Strategic Involuntary Teacher Transfers and Teacher Performance: Examining Equity and Efficiency

Despite claims that school districts need flexibility in teacher assignment to allocate teachers more equitably across schools and improve district performance, the power to involuntarily transfer teachers across schools remains hotly contested. Little research has examined involuntary teacher transfer policies or their effects on schools, teachers, or students. This article uses administrative data from Miami‐Dade County Public Schools to investigate the implementation and effects of the district's involuntary transfer policy, including which schools transferred and received teachers, which teachers were transferred, what kinds of teachers replaced them in their former schools, and how their performance—as measured by their work absences and value‐added in math and reading—compared before and after the transfer. We find that, under the policy, principals in the lowest performing schools identified relatively low‐performing teachers for transfer who, based on observable characteristics, would have been unlikely to leave on their own. Consistent with an equity improvement, we find that involuntarily transferred teachers were systematically moved to higher performing schools and generally were outperformed by the teachers who replaced them. Efficiency impacts are mixed; although transferred teachers had nearly two fewer absences per year in their new positions, transferred teachers continued to have low value‐added in their new schools.     

The development of a sexual abuse severity score: characteristics of childhood sexual abuse associated with trauma symptomatology, somatization, and alcohol abuse

Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) is common and is associated with both mental and physical health problems in adulthood. Using data from an age- and sex-stratified population survey of 600 Olmsted County, Minnesota, residents, a Sexual Abuse Severity Score was developed. The abuse characteristics of 156 CSA respondents were associated with self-reported trauma, somatization, and alcohol use. Characteristics included age of first sexual abuse, more than one perpetrator, degree of coercion, severity of abuse (i.e., attempted intercourse is more severe than fondling), and the number of occurrences. This is one of the few reports to develop a risk summary that quantifies the severity of CSA.     

Activation,Conversion, or Reinforcement? The Impact of Partisan News Exposure on Vote Choice

This study uses multiwave panel data from the 2008 presidential election to investigate the impact of partisan news exposure on changes in vote preferences over time. Overcoming key limitations of prior research, the analysis distinguishes among the potential effects originally delineated by Lazarsfeld and colleagues ( 1948 ): (1) activation—motivating partisans who initially say they are undecided or planning to defect to shift their vote back to their own party's candidate; (2) conversion—motivating partisans to shift their vote to the opposing party's candidate; and (3) reinforcement—strengthening partisans’ preference for their initial vote choice. The results reveal only modest evidence that partisan news reinforces existing vote preferences. Surprisingly, partisan news plays a more robust role motivating changes in vote choice: news slanted toward citizens’ own partisanship increased the odds of activation and decreased the odds of conversion, while news slanted away from citizens’ own partisanship proved a strong counterforce working in the opposite direction.     

Of Mandarins,Legal Consciousness,and the Cultural Turn in US Legal History: Robert W. Gordon. 1984. Critical Legal Histories. Stanford Law Review 36:57–125

This article traces the impact of Robert Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories” on scholars writing at the intersection of law and history. While Gordon's central claim about the constitutive character of the law has come to serve as a working assumption in the field, the case he made for the intellectual history of doctrine as articulated by legal mandarins has proven less influential in the twenty‐five years since the article was published. Instead, legal historians have focused their attention on the interaction between official and lay forms of law‐making with a decided emphasis on popular legal consciousness. For precisely this reason, the time may be ripe for reconsideration of mandarin materials, not only for what they have to tell us about the dynamics of cultural change, but also as sources of insight into basic puzzles of the human condition that have tended across time to be expressed in and through legal forms.     

Trick or truth? The British ANF proposal, west Germany and US nonproliferation policy, 1964-68

The deployment and control of nuclear weapons in Europe was a major aspect of Cold War diplomacy. The Multilateral Force (MLF) is a prime example. First proposed in 1960, the MLF attempted to reconcile European demands for collective alliance control within the broader framework of US nonproliferation policy. The MLF was opposed by both Britain and France, who feared the proposal would lead to a nuclear armed West Germany. To counter the MLF, the Wilson government advanced an alternate scheme - the Atlantic Nuclear Force (ANF). This article examines British objectives in advancing the ANF. It contends that the ANF was not a cynical attempt to frustrate the MLF, as suggested by previous commentators, but embodied a serious attempt by the Labour government to implement a nonproliferation regime.     

Sacred groves,sacrifice zones and soy production: globalization,intensification and neo-nature in South America

Soy has become one of the world's most important agroindustrial commodities – serving as the nexus for the production of food, animal feed, fuel and hundreds of industrial products – and South America has become its leading production region. The soy boom on this continent entangles transnational capital and commodity flows with social relations deeply embedded in contested ecologies. In this introduction to the collection, we first describe the ‘neo-nature’ of the soy complex and the political economy of the sector in South America, including the new corporate actors and financial mechanisms that produced some of the world's largest agricultural production companies. We then discuss key environmental debates surrounding soy agribusiness in South America, challenging especially the common arguments that agroindustrial intensification ‘spares land’ for conservation while increasing production to ‘feed the world’. We demonstrate that these arguments hinge on limited data from a peculiar portion of the southern Amazon fringe, and obfuscate through neo-Malthusian concerns multiple other political and ecological problems associated with the sector. Thus, discussions of soy production become intertwined with broader debates about agrarian development, industrialization and modernization. Finally, we briefly outline the contributions in this volume, and identify limitations and fruitful directions for further research.