Search results

There has been a tremendous decline in the use of the death penalty in the United States. Recent research using county-level data shows that a small minority of locales in the country account for death sentences and even fewer for executions. Drawing on theoretical work that seeks to account for why these locales continue to use capital punishment, we provide in this chapter a thick description of Maricopa County, Arizona, one of the most active death penalty locales in the contemporary United States. In doing so, we demonstrate how capital punishment operates in a field of violently defended racial boundaries. Our chapter shows the roles of various local actors across time in fortifying such racial boundaries through historical white terrorism and more recent reinforcement of zones of racial exclusion that are embodied especially in communicated fears of “illegal immigrant gangs.” We contend that the case of Maricopa County points to the importance of attending to racist localisms as a catalyst for the continued implementation of the death penalty in the United States.

David M. Marcovitz suggests that public education has not changed very much in the last 100 years, in spite of information and communication technology (ICT). Is ICT simply another educational fad or will it have a lasting impact on K-12 education? Lisa C. Yamagata-Lynch and Sharon Smaldino maintain there have been several examples of effective uses of technology in K-12. However, the inability of public schools and higher education to properly train teachers has severely limited the success of using computer technology in most public schools. Sharon Tettegah, Diana Betout, and Kona Taylor describes cyber-bullying, as a phenomenon that is creating difficulty for educators and has led to the humiliation of many students across the nation. David Williamson Shaffer and Kurt D. Squire argue that researchers of educational technology should study Pasteur's Quadrant for “use-inspired basic research” to create better models to evaluate educational practices and the use of technology. John Keller and Matthew J. Stuve discuss teacher quality, a topic that has taken on greater importance since NCLB. They also talk about the use of “teacher as brand” as a construct to further affect teacher quality. In connection, branding has been a very successful venture in the commercial context.

A study has been made of the effect of controlled variations in indexing vocabulary size on retrieval performance using the Cranfield 200 and 1400 test collections. The vocabularies considered are sets of variable‐length character strings chosen from the fronts of document and query terms so as to occur with approximate equifrequency. Sets containing between 120 and 720 members were tested both using an application of the Cluster Hypothesis and in a series of linear associative retrieval experiments. The effectiveness of the smaller sets is low but the larger ones exhibit retrieval characteristics comparable to those of words.

The purpose of this paper is to compare measures of socio-economic status (Index of Community Socio-educational Advantage values (ICSEA)), school performance, school funding and school readiness in terms of their impact on student performance. In this respect, the paper tests the proposition – given research that suggests the teacher is the important ingredient in improved student learning performance – that a school principal who has strategical worked to “ready” their teachers for a whole of school teaching improvement agenda will generate increased student learning results than those who have not and further this improvement will occur irrespective of the circumstance of the socio-economic circumstance of the school.

In total, 22 Government schools from a single school district in Australia participated in the study, after having been involved in a system sponsored “teaching improvement program”. A survey, consisting of 30 seven-point Likert-style scale items, was administered to all teachers and school leaders in the school district. The survey was designed to rate levels of staff perceived alignment, capability and engagement to the programme as it was implemented by the Head in each school. The information regarding each school’s ICSEA value, funding per student and student learning performance, was obtained from the database provided by the relevant authority (ACARA). All statistical analysis was completed using SPSS Version 22.

The findings of this study indicate that high levels of organisational readiness, as defined by the alignment, capability and engagement (ACE) approach, are associated with effective teaching and improvement in student outcomes. In turn, the authors interpret this to mean that the internal organisation of a school has important effects on student achievement that are independent to external factors such as school funding or even the socio-educational positioning of the school.

The findings of this study indicate that high levels of organisational readiness, as defined by the ACE approach, are associated with effective teaching and improvement in student outcomes. The implications are that the ACE provides a framework for what the school leader needs to focus on when whole of school teaching improvement is the goal. The study did not investigate what the school leader did in each school to ready their staff.

These findings indicate the importance of leadership in a school and provide an insight into what the school leader needs to focus on when whole of school teaching improvement is the intended goal. This focus can thus be understood as the leader working to ensure all staff members are ACE to the improvement agenda.

