, innovation, New South Wales, Australia

New approaches to airline recovery problems

Air traffic disruptions result in fight delays, cancellations, passenger misconnections, creating high costs to aviation stakeholders. This dissertation studies two directions in the area of airline disruption management – an area of significant focus in reducing airlines’ operating costs. These directions are: (i) a joint proactive and reactive approach to airline disruption management, and (ii) a dynamic aircraft and passenger recovery approach to evaluate the long-term effects of climate change on airline network recoverability. Our first direction proposes a joint proactive and reactive approach to airline disruption management, which optimizes recovery decisions in response to realized disruptions and in anticipation of future disruptions. Specifically, it forecasts future disruptions partially and probabilistically by estimating systemic delays at hub airports (and the uncertainty thereof) and ignoring other contingent disruption sources. It formulates a dynamic stochastic integer programming framework to minimize network-wide expected disruption recovery costs. Specifically, our Stochastic Reactive and Proactive Disruption Management (SRPDM) model combines a stochastic queuing model of airport congestion, a fight planning tool from Boeing/Jeppesen and an integer programming model of airline disruption recovery. We develop an online solution procedure based on look-ahead approximation and sample average approximation, which enables the model's implementation in short computational times. Experimental results show that leveraging partial and probabilistic estimates of future disruptions can reduce expected recovery costs by 1-2%, as compared to a baseline myopic approach that uses realized disruptions alone. These benefits are mainly driven by the deliberate introduction of departure holds to reduce expected fuel costs, fight cancellations and aircraft swaps. Our next direction studies the impact of climate change-imposed constraints on the recoverability of airline networks. We first use models that capture the modified payload-range curves for different aircraft types under multiple climate change scenarios, and the associated (reduced) aircraft capacities. We next construct a modeling and algorithmic framework that allows for simultaneous and integrated aircraft and passenger recovery that explicitly capture the above-mentioned capacity changes in aircraft at different times of day. Our computational results using the climate model on a worst-case, medium-case, and mild-case climate change scenarios project that daily total airline recovery costs increase on average, by 25% to 55.9% on average ; and by 10.6% to 156% over individual disrupted days. Aircraft-related costs are driven by a huge increase in aircraft swaps and cancelations; and passenger-related costs are driven by increases in disrupted passengers who need to be rebooked on the same or a different airline. Our work motivates the critical need for airlines to systematically incorporate climate change as a factor in the design of aircraft as well as in the design and operations of airline networks

Repairing the U.S.–South Korea Alliance: THAAD as an Appeasement Measure

On July 8, 2016, the South Korean government announced its decision to deploy the first stages of the U.S.-operated Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) technology in South Korea. Both countries stated that the reason for deployment was to enhance the security of South Korea, the U.S. and their allies in the Asia Pacific region against North Korea’s nuclear and missile provocations. However, a closer look at the timing and events surrounding the deployment poses significant questions over the South Korean government’s decision to deploy a highly controversial and expensive U.S.-operated military technology that had little military and strategic benefit to South Korea. This thesis seeks to understand the factors that ultimately led the South Korean government to deploy the first stages of THAAD and its subsequent decision to impede the deployment of additional stages. The analysis demonstrates that the South Korean government’s decision to deploy THAAD under the Park administration was primarily based on the importance it placed on maintaining the military and strategic alliance with the U.S., thereby using the deployment of the first stages of THAAD in July 2016 as a temporary appeasement measure to repair its relations with the U.S. The decision closely tracked the changes in direct or indirect U.S. pressure to adopt an integrated defensive system to counteract threats by North Korea rather than any significant change in patterns of North Korean nuclear and missile provocation. Such observations were also strongly supported by the lack of significant military or strategic benefit of THAAD to enhance South Korean security against North Korea’s threats. Once the initial stages were deployed, U.S.-South Korea relations improved and the urgency of repairing the alliance subsided, which led the Moon administration to suspend any additional stages of deployment in an effort to minimize further economic repercussions from China, exacerbated security dilemma with North Korea and domestic turmoil and public mistrust

Shelter in Roxbury

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1993.Includes bibliographical references (p. 66-67).This thesis attempts to use the concept of juxtaposed prospect and refuge to design shelter on a large urban site (92,000 square feet). The broad range of scales stretches the applicability of prospect and refuge as a design tool, yet also forges a varied understanding of related (and sometimes synonymous) architectural principles such as back-front directionality, contrast, threshold, mystery, life-affirmation. The selection of a 'healing' shelter for program intensified the exploration of prospect and refuge, as the given user group compelled a particular attention to architectural elements and dimensions at an intimate scale. This precision, coupled with the demands of community space on such a large site, brought into play intermediate issues of continuity and adjacencies and, thus, more incidents of prospect and refuge.by Jane Elizabeth Lee.M.Arch