The court-ordered plan fails to provide ways to improve rural schools, according to rural districts.

School districts have "unconscionably and impermissibly shifted operating costs of the classrooms directly on the financial backs of our teachers," the lawsuit alleges.

The Manchester district in the Granite State has worked to develop its own content standards. How do they differ from the common core?

Chief technology officers are facing an unprecedented test of digital preparedness due to the coronavirus pandemic, struggling with shortfalls of available learning devices and huge Wi-Fi access challenges.

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

The justices declined to hear the appeal of the Ferguson-Florissant district over its at-large board elections, which lower courts invalidated as violating the Voting Rights Act.

A school district in a small Arkansas city has installed steel safe rooms in every classroom.

The Arkansas Department of Education will now provide on-site help for schools and districts in the state that are experiencing cybersecurity incidents.

Confusion reigns when it comes to finding and reporting data on school-related coronavirus infections. That's a problem for school leaders weighing shutdowns.

In a small region of Vermont, a fierce debate raged over consolidating five tiny school districts into one.

State Education Secretary Rebecca Holcombe has been officiating over the state's politically thorny district consolidation process, and many are asking for it to be placed on hold until the state board replaces her.

In Kodiak, Alaska, a school district with deep ties to the U.S. Coast Guard has been walloped by the government shutdown with hundreds of families going without paychecks. And news of a deal to temporarily reopen the government was doing little to allay the community's anxieties.

Enrollment snags, head-count problems, and more home schooling could end up costing districts millions in funding based on the annual tally of how many students actually show up.

Teachers are still on strike in three Washington school districts, and their fights with the districts are escalating.

Teachers in seven districts are striking for higher pay—and Seattle may be next.

A Greenville, Miss. teacher was fired and a superintendent placed on administrative leave after a video of a student being dragged by her hair surfaced on social media.

But some Democrats say that could make the selection process more political.

Public schools in West Virginia are closed despite a deal that was supposed to end the teacher strike today.

Governors in several natural resource-dependent states said recently they will have to continue to cut public education funding because prices for oil and coal have not rebounded.

Teachers will receive a 5 percent raise, pending a vote by the state legislature. School will resume Thursday.

The West Virginia Senate trimmed the proposed pay raise for teachers from 5 percent to 4 percent, prompting union officials to declare that the strike will continue indefinitely.

The statewide teacher strike could end today if both chambers of the legislature pass the bill to deliver a 5 percent raise to all school employees.

Lawmakers effectively killed the controversial education bill that had prompted the second statewide strike in two years.

Teachers across the state will walk out of their classrooms on Tuesday to protest an education bill going through the state legislature.

Pandemic-inflicted budget cuts have cost thousands of educators their jobs. Here’s how that’s playing out in five districts around the country.

There’s a tussle over the right balance for who should pick up the tab for teacher retirements and how that affects wealthier and less-wealthy districts.

Teachers in the nation's third-largest school system are fighting for salary increases, class-size caps, and a written commitment for more nurses, social workers, and librarians—as well as investments some say are outside the scope of collective bargaining.

Campaigns to get rid of police in schools catch a wave of momentum in some communities, but activists still face deep resistance from educators nationally.

The state's decision indicates that U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos' push on COVID-19 and private school students is having an affect.

Confusion reigns when it comes to finding and reporting data on school-related coronavirus infections. That's a problem for school leaders weighing shutdowns.

The court declined to take up an appeal backed by school groups of a ruling allowing some property taxpayers challenge their assessments in federal court.

Hannah Grotzinger
May 29, 2024; 44:e1856232024-e1856232024
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Mitchell G. Spring
Oct 9, 2024; 44:e0602242024-e0602242024
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Jordan A. Taylor
Feb 19, 2014; 34:3023-3032
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Serotonin modulates diverse phenotypes and functions including depressive, aggressive, impulsive, and feeding behaviors, all of which have reward-related components. To date, research has focused on understanding these effects by measuring and manipulating dorsal raphe serotonin neurons and using single-receptor approaches. These studies have led to a better understanding of the heterogeneity of serotonin actions on behavior; however, they leave open many questions about the timing and location of serotonin's actions modulating the neural circuits that drive these behaviors. Recent advances in genetically encoded fluorescent biosensors, including the GPCR activation-based sensor for serotonin (GRAB-5-HT), enable the measurement of serotonin release in mice on a timescale compatible with a single rewarding event without corelease confounds. Given substantial evidence from slice electrophysiology experiments showing that serotonin influences neural activity of the striatal circuitry, and the known role of the dorsal medial striatal (DMS) in reward-directed behavior, we focused on understanding the parameters and timing that govern serotonin release in the DMS in the context of reward consumption, external reward value, internal state, and cued reward. Overall, we found that serotonin release is associated with each of these and encodes reward anticipation, value, approach, and consumption in the DMS.

Vertebrate nervous systems use the axon initial segment (AIS) to initiate action potentials and maintain neuronal polarity. The microtubule-associated protein tripartite motif containing 46 (TRIM46) was reported to regulate axon specification, AIS assembly, and neuronal polarity through the bundling, or fasciculation, of microtubules in the proximal axon. However, these claims are based on TRIM46 knockdown in cultured neurons. To investigate TRIM46 function in vivo, we examined male and female TRIM46 knock-out mice. Contrary to previous reports, we find that TRIM46 is dispensable for axon specification and AIS formation. TRIM46 knock-out mice are viable, have normal behavior, and have normal brain structure. Thus, TRIM46 is not required for AIS formation, axon specification, or nervous system function. However, we confirm that TRIM46 is required for microtubule fasciculation. We also show TRIM46 enrichment in the first ~100 μm of axon occurs independently of ankyrinG (AnkG) in vivo, although AnkG is required to restrict TRIM46 only to the AIS. Our results highlight the need for further investigation of the mechanisms by which the AIS and microtubules interact to shape neuronal structure and function.

