Francis X. Shen

Politics of State-Led Reform in Education: Market Competition and Electoral Dynamics

State-led educational initiatives have gained prominence across the nation. In this study, the authors examine two very different types of reform-state adoption of charter school legislation and state implementation of school district take-over-to explore the proposition that the type of education reform a state chooses will be significantly affected by a states electoral dynamics, that is, the extent to which there is political competition or party dominance in a given state. The authors examine charter schools and school district takeover with the expectation that the factors leading to charter schools in a state will be different than the political climate in which takeover reform is realized. To test various hypotheses on the role of electoral dynamics in state-led reform, the authors use an event history analysis using pooled cross-sectional time-series and a traditional cross-sectional model using ordinary least square regression techniques.

The Casualty Gap: The Causes and Consequences of American Wartime Inequalities

PREFACE 1. The Casualty Gap 2. Inequality and U.S. Casualties from WWII to Iraq 3. Selection, Occupational Assignment and the Emergence of the Casualty Gap 4. Do Casualty Gaps Matter? 5. The Broader Consequences of Casualty Inequalities 6. Political Ramifications of the Vietnam Casualty Gap 7. Political Ramifications of the Iraq Casualty Gap 8. The Casualty Gap and Civic Engagement 9. The Future of the Casualty Gap REFERENCES LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Measuring the Effectiveness of City and State Takeover as a School Reform Strategy

n increasing number of states and cities are allowing fortakeovers of school districts,either by a state authority orby the mayor.Twenty-four states allow state takeovers oflocal school districts, permitting state officials to exert authorityover a district in the case of “academic bankruptcy” or woefullylow-performing schools.School district takeovers have occurred in18 states and the District of Columbia.Even in states without takeover laws, school district takeoversare becoming a high-profile issue. In Missouri, for instance, statelawmakers have considered a bill allowing for the immediatetakeover of the Kansas City school district. On the other side ofthe state,mayoral takeover of the school district became an impor-tant campaign issue during the 2001 St.Louis mayoral campaign,when five of the six candidates said “they wouldn’t hesitate to pushfor a takeover if the city’s schools lose their accreditation.” Even-tual winner Francis Slay warned that although he doesn’t want toimplement a takeover,“if partnership and cooperation don’t work,[he] won’t be afraid to take drastic action.”

Iraq Casualties and the 2006 Senate Elections

Prior scholarship on the effects of war casualties on U.S. elections has focused on large-scale conflicts. For this article, we examined whether or not the much-smaller casualty totals incurred in Iraq had a similar influence on the 2006 Senate contests. We found that the change in vote share from 2000 to 2006 for Republican Senate candidates at both the state and county level was significantly and negatively related to local casualty tallies and rates. These results provide compelling evidence for the existence of a democratic brake on military adventurism, even in small-scale wars, but one that is strongest in communities that have disproportionately shouldered a wars costs.

Law and Neuroscience in the United States

Neuroscientific evidence is increasingly reaching United States courtrooms in a number of legal contexts. Just in calendar year 2010, the U.S. legal system saw its first evidentiary hearing in federal court on the admissibility of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) lie-detection evidence; the first admission of quantitative electroencephalography (qEEG) evidence contributing in part to a reduced sentence in a homicide case; and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling explicitly citing brain development research. Additional indicators suggest rapid growth. The number of cases in the U.S. involving neuroscientific evidence doubled from 2006 to 2009. And since 2000, the number of English-language law review articles including some mention of neuroscience has increased fourfold. In 2008 and again in 2009, more than 200 published scholarly works mentioned neuroscience. The data clearly suggest that there is growing interest on the part of law professors, and growing demand on the part of law reviews, for scholarship on law and the brain (Shen 2010). In addition, a number of symposia on law and neuroscience have been held in the United States over the past few years, and despite the notable youth of the field, courses in Law and Neuroscience have been taught at a number of U.S. law schools. This vivid interest in neurolaw, from both scholars and practitioners, is born of the technological developments that allow noninvasive detection of brain activities. But despite the rapid increase of legal interest in neuroscientific evidence, it remains unclear how the U.S. legal system – at the courtroom, regulatory, and policy levels – will resolve the many challenges that new neuroscience applications raise. The emerging field of law and neuroscience is being built on a foundation joining: (a) rapidly developing technologies and techniques of neuroscience; (b) quickly expanding legal scholarship on implications of neuroscience; and (c) (more recently) neuroscientific research designed specifically to explore legally relevant topics. With the institutional support of many of the country’s top research universities, as well as the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, among other private foundations and public funding agencies, the U.S. is well positioned to continue contributing to international developments in neurolaw. This chapter provides an overview of notable neurolaw developments in the United States. The chapter proceeds in six parts. Section 1 introduces the development of law and neuroscience in the United States. Section 2 then considers several of the evidentiary contexts in which neuroscience has been, and likely will be, introduced. Sections 3 and 4 discuss the implications of neuroscience for the criminal and civil systems, respectively. Section 5 reviews three special topics: lie detection, memory, and legal decision-making. Section 6 concludes with brief thoughts about the future of law and neuroscience in the United States. As judges, lawyers, legislators, and the public become more acquainted with neuroscientific evidence, and as neuroscience continues to produce more legally relevant findings, it is likely that we will see continued expansion of law and neuroscience in the United States.

