THE CURRENTS BENEATH THE “RISING TIDE” OF SCHOOL CHOICE: AN ANALYSIS OF STUDENT ENROLLMENT FLOWS IN THE CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Existing research highlights that families face geographic, social, and psychological constraints that may limit the extent to which competition can take hold in school choice programs. In this paper, we address the implications of such findings by creating a network of student flows from 11 cohorts of eighth‐grade students in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). We applied a custom algorithm to group together schools with similar sending and receiving patterns, and calculated the difference in mean achievement between a student's attended and assigned high schools. For all identified school groupings, we found that the students were on average moving to higher achieving schools. We also found that the movement toward higher achieving schools of the top achievement quartile of students was over twice as large as that of the bottom quartile, but that the flows of both the highest and lowest achieving student quartiles were toward higher achieving destinations. Our results suggest that student movements in CPS between the years of 2001 to 2005 were consistent with creating market pressure for improvement as well as increasing segregation by achievement. However, further research into how schools responded to those movements is required to make inferences about the level or consequences of competition generated by choice‐related reforms during that time.     

Caustic Ingestion—A Forensic Overview

The ingestion of corrosive substances may produce severe burns to the upper aerodigestive tract and stomach, particularly if the pH is greater than 12 or less than two. There is a biphasic age grouping with adult cases most often involving self‐harm and pediatric cases accidental ingestion. Three cases are reported to demonstrate characteristic features following the ingestion of potassium hydroxide, glacial acetic acid and Lysol^®, respectively. All deaths were due to the effects of caustic burns to the upper aerodigestive tract, esophagus and stomach with perforation and/or hemorrhage. The extent of injuries in these cases depends on the nature, amount, and concentration of the agent and on the exposure time. A point to note at autopsy is that tissue damage may also occur from postmortem exposure. Typical injuries involve perioral, limb, and trunk burns, with extensive aerodigestive liquefactive/coagulative necrosis causing hemorrhage and perforation.     

Institutional development in practice: A case-study from the Tibetan refugee community

There is growing interest in organisational and institutional development, or capacity-building, but little understanding of what these involve in practice. This article provides a case-study of a successful long-term programme of institutional development, which built the capacities of the Tibetan refugee community in development planning. The primary focus is on key features for adaptation by development practitioners. The authors also clarify some of the confusions in the debate on organisational and institutional development.     

Involuntary outpatient treatment as “desintitutionalized coercion”: The net-widening concerns

In American jurisprudence, two justifications have traditionally been put forth to support the government's social control of persons with mental illness: police power and parens patriae. As public mental hospitals became less available as loci in which to exercise these functions, governments sought alternative means to achieve the same ends. One prominent but quite controversial means is involuntary outpatient treatment (IOT). While the concerns about IOT have been myriad, one often alluded to but never documented is that of “net-widening.” That is, once IOT became available, it would be applied to an ever greater number of individuals, progressively expanding the margins of the designated population to whom it is applied, despite the formal standard for its application remaining constant. We tested the net-widening belief in a naturalistic experiment in Massachusetts. We found that net-widening did not occur, despite an environment strongly conducive to that expansion. At this time, whatever the arguments against IOT might be, net-widening should not be one of them.     

Indigenous NGOs and refugee assistance

Although well placed to render assistance to refugees, indigenous NGOs usually play only a marginal role, compared with the Northern NGOs which dominate most humanitarian aid programmes. The unbalanced power relations between Northern agencies and donors and Southern NGOs in the delivery of refugee assistance are reviewed. Using data from the assistance programmes for Mozambican refugees in Malawi and Zimbabwe, the strategies and conditions by which some indigenous NGOs successfully challenged this prevailing situation are examined. Factors considered to be significant are institution building; diversifying the donor-base; project design and development; and the skills and expertise of field directors. The broader applicability of these experiences is considered.     

"The Quest": The Strange Life of W. J. Garnett

This article investigates the career of a British diplomat, William Garnett, whose unusual life has until know been neglected by historians. Garnett's papers, held at Lancashire Record Office, are a particularly rich source for historians of British diplomacy, the British Foreign Office, and overseas travel in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Garnett was often outspoken and indiscreet in his private correspondence and his archive, on which this article draws, provides valuable insights into British representation and British policy in the countries to which he was posted in the period 1902-1919.     

Delegation as a Source of Law

The status of delegation as a strictly institutionalized source of law is controversial. In this article, we examine some instances of delegation, in order to explore their claim to be independent and strictly institutionalized sources of law. We consider primarily the instances of labour arbitration and of mediation. Our conclusion is that there is no straightforward answer in either instance to the question whether they constitute sources of law, although the claim of arbitration is strong and that of mediation is weak. We argue that the controversial character of delegation as a source of law is therefore to be expected, given its ambivalent character, and that in exploring the reasons for this ambivalence much can be learnt about the concept of a strictly institutionalized source of law.