School Finance Reforms, Tax Limits, and Student Performance: Do Reforms Level Up or Dumb Down?

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, a majority of states substantially changed the ways in which schools were funded, either directly through court- or legislatively mandated school finance reform, or indirectly through tax and expenditure limits. To date, there have been few academic attempts to gauge the effects of these policy changes on actual outcomes of education. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap in the literature. We find compelling evidence that the imposition of tax or expenditure limits on local governments in a state results in a significant reduction in the mean for that state of student performance on standardized tests of mathematics skills. We also find that finance reforms in response to court mandates do not result in significant changes in either the mean level or the distribution of student performance on standardized tests of reading and mathematics. In addition, substantial finance reforms that are not legislative responses to explicit court mandates generally result in increases in mean student performance. Further, in those states that have implemented finance reforms of this type, the test performance of students residing in localities in which local revenues formed smaller shares of total revenue prior to the reforms improve relative to others after the reforms are implemented.

Quantum Communication with an Accelerated Partner

An unsolved problem in relativistic quantum information research is how to model efficient, directional quantum communication between localised parties in a fully quantum field theoretical framework. We propose a tractable approach to this problem based on solving the Heisenberg evolution of localized field observables. We illustrate our approach by analysing, and obtaining approximate analytical solutions to, the problem of communicating coherent states between an inertial sender, Alice and an accelerated receiver, Rob. We use these results to determine the efficiency with which continuous variable quantum key distribution could be carried out over such a communication channel.Comment: Additional explanatory text and typo in Eq.17 correcte

Economic inequality and the provision of schooling

This paper was presented at the conference "Unequal incomes, unequal outcomes? Economic inequality and measures of well-being" as part of session 3, "Education and crime in urban neighborhoods." The conference was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on May 7, 1999. The authors examine the empirical evidence on the relationship between school finance reform and student outcomes, review the economic literature in the field, and present new evidence of the effects of reform on community and school composition. They argue that if one's goal is to reduce income inequality substantially, one should not look to school finance reform as a particularly effective policy instrument. Even the most optimistic estimates of the impact of school finance reform on the distribution of student performance indicate that these effects are relatively small. Furthermore, the authors note that these small gains may come at a cost - the movement of higher income families into private sector schools, a development that would lead to less diversity within the public schools.Income distribution ; Income ; Education

The structure of Onsala 1 star forming region

We present new high-sensitivity high-resolution mm-wave observations of the Onsala 1 ultra-compact HII region that bring to light the internal structure of this massive star forming cloud. The 1.2 mm continuum map obtained with the IRAM 30-m radiotelescope (~11" resolution) shows a centrally peaked condensation of 1' size (~0.5 pc at the assumed distance of 1.8 kpc) which has been further investigated at higher resolution in the 3 mm continuum and in the emission lines of H13CO+ J=1--0 and SiO J=2--1 with the IRAM Plateau de Bure interferometer. The 3 mm data, with a resolution of ~5" X 4", displays a unresolved continuum source at the peak of the extended 1.2 mm emission and closely associated with the ultra-compact HII region. The H13CO+ map traces the central condensation in good agreement with previous NH_3 maps of Zheng et al. (1985). However, the velocity field of this central condensation, which was previously thought to arise in a rapidly rotating structure, is better explained in terms of the dense and compact component of a bipolar outflow. This interpretation is confirmed by SiO and CO observations of the full region. In fact, our new SiO data unveils the presence of multiple (at least 4) outflows in the region. In particular, there is an important center of outflow activity in the region at about 1' north of the UCHII region. Indeed the different outflows are related to different members of the Onsala 1 cluster. The data presented here support a scenario in which the phases of massive star formation begin much later in the evolution of a cluster and/or UCHII region last for much longer than 10^5 yrs.Comment: 6 pages and 3 figure

Quantum Connectivity of Space-Time and Gravitationally Induced Decorrelation of Entanglement

We discuss an alternative formulation of the problem of quantum optical fields in a curved space-time using localized operators. We contrast the new formulation with the standard approach and find observable differences for entangled states. We propose an experiment in which an entangled pair of optical pulses are propagated through non-uniform gravitational fields and find that the new formulation predicts de-correlation of the optical entanglement under experimentally realistic conditions

CO line emission in the halo of a radio galaxy at z=2.6

We report the detection of luminous CO(3-2) line emission in the halo of the z=2.6 radio galaxy (HzRG) TXS0828+193, which has no detected counterpart at optical to mid-infrared wavelengths implying a stellar mass < few x10^9 M_sun and relatively low star-formation rates. With the IRAM PdBI we find two CO emission line components at the same position at ~80 kpc distance from the HzRG along the axis of the radio jet, with different blueshifts of few 100 km s^-1 relative to the HzRG and a total luminosity of ~2x10^10 K km s^-1 pc^2 detected at 8 sigma significance. HzRGs have significant galaxy overdensities and extended halos of metal-enriched gas often with embedded clouds or filaments of denser material, and likely trace very massive dark-matter halos. The CO emission may be associated with a gas-rich, low-mass satellite galaxy with little on-going star formation, in contrast to all previous CO detections of galaxies at similar redshifts. Alternatively, the CO may be related to a gas cloud or filament and perhaps jet-induced gas cooling in the outer halo, somewhat in analogy with extended CO emission found in low-redshift galaxy clusters.Comment: MNRAS Letters, accepte