A major concern of educators today is to ensure that our nations elementary andsecondary schools are staffed with qualified teachers. The quality of teachers and teachingundoubtedly becomes one of the most important factors in shaping the learning and growth ofstudents. The assignment of teachers to teach out-of-field is believed by some to be a contributorto low quality teaching. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 established anationwide goal of reducing and eliminating gaps between groups of students, and recognizedthe key to improving student learning and closing achievement gaps depends upon access tohighly qualified teachers for all students.The purpose of this study was to see how state teacher certification requirements changedafter No Child Left Behind Act and whether NCLB affected the percentage of highly qualifiedteachers in each state. The practical purpose of this study was to ascertain whether NCLB andmiddle school licensure requirement reform have had an effect on the number of highly qualifiedand non-highly qualified middle-school teachers in hard to staff areas like math and science.Using Schools and Staffing Survey data from school years 1999-2000 and 2003-2004,this study found that on the average there was a slight increase in percent middle-school scienceteachers with science majors from 1999-2000 to 2003-2004 but a decrease in percent of fullycertified math and science teachers and a decrease in middle-school math teachers with mathmajors. Certain states, Nebraska, Alabama, District of Columbia, New York and New Jerseywere consistently high in percent majors while certain other states, Kentucky, Georgia,Tennessee, Arizona and North Carolina were consistently low with Kentucky low in bothcategories (percent fully certified middle-school math teachers with math majors, percent fullycertified middle-school science teachers with science majors) during both school years. Someiiistates increased in both percent fully certified and majors in both math and science: Minnesota,North Dakota, and New Hampshire. Vermont, DC, Michigan and Ohio decreased in both ofthese categories. To show statistical significance, a logistic regression and odds ratio was doneto compare states likelihood of having matched teachers (which means fully certified with amajor in the field taught) to Kansass teachers likelihood of being matched. This revealed thatteachers who taught in DC were 615% more likely to be matched than those who taught inKansas during 1999-2000. Only teachers who taught in Minnesota have greater odds of beingmatched than Kansas teachers during both 1999-2000 and 2003-2004. A regression analysisshowed that certain teacher factors affected the likelihood of a teacher being matched. Thesevariables were middle-school teacher who teaches in high school vs. middle-school teacher whoteaches in middle school or elementary school, fully certified vs. not fully certified, and, male vs.female. The individual state certification requirements were compiled from before and afterNCLB and compared to see if licensure changes affected how states fared in percent majors andfully certified.After NCLB, several states added middle level endorsements in math and science thatincreased teachers opportunities to become highly qualified. Some states increased thestringency to become highly qualified by adding content preparation requirements and/orspecific subjects required. These changes were considered positive changes in certificationrequirements after NCLB. A negative change after NCLB was the decrease in contentpreparation requirements, or changing from requiring specific subjects to not requiring thesesubjects. The results of this study did not show any particular trend in terms of which statestended to increase or decrease in the percent of full certification and major of middle-schoolmath and science teachers from both years of SASS data. It showed that there were particularivstates that had increased or decreased in their percent of full certification and major but nocorrelation emerged.

This is the second paper based on my 2002 data collection of letters to the editor. I am hoping to publish it in a political science journal and, as such, framing it as one in an illustrious line of "Who..." pieces (who votes, who governs, who deliberates, etc.). I am eager to get feedback from the APWG on the study, its approach, and its findings.

Currently 2.3 million Americans are behind bars, equaling more than 1 in 100 adults. Up from just 500,000 in 1980, this marks more than a 300 percent increase in the United States’ incarcerated population and represents the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Over the last four years, The Pew Charitable Trusts has documented the enormous expense of building prisons and housing inmates that is borne by states and the federal government. Indeed, in the face of gaping budget shortfalls, more than half of the states are now seeking alternative sentencing and corrections strategies that cost less than prison, but can protect public safety and hold offenders accountable. A less explored fiscal implication of incarceration is its impact on former inmates’ economic opportunity and mobility. Economic mobility, the ability of individuals and families to move up the income ladder over their lifetime and across generations, is the epitome of the American Dream. Americans believe that economic success is determined by individual efforts and attributes, like hard work and ambition, and that anyone should be able to improve his or her economic circumstances.