Big City Mayors and School Governance Reform: The Case of School District Takeover

As the Peabody Journal of Education celebrates its 80th anniversary, educational policymakers and practitioners are keenly aware of the many changes in the way public schools have been governed in large urban districts over the last 80 years. Among the most significant changes is the role of the mayor. Although the 1920s saw partisan politics in retreat because of the reform efforts of the Progressive movement, mayors (and governors) have felt the political pressure to mediate intense interest-group competition since the 1960s. By the 1990s, mayors in several big cities, with gubernatorial support, decided to lead the public school system. Clearly, the relationship between the mayors and the schools has been reconfigured in the last 80 years. This article aims to analyze mayoral takeover as a reform strategy.

Reassessing American Casualty Sensitivity: The Mediating Influence of Inequality

Scholars have long conceptualized public support for war as the product of a cost–benefit calculation in which combat casualties factor significantly. This article argues that, when calculating the human costs of conflict, Americans care about more than just the number of war dead; they also care about the distribution of those casualties across society. Using two original survey experiments, we show that inequalities in sacrifice affect Americans’ casualty sensitivity. We find strong evidence that learning about socioeconomic inequalities in casualties in previous wars decreases Americans’ casualty tolerance toward future military endeavors. These effects are stronger for some mission types, particularly non-humanitarian interventions, than others. The effects are also concentrated among Americans from states that suffered high casualty rates in the Iraq War. Our results suggest that raising public awareness of inequalities in wartime sacrifice could significantly strengthen popular constraints on policy makers contemplating military solutions to future crises.

Parsing the Behavioral and Brain Mechanisms of Third-Party Punishment.

The evolved capacity for third-party punishment is considered crucial to the emergence and maintenance of elaborate human social organization and is central to the modern provision of fairness and justice within society. Although it is well established that the mental state of the offender and the severity of the harm he caused are the two primary predictors of punishment decisions, the precise cognitive and brain mechanisms by which these distinct components are evaluated and integrated into a punishment decision are poorly understood. Using fMRI, here we implement a novel experimental design to functionally dissociate the mechanisms underlying evaluation, integration, and decision that were conflated in previous studies of third-party punishment. Behaviorally, the punishment decision is primarily defined by a superadditive interaction between harm and mental state, with subjects weighing the interaction factor more than the single factors of harm and mental state. On a neural level, evaluation of harms engaged brain areas associated with affective and somatosensory processing, whereas mental state evaluation primarily recruited circuitry involved in mentalization. Harm and mental state evaluations are integrated in medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate structures, with the amygdala acting as a pivotal hub of the interaction between harm and mental state. This integrated information is used by the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex at the time of the decision to assign an appropriate punishment through a distributed coding system. Together, these findings provide a blueprint of the brain mechanisms by which neutral third parties render punishment decisions. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Punishment undergirds large-scale cooperation and helps dispense criminal justice. Yet it is currently unknown precisely how people assess the mental states of offenders, evaluate the harms they caused, and integrate those two components into a single punishment decision. Using a new design, we isolated these three processes, identifying the distinct brain systems and activities that enable each. Additional findings suggest that the amygdala plays a crucial role in mediating the interaction of mental state and harm information, whereas the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex plays a crucial, final-stage role, both in integrating mental state and harm information and in selecting a suitable punishment amount. These findings deepen our understanding of how punishment decisions are made, which may someday help to improve them.

Red States, Blue States, and Brain States: Issue Framing, Partisanship, and the Future of Neurolaw in the United States

Advances in neuroscience are beginning to shape law and public policy, giving rise to the field of “neurolaw.” The impact of neuroscientific evidence on how laws are written and interpreted in practice will depend in part on how neurolaw is understood by the public. Drawing on a nationally representative telephone survey experiment, this article presents the first evidence on public approval of neurolaw. We find that the public is generally neutral in its support for neuroscience-based legal reforms. However, how neurolaw is framed affects support based on partisanship: Republicans’ approval of neurolaw decreases when neuroscience is seen as primarily serving to reduce offender culpability, whereas Democrats’ approval is unaffected by how neurolaw is framed. These results suggest that both framing and partisanship may shape the future of neuroscience-based reforms in law and policy.

Mayoral Leadership Matters: Lessons Learned From Mayoral Control of Large Urban School Systems

“Mayoral takeover” has emerged as a major reform option for struggling urban districts since it was launched in Boston in 1992 and Chicago in 1995. This article examines the design, implementation, and the effects of mayoral-led school systems. Our research addresses issues that are critical to systemwide improvement: Are there variation in how mayors govern their schools? How can mayors “add values” to current school reform efforts in their cities? Have more resources been provided for teaching and learning? Is the public more confident in their citys school system? Are test scores improving? In addressing these issues of student outcomes and management improvement, we highlight lessons learned from our research projects mixed-methods approach, including case studies and statistical analyses using a multiyear database on a purposeful sample of 100 urban districts.