Browsing by Subject "Accountability"
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Item Open Access Double Standards in Global Health: Medicine, Human Rights Law and Multidrug-Resistant TB Treatment Policy(Health and human rights) Admay, CA; Thomas Nicholson, TRN; Aaron Shakow, AS; Salmaan Keshavjee, KSItem Open Access Essays on Education Policy(2013) Francis, Dania VeronicaThis dissertation consists of three essays on the topic of education policy. In the first essay, I evaluate the impacts of a teacher quality equity law that was enacted in California in the fall of 2006 prohibiting superintendents from transferring a teacher into a school in the bottom three performance deciles of the state's academic performance index if the principal refuses the transfer. The primary mechanism through which the policy should affect student outcomes is through the mix of the quality of teachers in the school. Using publicly available statewide administrative education data, and two quasi-experimental methodologies, I assess whether the policy had an effect on the district-wide distribution of teachers with varying levels of experience, education and licensure and on student academic performance. I extend the analysis by examining whether the policy has differential effects on subgroups of schools classified as having high-poverty or high-minority student populations. I find that, as a result of the teacher quality equity law, low-performing schools experienced a relative increase in fully-credentialed teachers and more highly educated teachers, but that did not necessarily translate to an increase in academic performance. I also find evidence that the dimension along which the policy was most effective was in improving teacher pre-service qualifications in schools with high minority student populations.
In the second essay, I estimate racial, ethnic, gender and socioeconomic differences in teacher reports of student absenteeism and tardiness while controlling for administrative records of actual absences. Subjective perceptions that teachers form about students' classroom behaviors matter for student academic outcomes. Given this potential impact, it is important to identify any biases in these perceptions that would disadvantage subgroups of students. I use longitudinal data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 in conjunction with longitudinal, student-level data from the North Carolina Education Data Research Center to employ a variation of a two sample instrumental variables approach in which I instrument for actual eighth grade absences with simulated measures of eight grade absences. I find consistent evidence that teacher reports of the attendance of poor students are negatively biased and that math teacher reports of male attendance are positively biased. There is mixed evidence with regard to student race and ethnicity.
The third essay is a co-authored work in which we employ a quasi-experimental estimation strategy to examine the effects of state-level job losses on fourth- and eighth-grade test scores, using federal Mass Layoff Statistics and 1996-2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress data. Results indicate that job losses decrease scores. Effects are larger for eighth than fourth graders and for math than reading assessments, and are robust to specification checks. Job losses to 1 percent of a state's working-age population lead to a .076 standard deviation decrease in the state's eighth-grade math scores. This result is an order of magnitude larger than those found in previous studies that have compared students whose parents lose employment to otherwise similar students, suggesting that downturns affect all students, not just students who experience parental job loss. Our findings have important implications for accountability schemes: we calculate that a state experiencing one-year job losses to 2 percent of its workers (a magnitude observed in seven states) likely sees a 16 percent increase in the share of its schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind.
Item Open Access Good Works – Changing (with) Civic Engagement at Duke University(2010-05-06T13:03:01Z) Aunon, FrancesItem Open Access How Could They Let This Happen? Cover Ups, Complicity, and the Problem of Accountability(Res Publica, 2023-01-01) Grant, RW; Katzenstein, S; Kennedy, CSexual abuse by clergymen, poisoned water, police brutality—these cases each involve two wrongs: the abuse itself and the attempt to avoid responsibility for it. Our focus is this second wrong—the cover up. Cover ups are accountability failures, and they share common strategies for thwarting accountability whatever the abuse and whatever the institution. We find that cover ups often succeed even when accountability mechanisms are in place. Hence, improved institutions will not be sufficient to prevent accountability failures. Accountability mechanisms are tools that people must be willing to use in good faith. They fail when people are complicit. What explains complicity? We identify certain human proclivities and features of modern organizations that lead people to become complicit in the wrongdoing of others. If we focus exclusively on the design of institutions, we will fail to constrain the perpetrators of wrongdoing. Understanding complicity is key to understanding accountability failures.Item Open Access Multilevel Governance and Accountability: Does Decentralization Promote Good Governance?(2016) Jang, JinhyukToday, the trend towards decentralization is far-reaching. Proponents of decentralization have argued that decentralization promotes responsive and accountable local government by shortening the distance between local representatives and their constituency. However, in this paper, I focus on the countervailing effect of decentralization on the accountability mechanism, arguing that decentralization, which increases the number of actors eligible for policy making and implementation in governance as a whole, may blur lines of responsibility, thus weakening citizens’ ability to sanction government in election. By using the ordinary least squares (OLS) interaction model based on historical panel data for 78 countries in the 2002 – 2010 period, I test the hypothesis that as the number of government tiers increases, there will be a negative interaction between the number of government tiers and decentralization policies. The regression results show empirical evidence that decentralization policies, having a positive impact on governance under a relatively simple form of multilevel governance, have no more statistically significant effects as the complexity of government structure exceeds a certain degree. In particular, this paper found that the presence of intergovernmental meeting with legally binding authority have a negative impact on governance when the complexity of government structure reaches to the highest level.
