Does merit pay reward good teachers? Evidence from a randomized experiment

A common criticism of merit‐pay plans is that they fail to systematically target rewards to the most effective teachers. This study presents new evidence on this issue by evaluating data from Tennessee's Career Ladder Evaluation System and the Project STAR class‐size experiment. Because the students and teachers participating in the experiment were randomly assigned, inferences about the relative quality of teachers certified by the career ladder should be unbiased. The results indicate that Tennessee's career ladder had mixed success in rewarding teachers who increased student achievement. Assignment to career‐ladder teachers increased mathematics scores by roughly 3 percentile points but generally had smaller and statistically insignificant effects on reading scores. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Bargaining and Learning While Fighting

Much of the existing formal work on war models the decision to go to war as a game-ending, costly lottery. This article relaxes this assumption by treating war as a costly process during which the states run the risk of military collapse. The model also allows for uncertainty over either the cost of fighting or the distribution of power. The analysis makes four contributions to the growing costly-process literature: (i) the present model provides a more general treatment of the learning process that occurs when states are uncertain about the distribution of power, (ii) it explicitly compares the bargaining and learning processes for the two different sources of uncertainty, (iii) it suggests a way to empirically distinguish wars arising from these two sources, and (iv) it shows that the equilibrium dynamics of informational accounts of war may be quite sensitive to the underlying bargaining environment through which information is conveyed .     

Parenting Style and Bullying and Victimization: Comparing Foreign-Born Asian,U.S.-Born Asian,and White American Adolescents

Journal of Family Violence - The purpose of the study is to explore whether the association between types of parenting styles and bullying and victimization are similar across White American,...     

Significant Differences in PostMortem Heart Weight Before and After Dissection Using the Short-Axis Dissecting Method

Correctly assessing heart weight can be critical at postmortem examination. The current international guidelines advocate using the short-axis method in dissecting the heart and the heart weighed when the blood is emptied. However, it did not specify at what point the heart should be weighed or how the blood should be emptied. This study compared heart weights at three different time points during the heart examination (immediately after dissecting out of the pericardial sac with blood still in chambers, blood washed/removed from heart chambers without the heart opened, and the heart completely opened, blood emptied, and pad dried). This was to illustrate the variation in measurement and potential errors when the heart is weighed at different time of dissection. The results show that there were statistical and clinical significant differences between the heart weights at each weighing points. We recommend the heart to be completely dissected with any blood and residual washing/rinsing water emptied before being weighed. Although performed in this study, the effect of pad drying the heart on heart weight was not explored and was a limitation in this study.     

The economy of secrecy: security,information control,and EU‒US relations

Abstract

This article develops an ‘economy of secrecy’ as a framework to understand how secrecy regulates interstate relations and to explicate why states react differently to breaches of secrecy. Drawing upon Simmel, the article argues that secrecy shapes interstate relations by tuning the ratio of ‘knowledge’ and ‘ignorance’. Furthermore, while the economy of secrecy acknowledges the existence of many types of secret, it emphasises their common underlying mechanisms, namely: secrecy as a field of power, secrecy as a field of performance, and secrecy as a normative terrain. Finally, the economy of secrecy is agnostic with regard to the moral character of promoting secrecy. In order to substantiate the argument, the article examines three recent iterations of how secrecy has disrupted EU?US relations: extraordinary renditions, WikiLeaks, and Snowden’s revelations. In addition to showcasing how the economy of secrecy operates, these examples contribute to our understanding of how secrecy affects information flow and dissemination in world politics.     

Centripetalism and Electoral Moderation in Established Democracies

Centripetal approaches to ethnic conflict management seek to promote inter-ethnic accommodation and moderation by making politicians dependent on the electoral support of groups other than their own base. There is an ongoing debate about the utility of such approaches, including which kinds of electoral systems can best promote moderate and centrist politics in deeply divided societies. Neglected in this debate, however, has been the experience of ethnically diverse established democracies utilizing centripetal electoral models. This article examines historical evidence from Australia, and recent natural experiments with subnational electoral reform in the United States, which lend support to centripetal claims that preferential, “ranked choice” or “instant runoff” voting can encourage electoral moderation and address political polarization.