The improvement of educational outcomes is a global goal of governments. In this respect, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) school systems in particular have linked education system performance and international competitiveness in ways that place pressure on the “black box” of individual schools. Reports, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment and local testing regimes testify that governments and communities are interested in the academic performance of students within and across schooling systems. The benefits of high performing schools contribute to the standard of living of citizens and the well-being of a society more generally. This paper investigates propositions that focus the work of the school leader to achieving such inherent goals.

The paper introduces the concept of school readiness. The premise is considered important to the current research because it represents the ability of schools to participate in reform agendas that are characteristic of government policy positions. The “school readiness” approach lies outside the education literature, motivated by the idea that the literature on turning around failing organisations in sectors outside of education provides clear guidelines for reforming schools. The implications for turnaround leadership are particularly encouraging and important particular organisational factors, in common with sectors outside of education, are of significant importance in enhancing teacher motivation, teacher learning and consequential improvements in student outcomes. This paper seeks to add empirical evidence in support of these approaches by adopting what the authors refer as organisational “readiness” for reform developed by Schiemann (2014).

Providing accessible and inclusive environments fulfils legislative obligations and creates financial benefits. Historic-listed buildings rely on heritage tourism for continued financial support. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how historic-listed buildings adapt to afford access to people with disabilities (PwD), through physical and non-physical interventions.

Using a case study approach of an historic property, research comprises of: an observational visitor survey, determining visitor demographic regarding visible disabilities; an access audit, determining current accessibility; interviews with the property’s Access Team; and desktop-based research.

The results depict the complexity, challenges and barriers in making historic buildings accessible for PwD. Through alternative training and inclusive initiatives, the findings reveal how historic buildings may support the multiplicity of individuals’ access requirements.

Further research incorporating longer surveying periods, wider demographic of interviewees and multiple case study analysis would provide richer, comparable data in understanding the intrinsic complexities involved in creating accessibility within historic buildings. The implications of this research could transcend management, conservation and adaptation of listed buildings in identifying the defined barriers and solutions to overcome them.

The originality of this paper relates to the use of alternative services creating access when physical changes are deemed “unreasonable”. A conceptual framework is developed depicting the complexity, challenges and barriers in making historic buildings accessible for PwD.

As the world becomes a global village, sports organisations have begun to extend their markets and fan bases to different groups of customers. David Beckham, a British soccer star with a high profile marriage and much media attention, has endorsed numerous products, thereby becoming an excellent case study for the current trend of athlete endorsement in the international sports industry. The results of this case study provide insights into factors that might influence the success of athlete endorsement.

Few issues in recent times have so provoked debate and dissention within the library field as has the concept of fees for user services. The issue has aroused the passions of our profession precisely because its roots and implications extend far beyond the confines of just one service discipline. Its reflection is mirrored in national debates about the proper spheres of the public and private sectors—in matters of information generation and distribution, certainly, but in a host of other social ramifications as well, amounting virtually to a debate about the most basic values which we have long assumed to constitute the very framework of our democratic and humanistic society.

The association between education and health is one of the most robust empiric findings over the past several decades. At each higher level of education, prevalence of most types of chronic disease decreases. However, understanding of the mechanisms through which education is related to chronic disease is limited. Specifically, the literature provides little evidence of the explanatory factors in the pathways linking education and health. Better scientific understanding of the pathways through which education influences health may help to explain the well-documented association between socioeconomic position (SEP) and health and could lead to improved intervention strategies for health disparities. We review the potential pathways through which education may influence health and the evidence that explicitly tests these hypothesized pathways and provide direction for future research in this field.

Variety Generation involves the selection of sets of character strings, or symbols, which are intended to occur with equal probabilities in bodies of text or sets of text units from a particular source. It is important that the sample used to generate the symbol set should be representative of the data with which the set will be used. An assessment is given here of the amount of variation in symbol sets generated from files of titles and author names from BNB MARC data over a five year period, and a comparison is made with LC MARC. Some of the BNB symbol sets are compared directly, and equifrequency statistics are obtained for the assignment of each symbol set to each file. The differences between the equifrequency statistics are examined by means of an analysis of variance technique.