Issues in Implementing a Comprehensive Intervention for Public School Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Many students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are educated separately from their typically developing peers, while others are placed in inclusive classes but without supports that would help them benefit from less restrictive placements. The needs of students with ASD who are in inclusive settings are often not planned for or met appropriately, resulting in continuing problems and movement to increasingly restrictive environments or private placements. There is a critical need for school models to fill the gap in appropriate services for this population of children with ASD. These models should include those that are inclusive and academically challenging, that can be implemented by many school districts, and that are responsive to the unique combination of strengths and deficits in these students. In the current article, the authors describe the development and core components of the model, and implementation of the ASD Nest program in public schools in New York City.     

Competitive pricing and the challenge of cost control in medicare

The Medicare program faces a serious challenge: it must find ways to control costs but must do so through a system of congressional oversight that necessarily limits its choices. We look at one approach to prudent purchasing - competitive pricing - that Medicare has attempted many times and in various ways since the beginning of the program, and in all but one case unsuccessfully due to the politics of provider opposition working through Congress and the courts. We look at some related efforts to change Medicare pricing to explore when the program has been successful in making dramatic changes in how it pays for health care. A set of recommendations emerges for ways to respond to the impediments of law and politics that have obstructed change to more efficient payment methods. Except in unusual cases, competitive pricing threatens too many stakeholders in too many ways for key political actors to support it. But an unusual case may arise in the coming Medicare fiscal crisis, a crisis related in part to the prices Medicare pays. At that point, competitive pricing may look less like a problem and more like a solution coming at a time when the system badly needs one.     

Does personalization of officeholders undermine the legitimacy of the office? On perceptions of objectivity in legal decisionmaking

Public legitimation of legal decisionmaking can be promoted through various strategies. We examine strategies of legitimation that are premised on personalizing the public image of legal agents. A personalized public administration emphasizes individual decisionmakers and seeks legitimacy through familiarity with the character, identity, and virtues of individual agents, whereas a non-personalized public administration projects an ethos of technocratic decisionmaking, seeking legitimacy through institutional objectivity and impartiality. We conducted an experiment to examine the efficacy of personalization strategies in the context of a politically charged legal affair: the criminal cases involving the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. We focus on people's perceived objectivity of the office of the Israeli attorney general (AG), given exposure (vs. no exposure) to different types of personal information about the AG, and while manipulating the salience of contrasting decisions concerning Netanyahu (indicting him on several counts of corruption versus exculpating him in others). We find that exposure to personal information about the AG decreased the perceived objectivity of his office, compared to no exposure to personal information, regardless of the type of information, decision salience, and respondents' political leanings. Our findings, therefore, support the legitimating potential of the non-personalization of decisionmakers, and show that it pertains to people positioned as both “losers” and “winners” with regard the political impact of the decision. The study further reflects the capacity of nonabstract real-world, real-time, analyses to shed light on the drivers of public trust in legal decisionmaking in politically polarized contexts—an issue of pertinence in many contemporary democracies.