Gov. Christie has pushed to flatten the state's funding formula so that the state's impoverished urban districts would get the same amount of money wealthy suburban districts get.

As the number of charter schools continues to grow, voters in California will be forced to examine their largess.

Democrat Gavin Newsom, who takes office Jan. 7, plans to expand full-day kindergarten and child-care offerings in the state, according to media reports.

Wisconsin is one of a handful of states where how much schools will get this fall is still being debated in the state capitol.

Schools are "still dealing with the belief that children [with disabilities] can't be educated with their peers," says Nicki Vander Meulen, an autistic school board member in Madison, Wis.

Biden's campaign announced March 31 that the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate backs two local attempts to raise more tax revenue for schools.

The Urban Institute released a toolkit aimed at policymakers and investors interested in using private dollars to pay for public programs, such as prekindergarten.

Hawaii teachers have joined the Red for Ed movement: Last week, dozens of teachers across the state staged a "walk-in" protest to spread awareness about what they see as a lack of funding for public schools.

"It has become clear over time that [the edTPA] caused unintended barriers and burdens for teachers entering the profession," Georgia's state superintendent said.

The state is trying to fight an Education Department decision that it had not put enough money into special education in the 2010-11 school year.

The state's supreme court ruled that it is not its role to tell the legislature how to spend its money, ending a 24-year school-funding battle.

Republican gubernatorial nominee Ron DeSantis is renewing a political trend that had fallen dormant: calling for the end of the use of the shared standards.

"I'm running because I'm not happy with the state of education," said veteran educator Kevin Leineweber, who is one of several teachers running for the state's legislature this year.

Research from REL Midwest examines the student characteristics associated with early college success in Indiana, with a focus on financial aid.

A state leader shares how research helped raise important considerations for increasing college success and completion in Indiana.

Thousands of Indiana teachers are scrambling to begin renewing their professional teaching licenses before new rules that state lawmakers approved this spring take effect July 1.

Teachers across the state are outraged over a new rule that requires 15 hours of workforce-related professional development.

A suburban Indianapolis district is signing up teachers to drive school buses before and after their usual time in the classroom.

The Indiana state teachers' union is pushing to protect student and staff safety during active-shooter trainings.

This Quality Counts 2019 Highlights Report captures all the data you need to assess your state's performance on key educational outcomes.

This Quality Counts 2020 Highlights Report captures all the data you need to assess your state's performance on key educational outcomes.

The teachers say they've suffered emotional distress and anxiety for months after being shot at with plastic bullets in a voluntary active-shooter drill in 2019.

An audit of the early-childhood education offerings in Minnesota finds complexity and fragmentation as well as a lack of data about program effectiveness.

The Montreal Canadiens are struggling on many fronts this season and goaltending is not an exception.

Nearly 17 million children lack high-speed internet at home that's considered crucial to their ability to participate in remote learning during the pandemic, according to a new study.

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 second College Football Playoff rankings dropped on Tuesday night with Oregon retaining its status as the No. 1 team in the country ahead of No. 2 Ohio State and No. 3 Texas. College Football Playoff:

Tennessee won easily over Mississippi State. Indiana and BYU won nail-biters. So why did they jump over the Vols? We asked the CFP committee chair.

Indiana's magical season makes rare move into the College Football Playoff top five despite an embarrassingly easy schedule

A West Virginia official turns up the heat on financial disclosure for the state’s beleaguered schools, and ruffles feathers in the process.

Freshman had a season-high 13 points off bench while contributing to Spartans' win over Eastern Michigan.

William W. Seeley
Dec 11, 2019; 39:9878-9882
Progressions

α-Neurexins are essential and highly expressed presynaptic cell-adhesion molecules that are frequently linked to neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. Despite their importance, how the elaborate extracellular sequences of α-neurexins contribute to synapse function is poorly understood. We recently characterized the presynaptic gain-of-function phenotype caused by a missense mutation in an evolutionarily conserved extracellular sequence of neurexin-3α (A687T) that we identified in a patient diagnosed with profound intellectual disability and epilepsy. The striking A687T gain-of-function mutation on neurexin-3α prompted us to systematically test using mutants whether the presynaptic gain-of-function phenotype is a consequence of the addition of side-chain bulk (i.e., A687V) or polar/hydrophilic properties (i.e., A687S). We used multidisciplinary approaches in mixed-sex primary hippocampal cultures to assess the impact of the neurexin-3α^A687 residue on synapse morphology, function and ligand binding. Unexpectedly, neither A687V nor A687S recapitulated the neurexin-3α A687T phenotype. Instead, distinct from A687T, molecular replacement with A687S significantly enhanced postsynaptic properties exclusively at excitatory synapses and selectively increased binding to neuroligin-1 and neuroligin-3 without changing binding to neuroligin-2 or LRRTM2. Importantly, we provide the first experimental evidence supporting the notion that the position A687 of neurexin-3α and the N-terminal sequences of neuroligins may contribute to the stability of α-neurexin–neuroligin-1 trans-synaptic interactions and that these interactions may specifically regulate the postsynaptic strength of excitatory synapses.

Different people listening to the same story may converge upon a largely shared interpretation while still developing idiosyncratic experiences atop that shared foundation. What linguistic properties support this individualized experience of natural language? Here, we investigate how the "concrete–abstract" axis—the extent to which a word is grounded in sensory experience—relates to within- and across-subject variability in the neural representations of language. Leveraging a dataset of human participants of both sexes who each listened to four auditory stories while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrate that neural representations of "concreteness" are both reliable across stories and relatively unique to individuals, while neural representations of "abstractness" are variable both within individuals and across the population. Using natural language processing tools, we show that concrete words exhibit similar neural representations despite spanning larger distances within a high-dimensional semantic space, which potentially reflects an underlying representational signature of sensory experience—namely, imageability—shared by concrete words but absent from abstract words. Our findings situate the concrete–abstract axis as a core dimension that supports both shared and individualized representations of natural language.

Seven guest collaborators bring new eyes to a Smithsonian museum founder’s collection of American art

The work of Diné artist DY Begay, now on view at the National Museum of the American Indian, blends tradition and modernity

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