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In many school districts, the policies that regulate teaching personnel are governed by collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). While there is significant policy attention that has affected the scope of these agreements, there is relatively little research on how CBAs vary over time, or whether they change in response to states' legislative reforms. Using a panel data set of over 1,200 CBAs across three states, we compare CBA change before and after reforms in two states (Michigan and Washington) relative to a state with no statutory changes (California). We show that the state policy reforms lessened the restrictiveness of CBAs, as intended. The results suggest when reforms limit bargaining negotiations, unions are unable to compensate for the substantial reductions in working conditions.

Because of COVID-19 precautions, instructors worldwide were required to introduce a variety of virtual instruction modes to complete the Spring 2020 semester. Herein we describe parallel efforts in contextualized chemistry courses at two institutions--Carthage College and Central Michigan University. These courses are primarily designed for nonscience majors and are taught through a "citizen-first" approach using "Chemistry in Context." The two classes featured similar class sizes and covered similar contexts. Although the online approach differed in scope between institutions, overall student performance was similar to that in pre-COVID offerings.

We examine more than 1,000 collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) in place across California, Michigan, and Washington. We investigate the prevalence of a set of 43 key provisions between and within these states, providing the first comprehensive comparison of CBA terms using data drawn from economically and demographically different districts, as well as districts that vary considerably by student enrollment. We find that CBAs vary substantially within and across states, and that this variation is more associated with district size than the proportion of low-income students within districts. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for research and policy. [For the companion piece, "Cut from the Same Cloth? Comparing Urban District CBAs within States and across the United States," see EJ1168096.]

There is considerable speculation and some empirical evidence that teacher collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) in urban school districts are more restrictive to district administrators than CBAs in other districts. We build on prior work by comparing urban with nonurban CBAs in three states--California, Michigan, and Washington--and, for a set of high-profile provisions, with those in CBAs from 72 of the largest districts in the country outside those states. We find that urban CBAs are more restrictive than nonurban CBAs in all three states, but there is still considerable heterogeneity across districts in overall restrictiveness and in high-profile provisions.

In "Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31", the U.S. Supreme Court ended the practice of enabling public-sector unions to collect "fair-share" or "agency" fees from employees who decline to join. Although federal law prohibits requiring workers to join a union as a condition of employment, public-sector unions had been allowed to collect some portion of their dues from employees who do not wish to become members. These non-members were required to pay fair-share fees for the non-political activities that benefit all employees covered by the union contract. Speculation about what the Janus decision will mean for teachers unions has been rampant. Most analysts who follow education policy and organized labor believe that the ruling will result in decreased power for teachers unions. The logic behind this assumption is simple: teachers unions will lose dues revenue because membership will decrease and former agency-fee payers will cease paying fees for union services. With fewer resources, teachers unions will have less ability to exert their influence in local, state, and federal elections and at the bargaining table. Fewer members, less money, less power. However agency fees have been challenged at the state level over the past decade, and several states recently stopped allowing unions to collect them. For this article, the authors examine state affiliates of the nation's largest teachers union, the National Education Association (NEA), in Wisconsin and Michigan. They look at changes in membership rates, revenues, and campaign contributions from 2009-2016, the six-year period before and after their new right-to-work laws were adopted. They also interviewed two dozen teachers, administrators, and union officials in Michigan to gather insights about how they have coped on the ground. They focus on Wisconsin and Michigan because the timing of their right-to-work laws provided them with sufficient pre- and post-reform data. With the Wisconsin and Michigan data results, they compared the two states' trends to those of NEA affiliates in two other groups of states: the 25 states that allowed agency fees during the six-year period, which they call "agency-shop" states (including West Virginia, Missouri, and Kentucky), and the 23 states that had right-to-work laws on the books during this time and therefore did not allow fees, which they call "right-to-work" states.

In 1989, Congress passed the Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act Amendments to address illegal alcohol and drug abuse on college campuses. To receive federal funding, each college must comply by implementing an alcohol and drug prevention program, but the federal government and some colleges have paid little attention to this policy. Recently, the Department of Education vowed to intensify its scrutiny of colleges and has begun issuing fines for noncompliance. There have been no studies on this topic in over 20 years, leaving community college administrators, in particular, without guidance on how to implement the required programs. In this study, I analyzed public reports from Michigan community colleges to evaluate compliance with the Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act and to examine their alcohol and drug programs. I found that 21 of Michigan's 28 community colleges partially complied with the Act, only two implemented all the required mandates, and five were noncompliant. Most notably, colleges failed to collect substantive programmatic outcomes data, and few offered evidence-based alcohol and drug prevention programs to students. I provide rationale for why colleges should invest in improving compliance and the quality of alcohol and drug programs, and I offer seven recommendations to community college administrators on how to do so.

