Extra Credit

UT Arlington, Japanese scientific equipment maker form $25.2 million partnership

In another step toward Tier One status, the University of Texas at Arlington will receive $7.5 million from the state's Permanent University Fund toward the formation of a three-part research technologies institute, UT System regents decided Monday.

The Institute for Research Technologies, a $25.2 million endeavor, is designed to "transform research capabilities and [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] education throughout the UT System and Texas," the university said in a news release.

UT Arlington's co-collaborator is Shimadzu Scientific Instruments, a world leader in the analytical instruments industry. The institute will include three centers: the existing Shimadzu Center for Advanced Analytical Chemistry, the new Center for Imaging and the new Center for Environmental, Forensic and Material Analysis.

“The institute will provide unlimited opportunities for scientific discovery for students, faculty members and private sector partners not only at UT Arlington but also nearby UT Dallas and UT Southwestern Medical Center," UT System Chancellor Francisco G. Cigarroa said in a statement.

UT Arlington President James Spaniolo said the partnership "positions UT Arlington to become a global leader in scientific discovery and will pay untold dividends in the opportunities it affords students and vital industries.

A philanthropic commitment from Shimadzu last spring allowed UT Arlington to establish the center for advanced analytical chemistry. The Institute for Research Technologies will be made possible by an additional $18.5 million equipment purchase from Shimadzu.

The institute is meant to foster innovation across a variety of disciplines and will involve research teams from the College of Engineering, the College of Nursing and the School of Social Work, among others.

-Patrick M. Walker

Nobel laureate in physics will give public lecture as part of international conference at UT Arlington next month

No word on whether Sheldon, Leonard or Penny will be there, but the International Workshop on Future Linear Colliders will draw plenty of star power to the University of Texas at Arlington in late October. Particle physicists from around the world will attend, and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg will deliver a public lecture Oct. 24.

Weinberg, the Jack S. Josey-Welch Foundation Chair in Science Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has published his ideas in books for general audiences including The First Three Minutes, Dreams of a Final Theory and Lake Views. He will speak on "The Standard Model, Higgs Boson, Who cares?" at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 24. 

The semiannual conference, being held in Texas for the first time, has added significance because of the July 4 announcement from researchers at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, that they've almost certainly found the elusive Higgs boson. As the next step in discovery, the proposed International Linear Collider would be a 19.3-mile-long collider to complement and expand the work of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, said Jaehoon Yu, UT Arlington physics professor and co-organizer of the event. 

"This summer's announcement of a Higgs-like particle allows us to take the linear collider idea to the next level," Yu said. "... The linear collider could give us a host of new information about this new particle and help address other mysteries such as dark matter and dark energy." 

Scientists at the October gathering will discuss concepts for the ILC, which consists of two linear accelerators that face each other, and the Compact Linear Collider, another potential project being studied at CERN. Both colliders would ultimately reach energies of 1 TeV (trillion electron volts) or more. 

Yu and other scientists from UT Arlington's Center of Excellence for High Energy Physics have worked on the LHC for more than a decade. He and professor Andrew White are also heavily involved in plans for the International Linear Collider, an estimated $10 billion project that would take a decade to build. 

-Patrick M. Walker

Fort Worth schools releases 2012 student engagement survey

Fort Worth schools officials released the results of a 2012 survey of elementary and secondary students late Friday.

I'm still going through the document, but you can check it out for yourself here.

The school district got responses from students in grades 4 and 5 and  6 to 11.

Some findings as reported in a news release:

• About one third of elementary students reported boredom with school
• 44 percent of elementary students say they know a student who has been bullied
• More than 30 percent of students said a majority of students feel it is okay to cheat or make racist or sexist remarks
• Verbal bullying is dropped nearly 20 percent and physical bullying remains unchanged. Internet bullying is up almost 30 percent from the previous year.

Jessamy Brown

Study: managed charter schools spend more per pupil than public schools

The National Education Policy Center issued a report Thursday on an analysis of spending by schools operated by charter management organizations.

A study of three years of data showed that many of the charter network schools outspent similar public district schools.

The report is called "Spending by the Major Charter Management Organizations: Comparing Charter School & Local Public District Financial Resources in New York, Ohio and Texas."