The negative exponential decline of population and employment density with distance from the center is examined for 16 large urban areas with two or three major centers. An additive model is used, with the predicted density for each census tract being the sum of the density estimated for the negative exponential decline from each center. The model works well for population density, producing results comparable to those for the large urban areas with single centers. As with employment density decline for the single-center areas, separate estimates of employment density decline are required for areas near the centers and farther from the centers.

In this article, the author constructs new life tables for the white population of the United States in each decade between 1790 and 1900. Drawing from several recent studies, he suggests best estimates of life expectancy at age 20 for each decade. These estimates are fitted to new standards derived from the 1900-1902 rural and 1900-1902 overall death registration area life tables using a two-parameter logit model with fixed slope. The resulting decennial life tables more accurately represent sex- and age-specific mortality rates while capturing known mortality trends.

This dissertation examines the impacts of historical and contemporary racial theories, socio-political movements, and grassroots mobilization efforts of communitybased organizations in transforming the politics to define multiracial identity and the “two or more races” population in the United States. Using an interdisciplinary and mixed methods research approach, I investigate the shifting and contested ways the multiracial population is defined in public and private discourses, paying particular attention to the complexities this community raises within and among monoracial identified communities. Examining the multiracial population in the U.S. has a significant and critical place in the larger trajectory of social scientific scholarship on race, gender, class, and other intersecting identities. This body of research counters the argument that multiple identity formation is inconsequential to theory, civic engagement, and sociopolitical participation in a contemporary society. This study urges scholars to (re)examine how race and ethnicity continues to be framed, analyzed, interrogated, and understood in ways that are restricted by historically racist/racialized moments that still linger today. These moments, I argue, are sharpened and more pronounced when centering the politics of what it means to claim a multiracial identity in America in the twenty-first century. The theoretical model for this study was Grounded Theory. Principle data collection methods were the “insider-outsider” and case study research approaches using extensive face-to-face audio and/or photographed interviews; participant and field observations of key local, state, and national events, including U.S. Census proceedings and California Senate Judiciary hearings; and content analysis of primary and secondary documents, including media coverage and organizational archives. Data was collected between 2004 and 2009 in Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago, New York, and Sacramento. These cities exhibited the most heightened multiracial activity across the country in this timeframe. I also investigated exclusive, never before documented, behind the scenes initiatives to recognize the unmet needs of this emerging population through an in-depth case study of the Association of MultiEthnic Americans (AMEA)—one of the oldest leading national advocacy organizations for multiracial, multiethnic, and transracially adopted individuals, families, organizations, and allies.

In the following chapters, factors that influence labor market outcomes and assimilation of immigrants in the United States are analyzed in an economic framework. The channels studied include the impact of larger flows of immigrants on the wages of other immigrants from the same countries, the effects of marrying a native or "intermarriage" on labor market outcomes of immigrant women and the impact of age of arrival to the U.S. on English proficiency and education of immigrant children. Immigration is a matter of current economic and socio-political debate all over the world, and the results presented in the following chapters are of particular interest to policy-makers and economists who design domestic and foreign policies. For all the work in this thesis, I use data from the U.S. decennial Censuses which are rich sources of information on the characteristics of immigrants. Chapter one provides a motivation and an overview for the research in chapters two through four. The second chapter studies the wage-gap profiles, vis-a-vis natives, of a rapidly growing group of "new" Asian immigrants from countries which were under-represented in the United States until 1965. While entry-level wage gaps increase and assimilation rates fall across cohorts, the unique feature of the new Asian profile is that the wage gap widens for all cohorts after the second decade of stay. For other immigrant groups, wage gaps improve throughout their working life. I use an impact of immigration argument to investigate the different curvature of "new" Asian wage-gap profiles. If occupations are imperfect substitutes, and natives and immigrants are worse substitutes than entrant and established immigrants within occupations, then the comparatively larger increases in occupation-specific "new" Asian inflows will have a greater negative impact on the wages of new Asians, compared to other groups. The explanation is studied in a nested constant elasticity of substitution (CES) framework. Elasticity parameters are estimated using cross-metropolitan variations in occupational and immigrant labor supply. The paper follows Card (2009) to create an instrument for regional labor supplies. Finally, to assess the power of this explanation, I use model estimates from 1990 to predict the wage gap between natives and Asians in 2000 that . . .

