Patterns of resource distribution in a decentralized urban public school system

Decentralization in the Detroit Public Schools resulted in the establishment of administrative regions and the sharing of responsibility for resource allocation among regional and central administrators. This study examines the relationship between resource levels (measured by per pupil spending and pupil-teacher ratios) and demographic characteristics of schools in each region. Regression analysis revealed differences among regions, with some allocating more resources to schools in lower-income neighborhoods and others favoring middle-income areas. Variations were also found in patterns of distribution of federal and state compensatory funds. These differences, the study concludes, were the consequence of utilization of different decision rules and responsiveness by regional administrators to different population groups.     

Policies on Inequality in the Third World: dependency or autonomy?

Analysis of the national planning documents of selected Third World countries reveals common key issues in policies on educational inequality. Expansion, national unity, decentralisation, positive discrimination and terminal education are highlighted as recurring themes. A further focus on the dimensions of aid, training, nationalism, regionalism and finance provides a framework which can be used both to assess the degree of dependency or autonomy exhibited in equity planning and to provide a critique of over‐simplified applications of dependency theory regarding educational policy.     

Politics,Identity, and College Protest: Then and Now

Kathryn Lynn Weiland, Amilcar Guzman, and KerryAnn O'Meara explore historical and contemporary student protest movements at three academic institutions and provide suggestions to educators on how to support students (and their learning) through their protest activities.     

Developing strategic readers: a multimodal analysis of a primary school teacher's use of speech,gesture and artefacts

Research on implementing reading strategy instruction has primarily focused on teachers' verbal communication with limited attention to other semiotic resources such as gesture and artefacts. In this paper, we construct a ‘telling case’ on the basis of how one primary teacher from the United States used speech, gesture and artefacts as a means of communication while instructing her students in reasons to predict when reading. Data sources for this case study consisted of field notes, artefacts and digital video. We analysed the teacher's use of gesture, speech and artefacts from a social semiotic multimodal perspective. Findings indicate that the teacher created meaning by interweaving multiple modes in the communicative contexts of strategy instruction using speech, deictic gestures, metaphoric gestures and artefacts. These findings are important to reading strategy instruction because much of the research and discussion of practice to date has centred on the instruction of reading strategies using teacher and student speech and not attending to the use of semiotic resources beyond speech.     

The optimization of online searches through the labelling of a dynamic, situation-dependent information need: The reference interview and online searching for undergraduates doing a social-science assignment

An important user group in academic libraries is the undergraduate student seeking information for coursework in the social sciences. With the proliferation of electronic databases, a major challenge for reference librarians is to conduct a quick and effective reference interview to determine the undergraduate's information need while also providing instruction on using the information system. The present article proposes a reference-interview strategy that will allow the reference librarian to (1) efficiently assess the information need of the undergraduate, (2) label the information need, and (3) assign the most appropriate search strategy to satisfy this need.