Item Open Access System Support for Strong Accountability(2009) Yumerefendi, Aydan RafetComputer systems not only provide unprecedented efficiency and
numerous benefits, but also offer powerful means and tools for
abuse. This reality is increasingly more evident as deployed software
spans across trust domains and enables the interactions of
self-interested participants with potentially conflicting goals. With
systems growing more complex and interdependent, there is a growing
need to localize, identify, and isolate faults and unfaithful behavior.
Conventional techniques for building secure systems, such as secure
perimeters and Byzantine fault tolerance, are insufficient to ensure
that trusted users and software components are indeed
trustworthy. Secure perimeters do not work across trust domains and fail
when a participant acts within the limits of the existing security
policy and deliberately manipulates the system to her own
advantage. Byzantine fault tolerance offers techniques to tolerate
misbehavior, but offers no protection when replicas collude or are
under the control of a single entity.
Complex interdependent systems necessitate new mechanisms that
complement the existing solutions to identify improper behavior and
actions, limit the propagation of incorrect information, and assign
responsibility when things go wrong. This thesis
addresses the problems of misbehavior and abuse by offering tools and
techniques to integrate accountability into computer systems. A
system is accountable if it offers means to identify and expose
semantic misbehavior by its participants. An accountable system
can construct undeniable evidence to demonstrate its correctness---the
evidence serves as explicit proof of misbehavior and can be strong enough
to be used as a basis for social sanction external to the
system.
Accountability offers strong disincentives for abuse and
misbehavior but may have to be ``designed-in'' to an application's
specific protocols, logic, and internal representation; achieving
accountability using general techniques is a challenge. Extending
responsibility to end users for actions performed by software
components on their behalf is not trivial, as it requires an ability
to determine whether a component correctly represents a
user's intentions. Leaks of private information are yet another
concern---even correctly functioning
applications can leak sensitive information, for which their owners
may be accountable. Important infrastructure services, such as
distributed virtual resource economies, offer a range of application-specific
issues such as fine-grain resource delegation, virtual
currency models, and complex work-flows.
This thesis work addresses the aforementioned problems by designing,
implementing, applying, and evaluating a generic methodology for
integrating accountability into network services and applications. Our
state-based approach decouples application state management from
application logic to enable services to demonstrate that they maintain
their state in compliance with user requests, i.e., state changes do take
place, and the service presents a consistent view to all clients and
observers. Internal state managed in this way, can then be used to feed
application-specific verifiers to determine the correctness the service's
logic and to identify the responsible party. The state-based approach
provides support for strong accountability---any detected violation
can be proven to a third party without depending on replication and
voting.
In addition to the generic state-based approach, this thesis explores how
to leverage application-specific knowledge to integrate accountability in
an example application. We study the invariants and accountability
requirements of an example application--- a lease-based virtual resource
economy. We present the design and implementation of several key elements
needed to provide accountability in the system. In particular, we describe
solutions to the problems of resource delegation, currency spending, and
lease protocol compliance. These solutions illustrate a complementary
technique to the general-purpose state-based approach, developed in the
earlier parts of this thesis.
Separating the actions of software and its user is at the heart of the
third component of this dissertation. We design, implement, and evaluate
an approach to detect information leaks in a commodity operating system.
Our novel OS abstraction---a doppelganger process---helps track
information flow without requiring application rewrite or instrumentation.
Doppelganger processes help identify sensitive data as they are about to
leave the confines of the system. Users can then be alerted about the
potential breach and can choose to prevent the leak to avoid becoming
accountable for the actions of software acting on their behalf.