In this paper we present a technique to derive rules describing contrast sets. Contrast sets are a formalism to represent groups differences. We propose a novel approach to describe directional contrasts using rules where the contrasting effect is partitioned into pairs of groups. Our approach makes use of a directional Fisher Exact Test to find significant differences across groups. We used a Bonferroni within-search adjustment to control type I errors and a pruning technique to prevent derivation of non significant contrast set specializations.

This paper examines the role of community colleges in the U.S. higher education system and their advantages and shortcomings. In particular, it discusses the population of community college students and economic returns to community college education for various demographic groups. It offers new evidence on the returns to an associates degree. Furthermore, the paper uses data from the National Survey of College Graduates to compare educational objectives, progress, and labor market outcomes of individuals who start their postsecondary education at community colleges with those who start at four-year colleges. Particular attention is paid to the Federal Reserves Eighth District, the geographic area served by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

This study looks at two key issues relating to sexual harassment. First, the factors which lead to increased risk for being targeted for sexual harassment, and second, the employer reporting on rates of sexual harassment. While a focal concern of sexual harassment law and legal reasoning has been the work context and employers, these concepts have received limited attention in the scholarly literature on sexual harassment. I improve on the handful of earlier studies that in fact incorporate organizational contexts in to their explanatory models in several ways. Unlike these studies, I use a nationally representative sample of US-based organizations and a sample of adult Americans. I also use several contemporary theoretical constructs to explain sexual harassment occurrence and employer reactions. I contend that the gendered character of contemporary bureaucratic organizations, the civil rights consciousness of corporate officials, and management imperative to protect the organization from liability affect employer perceptions of sexual harassment. I also contend that gendered organizations and a work environment that is not conducive to legal consciousness increase . . .

How did increases in individual income contribute to improvements in adult health during the late 19th and early 20th century? To disentangle the effect of income as opposed to medical advancements or public health interventions,I use exogenous variation in income from the first wide-scale entitlement program in the U.S. the Union Army pensions. Documenting that Republican Congressional candidates boosted veterans pensions in order to secure votes, I exploit exogenous increases in income stemming from Republican corruption to estimate income effects on morbidity and mortality. The effects of income on disease onset are large - an extra $1 of monthly pension income, a 9% average real income increase, lowered the probability of infectious disease onset by 38%. In addition, I find that an extra $1 of monthly income lowers the crude death rate by .008. I find the largest income effects for infectious illnesses, smaller effects for respiratory and digestive illnesses, and no effect for the onset of most endocrine diseases. Results shape our understanding of the U.S. mortality transition and inform todays debates on the health benefits of cash transfers to adults in regions with wide SES gradients in health, as was the case in the U.S. a century ago.

African Diaspora Identities provides insights into the complex transnational processes involved in shaping the migratory identities of African immigrants. It seeks to understand the durability of these African transnational migrant identities and their impact on inter-minority group relationships. John A. Arthur demonstrates that the identities African immigrants construct often transcends country-specific cultures and normative belief systems. He illuminates the fact that these transnational migrant identities are an amalgamation of multiple identities formed in varied social transnational se. Constructing African immigrant identies in transnational domains -- Situating Africa's brain drain in global migrations -- Transnational African immigrant lives and identities -- Rationalizing the meanings of African migrations -- Gendering the diaspora identities of second-generation African immigrant girls -- African immigrants and native-born blacks: discourses on finding common ground -- Imagining the future of African immigrant identities in migration studies.

