Creating School Finance Policies That Facilitate New Goals

In this policy brief, Allan Odden argues that it may be time to redesign state and district school finance systems to align them more closely to the standards-based education reform movement and the national goal of teaching all students to rigorous performance standards. Historically, a major focus of the school finance policy debate was the fiscal disparities across school districts within states. These disparities in per-pupil spending were inversely linked to tax efforts and strongly linked to the size of the local property tax base per pupil. Although the strength of the connection between spending and education quality was debated, most policymakers admitted some connection and viewed the overall structure as unfair. Low-property wealth districts were doubly disadvantaged—they not only had high tax rates but also had low education expenditures and a lower quality education program. On the other hand, high-property wealth districts were doubly advantaged—they had both low tax rates and high education expenditures and, in most cases, higher quality education programs. But most efforts to offset these disparities with state aid were only modestly successful over time. It became apparent that additional strategies were necessary to reduce spending differences. As research by Evans, Murray, and Schwab (1997) shows, many states have undergone court-ordered school finance reform in the past 30 years, which has had limited success in reducing fiscal inequality. Indeed, whether or not the reform was court-ordered, policymakers in most states developed strategies that attempted to reduce spending differences across districts, including flat grants, minimum foundation programs, guaranteed tax base and percentage equalizing formulas, and full state funding. But for the most part, these formulas have fallen far short of reducing fiscal disparities. Although these reforms managed to reverse the trends in tax rates between high- and low-property wealth districts in many states (so low wealth districts tend to have low tax rates and high wealth districts tend to have high tax rates), they still left spending per pupil highly associated with property wealth. With the national emphasis on teaching students to higher standards, however, it is becoming clear that this question of fiscal fairness, while important, does not address the more fundamental question of what resources are necessary to reach those high standards. Therefore, the traditional focus on equitable distribution of resources is giving way or expanding to a new focus: ensuring that school finance policy can facilitate the goal of teaching students to higher standards. As Clune (1994a, 1994b) argues, this requires a shift in school finance thinking from equity to adequacy. Such a shift challenges policymakers to identify a new school finance structure that is more directly linked to strategies that raise levels of student achievement

Including School Finance in Systemic Reform Strategies: A Commentary

This 1994 CPRE Finance Brief takes a look at the school finance issue and proposes that education funding be tied more closely to systemic reform initiatives. It next describes past trends in school finance and current challenges to traditional education funding sources. Policy implications of these changes are presented, followed by a discussion of possible components of a finance system based on systemic reform

Análisis sin mecanismos complementarios del bloqueo de la armonía mediante geminadas en Logoori

Following the demise of the SPE theory of phonology, little attention was paid to how rules should be formulated. Instead, there was a general trend to minimize the language-specific component of a grammar, to factor out recurring patterns and state them as independent constraints or parameters. The richer representations of autose­gmental phonology additionally led to uncertainty in rule formulation, primarily because of questions about what the correct representations are, but also because specifying dominance and precedence relations is more complex than just specifying precedence relations. This paper discusses a vowel harmony rule in the Bantu language Logoori, which is blocked by an intervening gemi­nate consonant. It is typologically surprising that an intervening geminate has an effect on harmony, and there is no clear model for how such an effect in a rule should be encoded. It is shown that the effect follows naturally from correctly formalizing the rule, with attention to how rule and representational substrings are matched, and no rule-external conditions on the rule are necessary.A partir del declive de la teoría fonológica de SPE, se prestó poca atención a cómo se deberían formular las reglas. Existía, en cambio, una tendencia general a minimizar el componente gramatical específico de una lengua para fac­torizar los patrones recurrentes y establecerlos como restricciones o parámetros independientes. Las representaciones, más ricas, de la fonología autosegmental generaron además dudas sobre cuál había de ser la formulación de reglas, principalmente por los interrogantes surgidos acerca de cómo son las correctas representaciones, pero también porque especificar las relaciones de dominancia y de precedencia resulta más complejo que especificar simplemente las rela­ciones de precedencia. En este artículo se discute una regla de armonía vocálica de la lengua bantú Logoori, que se ve bloqueada al intervenir una consonante geminada. Desde un punto de vista tipológico es sorprendente que una geminada interviniente afecte a la armonía, y no se cuenta con un modelo claro sobre cómo debe codificarse dicho efecto en una regla. Aquí se muestra que el efecto se desprende naturalmente de la formalización correcta de la regla, atendiendo a cómo se corresponden la regla y las subcadenas representacionales, y que no se precisan condiciones sobre la regla externas a ella

The Status of Onsetless Syllables in Kikerewe

Research for this paper was supported in part by NSF Grant SBR-9421362

Trauma: Integrating Play Therapy and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing

