ABSTRACT:The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans confirmed that effective implementation of public health preparedness programs and policies will require compliance from all racial and ethnic populations. This study reviews current resources and limitations and suggests future directions for integrating diverse communities into related strategies. It documents research and interventions, including promising models and practices that address preparedness for minorities. However, findings reveal a general lack of focus on diversity and suggest that future preparedness efforts need to fully integrate factors related to race, culture, and language into risk communication, public health training, measurement, coordination, and policy at all levels. [Health Affairs 26, no. 5 (2007):

For decades there have been calls by concerned stakeholders to improve the quality of education research, and some progress has been made towards creating a more secure evidence base in some areas. More programmes and approaches that have a reasonable evidence base are now also being used in schools (but not in policy, and not necessarily because they have a reasonable evidence base). However, there has been no equivalent improvement in secure knowledge about how best to get that evidence into use, or even what difference it makes when such evidence is used. This paper looks at what little is already known about the different ways to get research evidence into use in education by summarising the results of a large-scale review of the literature. A total of 323 of the most relevant studies were looked at across all areas of public policy, and judged for quality and contribution. Very few (33) were of the appropriate design and quality needed to make robust causal claims about evidence-intouse, and even fewer of these concerned education. This means that despite over 20 years of modest improvement in research on what works in education policy and practice, the evidence on how best to deploy these findings is still very weak. We consider studies in terms of several issues, including whether they look at changes in user knowledge and behaviour, or student outcomes, and how evidence is best modified before use. Providing access to raw research evidence or even slightly simplified evidence is not generally an effective way of getting it used, even if that evidence is presented to users by knowledge-brokers, in short courses or similar. What is more likely to work for both policy and practice is the engineering of high quality evidence into a more usable format and presenting it actively or iteratively via a respected and trusted conduit, or through population measures such as legislation. Having the users actually do the research is another promising approach. Expecting each individual study they fund to have an impact is not the way forward, as this may encourage widespread use of ineffective or even harmful interventions. Publicly-funded users, including policy-makers, should be required to use evidence-led programmes from those libraries providing them and which are appropriate and relevant to their aims. Research funders should support these approaches, and help to build up libraries of successfully tested programmes. Researchers need to be scrupulous, looking at their new evidence in the context of what is already known and not looking to obtain 'impact' from single studies. More and better research is needed on the best routes for evidence-into-use. However, the improvements required of all parties are as much ethical in nature as they are technical or scientific.Keywords use of evidence, engineering of evidence, translation of evidence, research impact, knowledge transfer, robust evidence.

A campus-wide smoke-free policy had no detrimental effect on measures of employee or consumer attitudes or behaviors.

ABSTRACTObjectives: Racially/ethnically diverse communities suffer a disproportionate burden of adverse outcomes before, during and after a disaster. Using California as a locus of study, we sought to identify challenges and barriers to meeting the preparedness needs of these communities and highlight promising strategies, gaps in programs, and future priorities.Methods: We conducted a literature review, environmental scan of organizational Web sites providing preparedness materials for diverse communities, and key informant interviews with public health and emergency management professionals.Results: We identified individual-level barriers to preparing diverse communities such as socioeconomic status, trust, culture, and language, as well as institutional-level barriers faced by organizations such as inadequate support for culturally/linguistically appropriate initiatives. Current programs to address these barriers include language assistance services, community engagement strategies, cross-sector collaboration, and community assessments. Enhancing public-private partnerships, increasing flexibility in allocating funds and improving organizational capacity for diversity initiatives were all identified as additional areas of programmatic need.Conclusions: Our study suggests at least four intervention priorities for California and across the United States: engaging diverse communities in all aspects of emergency planning, implementation, and evaluation; mitigating fear and stigma; building organizational cultural competence; and enhancing coordination of information and resources. In addition, this study provides a methodological model for other states seeking to assess their capacity to integrate diverse communities into preparedness planning and response.(Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2011;5:227–234)

This paper re-considers the widespread use of value-added approaches to estimate school ‘effects’, and shows the results to be very unstable over time. The paper uses as an example the contextualised value-added scores of all secondary schools in England. The study asks how many schools with at least 99% of their pupils included in the VA calculations, and with data for all years, had VA measures that were clearly positive for five years. The answer is - none. Whatever it is that VA is measuring, if it is measuring anything at all, it is not a consistent characteristic of schools. To find no schools with five successive years of positive VA means that parents could not use it as a way of judging how well their primary age children would do at age 16 in their future secondary school. Contextualised value-added (CVA) is used here for the calculations because there is good data covering five years that allows judgement of its consistency as a purported school characteristic. However, what is true of CVA is almost certainly true of VA approaches more generally, whether for schools, colleges, departments or individual teachers, in England and everywhere else. Until their problems have been resolved by further development to handle missing and erroneous data, value-added models should not be used in practice. Commentators, policy-makers, educators and families need to be warned. If value-added scores are as meaningless as they appear to be, there is a serious ethical issue wherever they have been or continue to be used to reward and punish schools or make policy decisions

Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Grammar schools in England: a new analysis of social segregation and academic outcomesStephen Gorard and Nadia Siddiqui school of Education, durham university, durham, uK ABSTRACTThe UK government is planning to increase the number of pupils attending state-funded selective grammar schools, claiming that this will assist overall standards, reduce the poverty attainment gap and so aid social mobility. Using the full 2015 cohort of pupils in England, this article shows how the pupils attending grammar schools are stratified in terms of chronic poverty, ethnicity, language, special educational needs and even precise age within their year group. This kind of clustering of relative advantage is potentially dangerous for society. The article derives measures of chronic poverty and local socioeconomic status segregation between schools, and uses these to show that the results from grammar schools are no better than expected, once these differences are accounted for. There is no evidence base for a policy of increasing selection, and so there are implications for early selection policies worldwide. The UK government should consider phasing the existing selective schools out.

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The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractUK universities are increasingly making decisions about undergraduate admissions with reference to various contextual indicators which are intended to identify whether or not an applicant comes from a disadvantaged family, neighbourhood or school environment. However, the indicators used are often chosen because they are readily available, without much consideration of the possible alternatives and their comparative quality. This paper is part of a larger scoping review of existing research literature used to compile a list of potential contextual indicators, and assess these with respect to their quality, availability, and their relationship to outcomes in UK higher education. A search was made of relevant electronic databases, yielding around 120,000 reports initially, and 28 categories of indicators. Each indicator was assessed on the basis of existing evidence concerning its relevance, reach, availability, accuracy, reliability, and completeness -and in terms of whether its use might inadvertently create a different kind of injustice or lower the student outcomes for HEIs.Many possible indicators are not readily available, or not accurate enough for use in policy and practice. In general, indicators concerning individual circumstances are more relevant than area-based or school characteristics. As expected, there is no ideal single indicator. And it is not clear that combining indicators leads to the advantages rather than the deficits of all. Here we list the best available.There are some indicators for very small categories that can be used relatively un-problematically as long as the data can be made available at time of candidate selection, and these include being a recent refugee or asylum-seeker and having spent time living in care. However, neither of these is a solution to the more general issue of contextualised admissions. School type attended (private or state-funded) could also be used relatively safely, but requires clear definition, could lead to inadvertent injustice, and might not be necessary if good individual data on relative advantage is available instead. The category of mature applicant is also relatively unproblematic, but it is not clear that simply being older than traditional age is a disadvantage. The two most general indicators, most suitable for use, are considered to be eligibility for (or receipt of) free school meals, and having a disability or special educational need. However, like school type, both need care and some adjustment from how th...