Demand for infrastructure in the United States continues to grow dramatically while governments at all levels struggle to balance their budgets. As a result, state and local governments are looking more to nontraditional sources of financing for their capital and operating needs. Public Private Partnerships (PPP) are financing strategies that are widely used around the world but are still relatively new in the United States. Under these agreements, state and local governments maintain ownership and control of the assets but receive financial compensation to contract with a private operator who provides operating, maintenance, and/or construction expertise for large-scale infrastructure projects.

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The purpose of this study was to replicate the analysis made by D. Verstegen and L. Driscoll in The Illinois Dilemma (2008) utilizing the actual allocations to districts resulting from the funding formula in Illinois for the 2004-2005 school year to understand the influence of adjusted values on determinants of fiscal equity. The results of a study by the Illinois Education Research Council (IERC) showed that actual, unadjusted values revealed a more fiscally inequitable system than reported by Verstegen and Driscoll as determined by the calculations traditional to school finance. For example, where Verstegen and Driscoll reported a range per pupil of $16,620 for all districts, IERC found a range of $28,578 per pupil. Illinois' multiple district configurations influenced the analysis. Illinois has three basic types of school districts-elementary, high school, and unit (K-12) districts. Elementary districts, which represent 26.5% of the state's pupil count, contributed the greatest influence on the inequitable findings. Furthermore, IERC's study found ten elementary districts-representing just 0.29% of all pupils in Illinois-had considerable influence on fiscal equity, as evidenced by the range per pupil for all district types dropping to $9,468 from $28,579 when they were excluded from the analysis. The study concludes that researchers must acknowledge the efforts that states employ to address additional funding for populations of interest, that policymakers must insist on both adjusted and unadjusted figures, and that an Illinois-specific and comprehensive report is needed which includes analyses of both General State Aid (the funding formula) and categorical aid which is outside the formula.

Psychology has come to recognize that the effects of biases related to disabilities have been detrimental to the increasingly complex needs of women with disabilities (WWD). Currently, about 27 million women in the United States have disabilities, and the number is growing (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2013a). Definitions of disability have evolved and broadened over time and may include medical, legal, social, or political factors. For the purposes of this chapter, disability is defined broadly as a condition that creates impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions, independent of whether the condition is congenital, acquired, acute, or chronic in nature. Disability reflects the interaction between features of a person's body and features of the society in which he or she lives. The National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research's (NIDRR) "New Paradigm of Disability" emphasizes the interactions among a variety of factors in order to better illuminate the experience of people with disabilities (PWD; Pledger,

There are few instances in the literature on urban school reform that have closely studied specific school buildings to describe the grant resource appropriation process. This study attempts to fill that gap by developing case studies of two middle schools with divergent profiles in resource utilization through micro-ethnographies. One school exhibited optimal engagement with opportunities made available through a large federally funded grant, whereas the second school failed to do the same through this initiative. We investigated how the unique features of these schools and key individuals within them intersected with the structure of the grant program to shape the nature of school engagement. These two case study narratives illuminate the range of factors that might be implicated in the implementation of school reform initiatives, particularly in urban settings.