Herein, we describe the design and testing of two different home-built atomic layer deposition (ALD) systems for the growth of thin films with sub-monolayer control over film thickness. The first reactor is a horizontally aligned hot-walled reactor with a vacuum purging system. The second reactor is a vertically aligned cold-walled reactor with a quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) and a vacuum purging system. This latter reactor was also built to be capable of the addition of liquid- or solution-phase precursors, including the addition of a solution-based precursor containing nanoparticles. Each system cost less than $10,000, and they were used to deposit aluminum oxide thin films using trimethylaluminum and water/isopropyl alcohol as coreactants. Whereas the horizontal hot-walled system was able to deposit alumina thin films at a growth rate of 1.2-1.4 Å/cycle, the more sophisticated vertically aligned reactor deposited films at 0.95-1.1 Å/cycle, which is comparable to commercial systems costing $100,000 or more. Most importantly, both systems were fabricated entirely by M.S. and undergraduate students at Central Michigan University.

We describe the use of concept maps within a 4-week nanotechnology survey course, designed for first-year undergraduate students. Because of the extremely short time frame of the class, students would be inundated with an overwhelming number of new concepts and definitions. Hence, we employed concept mapping to increase student retention and ascertain the level of student conceptual understanding for each topic covered in the course. In contrast to most studies that introduce concept mapping via posthoc interviews, we report the use of student-generated concept maps. Examples of concept maps are provided from students who were confused by various subtopics, as well as those who demonstrated a more lucid conceptual understanding. In addition, we found a significant correlation between average concept map scores and the final exam grades for students. (Contains 6 figures and 1 table.)

The Upper Silurian Salina Group of eastern North America is well known for its thick evaporite successions and hydrocarbon resources. These strata have been assigned to numerous chronostratigraphic schemes within Ohio and Michigan and are currently identified by varying subsurface and outcrop nomenclatural schemes. These chronostratigraphic challenges have persisted for over 50 yr and dramatically inhibit the correlation of events recorded in the Silurian section of eastern North America with the global record of Silurian biogeochemical events. To help resolve the chronostratigraphic correlation of these units, we provide new high-resolution δ13Ccarb chemostratigraphic analyses of a core located in central Ohio for strata assigned to the Greenfield and Tymochtee Formations and integrate existing biostratigraphic, chemostratigraphic, and subsurface geophysical data in western, southern, and eastern Ohio. The new data presented here, integrated for the first time with basinwide subsurface geophysical data, demonstrate a mid-late Homerian Stage global sea-level lowstand, suggest a short interval of tectonic stability within the study area at the beginning of “Salina B–G” deposition, during which accommodation was occupied by the Greenfield Formation and laterally equivalent strata, and provide chronostratigraphic constraints for basin flexure and potential forebulge migration associated with renewed tectonic activity. The new chronostratigraphic correlation of these strata provides a broader picture of Silurian environmental change across the eastern half of the Laurentian paleocontinent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The U.S. EPA periodically evaluates ambient concentrations, human exposures, and health risks for 180 hazardous air pollutants plus diesel particulate matter using modeled estimates from the National-Scale Air Toxics Assessment (NATA). NATA publishes estimates at the spatial resolution of U.S. Census tracts, which are subdivisions of a county. These local scale, model-predicted estimates from NATA are used extensively in community-based assessments; however, evaluation of NATA’s ambient concentrations and human exposure estimates against measurement data has been limited to date. This paper compares modeled annual average benzene results from the 2002 NATA with measured results from the 2004 to 2007 Detroit Exposure and Aerosol Research Study (DEARS) as a case study of the quality of NATA results. NATA model estimates support community-scale characterization and assessment. Benzene is particularly important as it was estimated by the 2002 NATA as the largest single air toxic pollutant in terms of cancer risk in the U.S. We found that the average ambient concentrations of benzene predicted by NATA were within 5 percent, on average, of the 24-h integrated average ambient concentrations measured in DEARS. The NATA human exposure estimates, which include only outdoor sources for benzene, were, on average, approximately half the measured breathing zone concentrations from DEARS. Our analyses support that the factors driving higher DEARS personal benzene concentrations relative to the NATA predicted exposure values are likely due, at least in part, to indoor sources. This work points to further community-scale modeling research to improve characterizations and assessments of human exposures. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

A 17-year-old male was envenomated on the right forearm by a black widow spider that had presumably traveled in a packaged dishwasher and been shipped from Mexico to Michigan. The patient experienced vomiting and severe pain in his abdomen and chest approximately 30 min after being bitten. He received 6000 units (1 vial) of Latrodectus antivenin intravenously about 7 h after he was envenomated. He did not experience significant improvement in his symptoms after the administration of antivenin and additional antivenin was not given. The patient was hospitalized for 7 days and still was complaining of intermittent episodes of pain in his chest and lower back 3 weeks after envenomation. To avoid prolonged symptomatology and hospitalization, additional Latrodectus antivenin should be given promptly to those individuals whose symptoms are not ameliorated after 1 vial.