A news release said the study found that "some charter chains in Texas, such as KIPP, spend substantially more per pupil than district schools in the same city and serving similar populations.

"In some Texas cities (and at the middle school level), these charters spend around 30 to 50 percent more based on state-reported current expenditures. If data from IRS filings are used, these charters ar found to spend 50 to 100 percent more."

Read more here.

Update: Officials from the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) posted a statement on their website disputing assertions in the report.

"The NEPC report incorrectly asserts that two KIPP established regions – KIPP Houston and KIPP New York – spend $2,000 and $4,000 more per student respectively, than similarly-sized district schools.

"This false claim is manufactured by (a) failing to include sizable district school expenditures in the comparison with KIPP schools, and (b) attributing to KIPP schools various expenses that the study does not likewise allocate to district schools.

"If the researchers accounted for these differences and created a true ‘apples to apples’ comparison, the spending gap between KIPP and district schools would be virtually eliminated."

Jessamy Brown

At UT Arlington, it's not brain surgery -- but close

From peewee to pros, the U.S. sports culture has become hard-headed about concussions.

Being knocked silly is no longer silly. Getting your bell rung means facing the music — or at least the head trainer — not sneaking back onto the field when the coach isn’t looking.

The days of a woozy player running around on autopilot, oblivious of the action, aren't completely over, to be sure. But a conference this weekend at the University of Texas at Arlington aims to share the latest concussion research with doctors, coaches, athletic trainers and even parents — including how to better spot incapacitated athletes and ensure that they remain safely on the sidelines until they are fully healed.

Conference organizer Jacob Resch, an assistant professor of kinesiology at UT Arlington, is leading a long-term study on young athletes in North Texas. He and researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center and Texas Health Resources have recorded baseline measurements for every middle and high school athelete at Pantego Christian Academy and the DeSoto school district. When one of the athletes suffers a concussion, the researchers compare test results with the baseline data, and work to ensure that the student is fully recovered before he or she resumes contact.

The conference begins at 6 p.m. Friday with a keynote address by former Cowboys fullback Daryl “Moose” Johnston, now an NFL broadcaster for Fox Sports. Leading experts from around the country will present topics Saturday, including four lab demonstrations in the afternoon.

Registration must be done in advance. Find out more here.

-Patrick M. Walker

Watauga Middle School students on C-SPAN bus

How many times has U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson appeared on C-SPAN?

Students who boarded the high tech C-SPAN bus on Wednesday learned the answer: 70 times in 2011, three for 2012 so far.

Students in eighth grade history classes at Birdville ISD's Watauga Middle School used touch screen computers and HD TVs in the mobile classroom to access C-SPAN's vast library archive, checking out presidential speeches and taking quizzes on how the government works.

The cable network’s custom-made coach launched a nationwide “Road to the White House” tour in August to visit political and campaign events, meet with voters and drop by schools.

Other Tarrant County stops are Fort Worth's Metro Opportunity High School, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Fort Worth and Birdville High School.

Read a Star-Telegram article on the visit here.

The next stop: Phoenix, Ariz.

About 70,000 educators around the country use C-SPAN’s resources to help teach about government, history and civics. Teachers can tap into the network’s library archives to watch videos of candidate speeches, review U.S. Supreme Court cases, and learn about the electoral college.

To prepare for the bus visit, Watauga Middle students studied about the presidential candidates and their Congressional representatives, said Elizabeth Cumbie, a history teacher. Students in teacher Deanna Boyd's classes at the campus got to visit the bus, too.

Jessamy Brown

Fort Worth teen wins first Google Global Science Fair

A Fort Worth teen took the first Google Global Science Fair grand prize last night for her research on
ovarian cancer.

Shree Bose, 17, (pictured at far right) found that a metabolic enzyme affects ovarian cancer cells that can cause them to become resistant to certain treatments and discovered a way to improve cancer treatment when such resistance happens.

The Fort Worth Country Day senior wins $50,000 in scholarships, a trip to the Galapagos Islands for her project and a three-day internship to the prominent European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, known by its French acronym as CERN. Fair winners were announced last night at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

Bose was inspired to research cancer after her grandfather died from the illness two years ago. She has presented related work to various science fairs, winning some top honors in the Fort Worth Regional Science and Engineering Fair and the Exxonmobil Texas Science and Engineering Fair. She was one of 15 finalists in the Google competition.

