State Systemic Improvement Planning: Impact on System and Student Outcomes

2020 ◽  
pp. 104420732093254
Author(s):  
Dawn A. Rowe ◽  
Catherine H. Fowler ◽  
Cesar D’Agord ◽  
Frank Horiuchi ◽  
Miles Kawatachi ◽  
...  

In the wake of reports of continued gaps between youth with and without disabilities in regard to graduation rates and postschool outcomes, the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE), Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) began examining their process for monitoring state implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA). OSEP’s revised accountability system, known as Results-Driven Accountability, better aligns accountability systems to support states in improving results for infants, toddlers, and youth with disabilities and their families. Currently required from states, is a comprehensive multiyear State Systemic Improvement Plan (SSIP) focused on improving results for students with disabilities. The purpose of this article is to describe the phases of the SSIP and provide an example of how this new accountability system is working in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). As with all other states, territories, and freely associated states, RMI is required to develop and implement an SSIP.

Electronics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (12) ◽  
pp. 388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seung-Mo Je ◽  
Jun-Ho Huh

The Republic of Korea (ROK) has four distinct seasons. Such an environment provides many benefits, but also brings some major problems when using new and renewable energies. The rainy season or typhoons in summer become the main causes of inconsistent production rates of these energies, and this would become a fatal weakness in supplying stable power to the industries running continuously, such as the aquaculture industry. This study proposed an improvement plan for the efficiency of Energy Storage System (ESS) and energy use. Use of sodium-ion batteries is suggested to overcome the disadvantages of lithium-ion batteries, which are dominant in the current market; a greedy algorithm and the Floyd–Warshall algorithm were also proposed as a method of scheduling energy use considering the elements that could affect communication output and energy use. Some significant correlations between communication output and energy efficiency have been identified through the OPNET-based simulations. The simulation results showed that the greedy algorithm was more efficient. This algorithm was then implemented with C-language to apply it to the Test Bed developed in the previous study. The results of the Test Bed experiment supported the proposals.


Field Methods ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 395-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Robbins ◽  
Justin M. Nolan ◽  
Diana Chen

A new free-list measure of cognitive salience, B′, is presented, which includes both list position and list frequency. It surpasses other extant measures by being normed to vary between a maximum of 1 and a minimum of 0, thereby making it useful for comparisons irrespective of list length or number of respondents. An illustration of its properties, uses, and computation is provided with the aid of examples drawn from free lists of foods elicited from a sample of migrants from the Republic of the Marshall Islands.


Author(s):  
Tim London

This chapter argues that most organizations should develop a set of shared values that drive and unite all facets of their work, creating an inclusive and transparent accountability system. This enables an overall connection while allowing for groups (such as divisions or departments) to avoid being overly interdependent (Carroll & Burton, 2000). This is a more nuanced and adaptable accountability system, enabling individuals and sections within the overall organization to be dynamic, rather than trying to develop a range of rules and procedures that will cover all circumstances across the organization over time. In this scenario, changes in context, whether internally or externally to an organization, would not require a whole new set of rules and procedures. The chapter focuses on analyzing how an organization can develop and utilize a shared set of values to connect processes and interactions into a coherent and flexible accountability system (Gehman et al., 2013).


Author(s):  
Terence Cavanaugh

An estimated three billion people, representing approximately half of the planet’s population, are in some way affected by disabilities, which includes an estimated 150 million from the United States of America (Half the Planet, 2001). According to the Twenty-Third Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (U.S. Department of Education, 2002a), concerning students with special needs between the ages of three and 21, the U.S. and its outlying areas are currently serving educationally more than 6,272,000 students classified as having a disability. The inclusion model, in which a special needs student participates in the “regular” classroom, has become the current classroom education standard. Today’s special needs students have increasing impacts on the general education teacher as, during the past 10 years, the percentage of students with disabilities served in schools and classes with their non-disabled peers has gradually grown to over 90% in 1998 (U.S. Department of Education, 2000b). Because of the large and increasing number of special needs students, assistive educational technology is growing in importance. The population of postsecondary students with disabilities has increased over the past two decades, and currently there are approximately one million persons in postsecondary institutions who are classified as having some form of disability (U.S. Department of Education, 2000b). In 1994, approximately 45% of the adult population who reported having a disability had either attended some college or had completed a bachelor’s degree or higher, as compared to only 29% in 1986 (National Center for Educational Statistics, 1999a).


Author(s):  
Peter Rudiak-Gould

The Republic of the Marshall Islands, an archipelago of low-lying coral atolls in eastern Micronesia, is one of four sovereign nations that may be rendered uninhabitable by climate change in the present century. It is not merely sea level rise which is expected to undermine life in these islands, but the synergy of multiple climatic threats (Barnett and Adger 2003). Rising oceans and increasingly frequent typhoons will exacerbate flooding at the same time that the islands’ natural protection—coral reefs—will die from warming waters and ocean acidification. Fresh water resources will be threatened by both droughts and salt contamination from flooding. Although the reaction of the coral atoll environment to climate change is uncertain, it is likely that the islands will no longer be able to support human habitation within fifty or a hundred years (Barnett and Adger 2003: 326)—quite possibly within the lifetimes of many Marshall Islanders living today. In the public imagination, climate change in vulnerable, remote locations is the intrusion of contamination into a formerly pristine environment, of danger into a once secure sanctuary, of change into a once static microcosm (see Lynas 2004: 81, 124). Archaeologists, of course, know better than this: every place has a history of environmental upheavals, and the Marshall Islands is no exception. Researchers agree that coral atolls are among the most precarious and marginal environments that humans have managed to inhabit (Weisler 1999; Yamaguchi et al. 2005: 27), existing only ‘on the margins of sustainability’ (Weisler 2001). The islands in fact only recently formed: while the reefs are tens of millions of years old, the islets that sit on them emerged from the sea only recently, probably around 2000 BP (Weisler et al. 2000: 194; Yamaguchi et al. 2005: 31–2), just before the first people arrived (Yamaguchi et al. 2005: 31–2). The new home that these early seafarers found was not so much an ancient safe haven as a fragile geological experiment—land whose very existence was tenuous long before humans were altering the global climate.


2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 453-456
Author(s):  
Hilda Heine ◽  
Julianne Walsh Kroeker

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