California's New School Funding Flexibility

Recommends improving on temporary provisions to relax spending restrictions on school districts' categorical funding. Calls for a more equitable distribution of funds, clear criteria for flexibility and alternative configurations, and some restrictions

Pathways for School Finance in California

Simulates school finance reforms to equalize core program funding rates, shifting categorical programs to unrestricted support, raising funding for high-poverty districts, and adjusting regional rates. Focuses on special education and Economic Impact Aid

Funding Formulas for California Schools III: An Analysis of Governor Brown's Weighted Pupil Funding Formula

Outlines the policy priorities of the weighted pupil funding formula proposed in the state's 2012-13 budget. Analyzes the revenue districts with high percentages of disadvantaged students would receive compared to other districts and 2010-11 allocations

From Potential to Action: Bringing Social Impact Bonds to the U.S.

Examines the structure, benefits, stakeholders, and potential for and economics of social impact bonds in the areas of homelessness and criminal justice, including meaningful savings, proven interventions, and capacity, with a focus on juvenile justice

How to Motivate Your Dragon: Teaching Goal-Driven Agents to Speak and Act in Fantasy Worlds

We seek to create agents that both act and communicate with other agents in pursuit of a goal. Towards this end, we extend LIGHT (Urbanek et al. 2019)---a large-scale crowd-sourced fantasy text-game---with a dataset of quests. These contain natural language motivations paired with in-game goals and human demonstrations; completing a quest might require dialogue or actions (or both). We introduce a reinforcement learning system that (1) incorporates large-scale language modeling-based and commonsense reasoning-based pre-training to imbue the agent with relevant priors; and (2) leverages a factorized action space of action commands and dialogue, balancing between the two. We conduct zero-shot evaluations using held-out human expert demonstrations, showing that our agents are able to act consistently and talk naturally with respect to their motivations