Trauma has been documented for hundreds of years. Anyone can experience symptoms of trauma. Wamser-Nanney and Vandenberg (2013), discuss different types of trauma including, physical, sexual, domestic, medical, natural disaster, and terrorism violence. Symptoms from trauma can result in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD is a result from a traumatic event that occurred. It can alter the brain and leave long lasting psychological symptoms (Bremner, 2006). Treatment for PTSD has focused around using exposure or cognitive therapies to help clients work through their traumatic event. Beckley-Forset (2015), discussed using an alternative therapy to work with trauma. She integrated play therapy and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, while working with a young child who experienced a traumatic event. Integrating play therapy and EMDR, gives the therapist and client flexibility. These therapies integrated a directive and non-directive approach to working with trauma. Trauma can be hard to describe or talk about. Play therapy provides the opportunity to play out or express their trauma without words. Using EMDR with the bilateral stimulation, help the brain reprocess and store the trauma without further triggering the client. The integration of these two approaches provides therapists with methods that meet the developmental needs of clients who have experienced trauma

Interval-training at higher percentages of VO2max induces greater training adaptions than lower percentages in cyclists

Purpose: Training at high intensities is well known to improve endurance performance, yet the importance of training intensity measured as percentage of maximal oxygen consumption (VO2max) has never been verified. Thus, the present study aimed to investigate the importance of training intensity measured as the average percentage of VO2max elicited during every interval-sessions (%VO2max@IS) during an entire training intervention on changes in endurance performance and physiological determinants of endurance performance in cyclists. Methods: Twenty-two cyclists (VO2max = 67.1 ± 6.4 mL·min-1·kg-1; males, n = 19; females, n = 3) performed a nine-weeks training intervention including twenty-one 5x8-minutes interval-sessions at a mean power output (PO) corresponding to the individual cyclists´ 40-minutes PO. Oxygen consumption was measured during all interval-sessions, and the half of the cyclists eliciting the highest %VO2max@IS were allocated to HIGH (%VO2max@IS = 86.2 ± 3.8%; n = 11) whereas the half eliciting the lowest %VO2max@IS were allocated to LOW (%VO2max@IS = 79.9 ± 4.0%; n = 11). Physiological tests were performed prior to (pre), two times during, and after the intervention (post). Results: Across both groups, the pre to post percentage increase in PO at 4 mmol·L-1 blood lactate concentration (PO@4mmol; p = 0.001) and in a performance index (composed of PO@4mmol, maximal aerobic PO (Wmax), and 15-minutes PO (PO@15min); p = 0.042) were both positively related to %VO2max@IS. Comparing HIGH to LOW, larger percentage increases were observed in VO2max (8.0 ± 4.3% and 2.7 ± 2.7%, p = 0.003), Wmax (8.6 ± 5.6% and 4.2 ± 2.8%, p = 0.035), PO@4mmol (7.8 ± 3.6% and 3.0 ± 4.5%, p = 0.013), and the performance index (7.7 ± 3.4% and 3.6 ± 2.9%, p = 0.007). Conclusion: Performing twenty-one interval-sessions over nine weeks at a higher %VO2max@IS induces greater training adaptions than at a lower %VO2max@IS in cyclists

Getting the Best People Into the Toughest Jobs

It is indisputable that teachers and principals have the greatest impact on student learning. Unfortunately, the education system has hired and tenured thousands of ineffective teachers and principals, particularly in high-poverty urban and rural schools. As a consequence, these schools have low levels of student learning. To remedy this problem, the nation is engaged in multiple activities to get effective teachers into all classrooms and effective principals into all schools through more “strategic management” of education talent. Strategic talent management is an approach that manages all human resource programs—recruitment, selection, placement, development, evaluation, tenure, promotion, dismissal, and compensation—around a set of effectiveness metrics that capture instructional practice and student-learning growth. The theory is that effective principals should manage schools in ways that facilitate teachers’ acquiring the instructional expertise they need to make them and the school effective—that is to say, successful in dramatically boosting student learning. The issue of strategic talent management in education leapt onto the policy and practice agenda quite recently. Yet in a short time period, huge changes in policy and practice have occurred. From a set of disjointed policies and even-worse practices, a comprehensive and holistic view of strategic talent management in education is developing, supported by new and ambitious federal and state policies and rapidly changing local practices. Admittedly, policy design still needs significant calibration, and local implementation is far from complete. But the landscape of how teachers and principals—the education talent—are managed is dramatically changing. A once-haphazard mix of approaches is moving toward many more strategic systems that are designed to ensure that only effective teachers and principals are recruited, tenured, retained, and well-compensated—particularly in urban and poor rural communities. This paper examines the evolving landscape of talent management in education: Talent management, or lack thereof, in education at the close of the 20th century; educational change that began at the dawn of the 21st century; rumblings of change that evolved into comprehensive new federal and state human-capital management policies and local practices; rumblings of change that coalesced into a foundation of change across the country and the new world of talent management; why the focus on talent evolved and quickly assumed such a prominent role in the nation’s education policy and practice agendas