The US Decennial Census is arguably the most important data set for social scienceresearch in the United States. The UScensus2000 suite of packages allows for convenienthandling of the 2000 US Census spatial and demographic data. The goal of this articleis to showcase the UScensus2000 suite of packages for R, to describe the data containedwithin these packages, and to demonstrate the helper functions provided for handlingthis data. The UScensus2000 suite is comprised of spatial and demographic data forthe 50 states and Washington DC at four di erent geographic levels (block, block group,tract, and census designated place). The UScensus2000 suite also contains a number offunctions for selecting and aggregating speci c geographies or demographic informationsuch as metropolitan statistical areas, counties, etc. These packages rely heavily on thespatial tools developed by Bivand, Pebesma, and Gomez-Rubio (2008), i.e., the sp andmaptools packages. This article will provide the necessary background for working withthis data set, helper functions, and nish with an applied spatial statistics example.

This paper examines the dynamic implications of social networks for the labor market out-comes of refugees resettled in the U.S. A theoretical model of job information transmission shows that the relationship between social network size and labor market outcomes is heterogeneous and depends on the vintage of network members: an increase in network size can negativelyimpact some cohorts in a network while benefi ting others. To test this prediction, I use new data on political refugees resettled in the U.S. and exploit the fact that these refugees are distributed across cities by a resettlement agency, precluding individuals from sorting. The results indicate that an increase in the number of social network members resettled in the same year or one year prior to a new arrival leads to a deterioration of outcomes, while a greater number of tenured network members improves the probability of employment and raises the hourly wage.

How did increases in individual income contribute to improvements in adult health during the late 19th and early 20th century? To disentangle the effect of income as opposed to medical advancements or public health interventions, I use exogenous variation in income from the first wide-scale entitlement program in the U.S. the Union Army pensions. Documenting that Republican Congressional candidates boosted veterans pensions in order to secure votes, I exploit exogenous increases in income stemming from Republican corruption to estimate income effects on morbidity and mortality. The effects of income on disease onset are large - an extra $1 of monthly pension income, a 9% average real income increase, lowered the probability of infectious disease onset by 38%. In addition, I find that an extra $1 of monthly income lowers the crude death rate by .008. I find the largest income effects for infectious illnesses, smaller effects for respiratory and digestive illnesses, and no effect for the onset of most endocrine diseases. Results shape our understanding of the U.S. mortality transition and inform todays debates on the health benefits of cash transfers to adults in regions with wide SES gradients in health, as was the case in the U.S. a century ago.

We examine whether womens rising labor force participation led to increased intergenerationaltransmission of occupation from fathers to daughters. In order to motivateour empirical strategy, we develop a model of investment of fathers in daughters, wherefathers invest in human capital that is specific to their occupations. Our model generatesan empirical test where we compare the trends in the probabilities that a woman worksin her fathers versus her father-in-laws occupation. Because of assortative mating, thefather-in-laws occupation serves as a kind of counterfactual for the set of occupations thateach particular woman might have chosen absent transmission from her father. Using datafrom birth cohorts of women born between 1909 and 1977, our results indicate that theestimated difference in these trends accounts for at least 13 to 20 percent of the totalincrease in the probability that a woman enters her fathers occupation. Thus, over thebirth cohorts studied, daughters are increasingly likely to enter their fathers occupation,above and beyond what would have been expected from the secular rise in women enteringtraditionally male-dominated occupations.

We examine the geographic diffusion of industries and occupations. Using decennial census microdata from 1980 to 2000, we show that high-skilled types of work have diffused less rapidly than low-skilled work, within and across industries. We also use data on industries' use of new occupations and the share of revenue from new products to show that while industries that have experienced recent technological changes are more concentrated, the rate of geographical diffusion is unrelated to recent innovativeness. We interpret these results in the context of recent theoretical work linking product life-cycles and relative factor prices to the geographic diffusion of industries.

Achieving the nation’s educational attainment goals is impossible without significant improvements in the postsecondary completion rates of Latino students. Taking into account the current population projections, educational attainment levels, and economic reality, this brief aligns a focus on Latino college degree completion with federal policy to address the emerging national agenda to accelerate degree completion.