She did her research for the project as part of a larger research with Alakanada Basu, a professor of molecular biology and immunology at the University of North Texas Health Science Center who is studying drug resistant cancers. Basu said the teen approached her about two years ago to help in her lab.

"I'm so proud of her," Basu said. "We really challenged her on this project, and she just excelled. She’s doing not only well in science but in swimming and violin. Whatever she does she has the desire to excel."

Bose has spent many years competing in science fairs. In 2008, for example, she invented a new railroad tie aimed at reducing toxins. She was a finalist for the national Society for Science and Public Middle School Program competition for that project and had a minor planet named in her honor for it. She told the Star-Telegram then that she had been inspired to take on ambitious projects when she was 10 and her older brother Pinaki was competing in national science competitions.

“It was just surprising to me to see kids close to my age doing some really amazing things. ... I wanted to do something big like that,” she said at the time.

Learn more about Bose's project here.

Photo courtesy of Google.

-Eva-Marie Ayala

UT Arlington gets $500,000 grant to protect children from lead hazards

A nearly $500,000 grant has been awarded to the University of Texas at Arlington to conduct research to reduce the risks to children who come into contact with lead-contaminated soil.

The funding is provided through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of Healthy Homes and Lead Hazard Control, which supports research to eliminate dangerous lead and other hazards from lower income homes.

Homes with lead, a known toxin, can worsen conditions such as asthma and impair children's development. Lead-based paint was banned for use in homes in 1978, but HUD estimates that 24 million homes still have significant lead-based paint hazards.

At UT Arlington, the funding  will be used to compare different treatments and demonstrate that a phosphate called Apatite II is an environmentally acceptable remediation agent because it does not leach from the soil. The grant will allow researchers to study contaminated urban residential soil in New Orleans.

Nationwide, HUD is funding $7.8 million in grants to 14 projects in nine states.

Jan Jarvis

 

Texas African-American students' reading scores top most states

New testing results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress contain good news and not so good news for Texas.

The state's African-American fourth-graders scored sixth highest in the nation on the 2009 NAEP reading test, with a score of 213, nine points higher than the national average for African-American students.

Texas fourth-graders as a whole, however, scored an average of 219, one point lower than the national average and 34th in the nation.

The test is given every two years. About 12,000 fourth-graders and eighth-graders took the reading test in 2009.

The TEA has more results here.

- Traci Shurley

Dropouts affect North Texas economics big time, study says

If North Texas schools, including those in Dallas and Tarrant counties, could decrease their dropout rates by half, it could mean an additional $143 million in spending a year for the region, according to a new national report out this morning.
The Washington D.C.-based Alliance for Excellent Education analyzed data from 45 large metropolitan areas in an effort to illustrate how high school dropouts influence not only their own lives, but their community's economic health. The group, which promotes secondary school reform that results in more high school graduates, has done similar state level studies before, but none as specific as that released Tuesday.
The figures for North Texas, which were compiled for an area that includes Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington and 12 surrounding counties,show that 32 percent of students in the area didn't graduate from high school in four years and with a regular diploma. If just half of the dropouts in the class of 2008 had graduated on time, it could have meant as much as $197 million a year in average increased annual earnings for those approximately 14,500 students, according to the study, called The Economic Benefits from Halving Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington's Dropout Rate: A Boom To Regional Businesses. Even just 1,000 additional graduates could bring an add $1.3 million to local and state tax proceeds each year, the researchers estimated.

Educators in Tarrant County and throughout the state have put increased focus on keeping students in school in recent years, as their state accountability rankings have been tied to "completion rates." Those rates also give districts credit for students who come back for programs even though they didn't graduate in five years.

In Arlington, for example, officials tried to get students back this fall by doing home visits and offering freebies like Texas Rangers tickets to students who attended tutoring. In that district, 74.5 percent of the students in the class of 2008 graduated in four years. Another 14.3 percent came back the next fall for some kind of program, whether it was to re-enroll or take part in test preparations courses that would help them pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills exam.

- Traci Shurley