Six school systems, the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools, and the NAACP Pennsylvania State Conference want to change the state's school-funding system, which allows for wide spending gaps between low- and high-income districts.

The lawsuit, filed in 2014, alleges that the state was severely underfunding schools, forcing school districts to lean heavily on property taxes, which especially disadvantages students in property-poor areas.

The supreme court put an end to five years of legal wrangling that landed the state's public school system with millions more dollars from the state and teachers with a pay raise.

"The objective of the audit was to assess whether the award of funding under the RJIP program was informed by appropriate departmental advice and that processes complied with the grants administration framework."--Page 8.

This paper assesses whether the Newstart Allowance for unemployed people should be increased. It investigates the relationship of the Newstart Allowance to Average Weekly Earnings, the Federal Minimum Wage, and Australian poverty lines, and considers the typical the duration of unemployment and long term unemployment, duration of time on income support, overseas allowances, cost of living, and a comparison with policy makers' remuneration. It finds that the value of the allowance has eroded since it was first set and that unemployment for many is not a transitional situation, and concludes that an increase is warranted to bridge the gap to the poverty line.

The Kansas Supreme Court has again ruled that the money the state legislature provides its schools is constitutionally inadequate.

Kansas will offer up $534 million more this fall to its public schools, an amount it will tell the state's supreme court in the coming weeks is enough to provide students with an "adequate" education.

The state's courts said the additional $548 million the legislature provided its schools this year is still not enough to ensure a constitutionally adequate education.

Some state lawmakers said that Monday's ruling is another sign that they should ask voters whether or not the state's highest court should have a say over school spending amounts.

A plan to end a years-long court battle over school funding in Kansas is under threat after an influential group of school districts withdrew its support.

While the court said the state is moving in the right direction, it also said it doesn't feel comfortable closing a funding lawsuit and wants to make sure the state keeps up with the costs of inflation.

Kansas' highest court has declared that the state finally is spending enough money on its public schools under a new education funding law but refused to end a lawsuit filed nearly a decade ago because it wants to monitor future funding by the legislature.

State lawmakers have made it illegal for school districts to spend any public money on the Mississippi Association of School Superintendents, saying district leaders personally attacked state officials while they were seeking votes for a school funding initiative last year.

Mariella Dimiccoli.

Source: Statistics Surveys, Volume 10, 53--99.

Abstract:
Cone regression is a particular case of quadratic programming that minimizes a weighted sum of squared residuals under a set of linear inequality constraints. Several important statistical problems such as isotonic, concave regression or ANOVA under partial orderings, just to name a few, can be considered as particular instances of the cone regression problem. Given its relevance in Statistics, this paper aims to address the fundamentals of cone regression from a theoretical and practical point of view. Several formulations of the cone regression problem are considered and, focusing on the particular case of concave regression as an example, several algorithms are analyzed and compared both qualitatively and quantitatively through numerical simulations. Several improvements to enhance numerical stability and bound the computational cost are proposed. For each analyzed algorithm, the pseudo-code and its corresponding code in Matlab are provided. The results from this study demonstrate that the choice of the optimization approach strongly impacts the numerical performances. It is also shown that methods are not currently available to solve efficiently cone regression problems with large dimension (more than many thousands of points). We suggest further research to fill this gap by exploiting and adapting classical multi-scale strategy to compute an approximate solution.

Op-ed by Agustín Carstens published in the Financial Times on 29 March 2020.

Giving birth triggers a wide repertoire of physiological and behavioral changes in the mother to enable her to feed and care for her offspring. These changes require coordination and are often orchestrated from the CNS, through as of yet poorly understood mechanisms. A neuronal population with a central role in puerperal changes is the tuberoinfundibular dopamine (TIDA) neurons that control release of the pituitary hormone, prolactin, which triggers key maternal adaptations, including lactation and maternal care. Here, we used Ca²⁺ imaging on mice from both sexes and whole-cell recordings on female mouse TIDA neurons in vitro to examine whether they adapt their cellular and network activity according to reproductive state. In the high-prolactin state of lactation, TIDA neurons shift to faster membrane potential oscillations, a reconfiguration that reverses upon weaning. During the estrous cycle, however, which includes a brief, but pronounced, prolactin peak, oscillation frequency remains stable. An increase in the hyperpolarization-activated mixed cation current, I_h, possibly through unmasking as dopamine release drops during nursing, may partially explain the reconfiguration of TIDA rhythms. These findings identify a reversible plasticity in hypothalamic network activity that can serve to adapt the dam for motherhood.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Motherhood requires profound behavioral and physiological adaptations to enable caring for offspring, but the underlying CNS changes are poorly understood. Here, we show that, during lactation, neuroendocrine dopamine neurons, the "TIDA" cells that control prolactin secretion, reorganize their trademark oscillations to discharge in faster frequencies. Unlike previous studies, which typically have focused on structural and transcriptional changes during pregnancy and lactation, we demonstrate a functional switch in activity and one that, distinct from previously described puerperal modifications, reverses fully on weaning. We further provide evidence that a specific conductance (I_h) contributes to the altered network rhythm. These findings identify a new facet of maternal brain plasticity at the level of membrane properties and consequent ensemble activity.

The Board of the Full Article