Rodent jaws evolved structurally to support dual functionality, for either biting or chewing food. Rodent hands also function dually during food handling, for actively manipulating or statically holding food. How are these oral and manual functions coordinated? We combined electrophysiological recording of muscle activity and kilohertz kinematic tracking to analyze masseter and hand actions as mice of both sexes handled food. Masseter activity was organized into two modes synchronized to hand movement modes. In holding/chewing mode, mastication occurred as rhythmic (~5 Hz) masseter activity while the hands held food below the mouth. In oromanual/ingestion mode, bites occurred as lower-amplitude aperiodic masseter events that were precisely timed to follow regrips (by ~200 ms). Thus, jaw and hand movements are flexibly coordinated during food handling: uncoupled in holding/chewing mode and tightly coordinated in oromanual/ingestion mode as regrip–bite sequences. Key features of this coordination were captured in a simple model of hierarchically orchestrated mode-switching and intramode action sequencing. We serendipitously detected an additional masseter-related action, tooth sharpening, identified as bouts of higher-frequency (~13 Hz) rhythmic masseter activity, which was accompanied by eye displacement, including rhythmic proptosis, attributable to masseter contractions. Collectively, the findings demonstrate how a natural, complex, and goal-oriented activity is organized as an assemblage of distinct modes and complex actions, adapted for the divisions of function arising from anatomical structure. These results reveal intricate, high-speed coordination of disparate effectors and show how natural forms of dexterity can serve as a model for understanding the behavioral neurobiology of multi-body-part coordination.

Human sleep exhibits multiple, recurrent temporal regularities, ranging from circadian rhythms to sleep stage cycles and neuronal oscillations during nonrapid eye movement sleep. Moreover, recent evidence revealed a functional role of aperiodic activity, which reliably discriminates different sleep stages. Aperiodic activity is commonly defined as the spectral slope of the 1/frequency (1/f) decay function of the electrophysiological power spectrum. However, several lines of inquiry now indicate that the aperiodic component of the power spectrum might be better characterized by a superposition of several decay processes with associated timescales. Here, we determined multiple timescales, which jointly shape aperiodic activity using human intracranial electroencephalography. Across three independent studies (47 participants, 23 female), our results reveal that aperiodic activity reliably dissociated sleep stage-dependent dynamics in a regionally specific manner. A principled approach to parametrize aperiodic activity delineated several, spatially and state-specific timescales. Lastly, we employed pharmacological modulation by means of propofol anesthesia to disentangle state-invariant timescales that may reflect physical properties of the underlying neural population from state-specific timescales that likely constitute functional interactions. Collectively, these results establish the presence of multiple intrinsic timescales that define the electrophysiological power spectrum during distinct brain states.

The brain's extracellular matrix (ECM) regulates neuronal plasticity and animal behavior. ECM staining shows a net-like structure around a subset of neurons, a ring-like structure at the nodes of Ranvier, and diffuse staining in the interstitial matrix. However, understanding the structural features of ECM deposition across various neuronal types and subcellular compartments remains limited. To visualize the organization pattern and assembly process of the hyaluronan-scaffolded ECM in the brain, we fused a HaloTag to hyaluronan proteoglycan link protein 1, which links hyaluronan and proteoglycans. Expression or application of the probe in primary rat neuronal cultures enables us to identify spatial and temporal regulation of ECM deposition and heterogeneity in ECM aggregation among neuronal populations. Dual-color birthdating shows the ECM assembly process in culture and in vivo. Sparse expression in mouse brains of either sex reveals detailed ECM architectures around excitatory neurons and developmentally regulated dendritic ECM. Our study uncovers extensive structural features of the brain's ECM, suggesting diverse roles in regulating neuronal plasticity.

Neural decoding is a tool for understanding how activities from a population of neurons inside the brain relate to the outside world and for engineering applications such as brain–machine interfaces. However, neural decoding studies mainly focused on different decoding algorithms rather than different neuron types which could use different coding strategies. In this study, we used two-photon calcium imaging to assess three auditory spatial decoders (space map, opponent channel, and population pattern) in excitatory and inhibitory neurons in the dorsal inferior colliculus of male and female mice. Our findings revealed a clustering of excitatory neurons that prefer similar interaural level difference (ILD), the primary spatial cues in mice, while inhibitory neurons showed random local ILD organization. We found that inhibitory neurons displayed lower decoding variability under the opponent channel decoder, while excitatory neurons achieved higher decoding accuracy under the space map and population pattern decoders. Further analysis revealed that the inhibitory neurons’ preference for ILD off the midline and the excitatory neurons’ heterogeneous ILD tuning account for their decoding differences. Additionally, we discovered a sharper ILD tuning in the inhibitory neurons. Our computational model, linking this to increased presynaptic inhibitory inputs, was corroborated using monaural and binaural stimuli. Overall, this study provides experimental and computational insight into how excitatory and inhibitory neurons uniquely contribute to the coding of sound locations.

In a new book, a curator at England's Natural History Museum describes rare and interesting nests and eggs—from the house sparrow to the village weaver—and the lessons they hold for avian conservation