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Experts in the field of family and school partnerships have called for a shift from a focus on engagement to a focus on empowerment of parents, guardians, and caregivers to improve education outcomes for historically marginalized students. Although the terms "engage" and "empower" are often used interchangeably in the research, there is a significant difference in terms of practice. Family engagement generally refers to educators inviting families to participate in school-related activities. More than 50 years of research indicates that family engagement is one of the most powerful predictors of a child's development, educational attainment, and success in school and life. Family empowerment occurs when educators and schools remove the barriers to and provide opportunities for families to gain agency and influence their schools' communities to bring about positive change in their children's schooling. Empowerment involves a mutually shared effort to reach mutually identified learning goals for an individual child or for all children in a school or district. To support educational equity in terms of both opportunity and outcomes, families must be empowered by schools, districts, and communities to support their children's learning. Family empowerment occurs when educators and schools remove the barriers to and provide opportunities for families to gain agency and influence their schools' communities to bring about positive change in their children's schooling. Empowerment involves a mutually shared effort to reach mutually identified learning goals for an individual child or for all children in a school or district. To support educational equity in terms of both opportunity and outcomes, families must be empowered by schools, districts, and communities to support their children's learning. This brief presents a narrative synthesis and is based on a partial review of the relevant literature on strategies for engaging and, more recently, empowering families to support their children's learning and development. The brief also reviews and summarizes lessons learned from this research, and offers recommendations for how local education agencies can engage and empower families. [Contributors of the brief include Sylvia Kwon and Ron McCowen.]

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), passed in 2015, signaled a major shift in the roles of states and districts in supporting school improvement. Under ESSA, state education agencies (SEAs) and local education agencies (LEAs) have more responsibility and flexibility in developing and implementing plans, informed by local context, to support the bottom 5 percent of schools, high schools with graduation rates of less than 67 percent, and schools with chronically struggling subgroups of students. The purpose of this brief from the Center on School Turnaround (CST) at WestEd is to provide examples of how states and districts are working together to improve low-performing schools under ESSA. This brief includes a description of state and district roles in school improvement based on an analysis of 23 state ESSA plans. It also provides examples, based on interviews, of how 10 states are carrying out those roles.

The Center on School Turnaround at WestEd has developed a framework to assist states, districts, and schools in leading and managing rapid improvement efforts. The framework shares, in practical language, the critical practices of successful school turnaround in four domains, or areas of focus, that research and experience suggest are central to rapid and significant improvement: turnaround leadership, talent development, instructional transformation, and culture shift. At a more fine-grained level, the framework then offers examples of how each practice would be put into action at each level of the system. [Contributing writers were Coby V. Meyers, Sam Redding, Dallas Hambrick Hitt, Carlas McCauley, Lenay Dunn, Katy Chapman, Eric Ambroso, and Min Chen-Gaddini. For other reports in the Center on School Turnaround Four Domains Series, see ED584111, ED584125, and ED584115.]

Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students often participate in programs being evaluated, yet they are generally excluded from being involved in the evaluation process. In addition, the staff of organizations that conduct evaluations are predominately White and often implement research methods that may perpetuate racial biases and unequal power dynamics that exist in our society (Caldwell & Bledsoe, 2019; Hall, 2018; Leiderman, 2017; Public Policy Associates, 2015; Stanfield, 1999). These dynamics may produce inaccurate findings that can impact recommendations for program improvement and future funding decisions, potentially doing a disservice to the students and communities that the programs are intended to support. Our organization is conducting a comprehensive evaluation of a large-scale National Science Foundation (NSF) grant initiative. The mixed-methods evaluation combines formative and summative components. The formative component is used to provide ongoing data to the project's leaders that can be used to improve the work. The focus of this aspect of the evaluation is to understand the experiences of graduate students in Bridge Programs in chemistry, geoscience, and physics. Participants are asked questions about department climate, sense of belonging, funding, support from their program, faculty and peers, mental health support, and imposter syndrome. Faculty at the departments that house these graduate students applied to the various disciplinary societies to become a Bridge Program site. The application process included departments outlining the work done to make their program more inclusive and supportive. Our goals are to determine how students are supported in their program and how programs can find ways to support their students better. The assumption is that if students are feeling supported in their graduate programs, they will persist and be successful. The study participants are graduate students who were enrolled in Bridge Programs at universities across the country. Due to the pandemic, the research occurred online using Zoom to conduct individual interviews. The population being studied include Black, Indigenous, and Latinx graduate students in graduate programs in chemistry, geoscience, and physics. The students all matriculated into their graduate program through a Bridge Program established through the disciplinary society partner. At the time of the evaluation, 221 students were enrolled in Bridge Programs. The purpose of the Bridge Programs is to raise awareness of the experiences Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students face in pursuing graduate degrees; to inspire departments to adopt inclusive practices; to begin to build a recognizable disciplinary movement toward the adoption of inclusive practices in graduate education; and to increase the number of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students earning graduate degrees, while creating a network to support and serve students in the physical sciences. The evaluation team studying the Bridge Programs consists of a mixed-race female who appears White and a White male. Acknowledging that our evaluation team is not representative of the Bridge Program participants, and understanding and reflecting on how our own assumptions, biases, and experiences related to race and ethnicity may influence data collection, analysis, and interpretation, we sought to engage in anti-racist, culturally responsive, and participatory evaluation practices by collaborating with program participants to inform the evaluation design and implementation. We recruited graduate students in Bridge Programs to review our data collection protocols and provide feedback to test the validity and cultural appropriateness of our qualitative and quantitative items before administration, and participate in the qualitative coding of narrative data. During interviews with students, we worked to foster a safe environment and shared understanding by informing each participant about the purpose of the interview and that they are free to end the interview at any time or pass on any question they did not want to answer. We started the interview by asking which program they are in and their career goals, followed by questions about support they receive from their programs, faculty, and peers. Prior to asking questions about race, identity, or department climate, researchers first prepared the interviewee with the following introduction: "The goal of the Bridge Program is to increase the number of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx graduate students in chemistry/geosciences/physics. The Bridge Programs already know how many Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students are being admitted to programs and whether they are still in graduate school, but they know less about their experiences during graduate school. We'd like to know more about that so the Bridge Program can better support students in the future. Would it be ok if I asked a few questions about this?" All eight participants agreed to provide answers to the items in this section. The first item in this portion of the interview asked the open-ended question, "Do you identify as a member of an underrepresented racial group in chemistry/geosciences/physics? How would you describe yourself?" allowing participants to self-identify rather than imposing predetermined categories. Finally, to include partners who share the background and experiences of the program participants, we recruited two students who expressed interest in the evaluation process during interviews as paid temporary employees. The students completed training in human subjects research and training in qualitative coding, including calibration activities with an experienced qualitative researcher. The students then reviewed and coded narrative data from Bridge faculty and graduate students and modified the coding scheme given their insight and experiences. They also reviewed the report section on Bridge Programs to ensure accuracy and made suggested edits. Both students were authors on the final report and presented the findings to leadership of various organizations. The insight and input of the graduate students greatly strengthened the information the evaluation team provided to leadership to inform program improvement in regard to further training needed by faculty in Bridge Programs and additional support students need to be successful. Given the success of the inclusion of program participants in the evaluation, we expanded and formalized this work into an Evaluation Committee. The Committee is Co-Chaired by one of the graduate students who initially worked on the evaluation and co-author on this conference proposal. We also recruited 7 more graduate students as paid temporary employees, representing all disciplines and demographic groups targeted in this program.

The matter spectrum of the MSSM, including three right-handed neutrino supermultiplets and one pair of Higgs-Higgs conjugate superfields, can be obtained by compactifying the E_{8} x E_{8} heterotic string and M-theory on Calabi-Yau manifolds with specific SU(4) vector bundles. These theories have the standard model gauge group augmented by an additional gauged U(1)_{B-L}. Their minimal content requires that the B-L gauge symmetry be spontaneously broken by a vacuum expectation value of at least one right-handed sneutrino. In previous papers, we presented the results of a quasi-analytic renormalization group analysis showing that B-L gauge symmetry is indeed radiatively broken with an appropriate B-L/electroweak hierarchy. In this paper, we extend these results by 1) enlarging the initial parameter space and 2) explicitly calculating all renormalization group equations numerically, without approximation. The regions of the initial parameter space leading to realistic vacua are presented and the B-L/electroweak hierarchy computed over these regimes. At representative points, the mass spectrum for all sparticles and Higgs fields is calculated and shown to be consistent with present experimental bounds. Some fundamental phenomenological signatures of a non-zero right-handed sneutrino expectation value are discussed, particularly the cosmology and proton lifetime arising from induced lepton and baryon number violating interactions., Comment: 67 pages, 13 figures

E8 X E8 heterotic string and M-theory, when appropriately compactified, can give rise to realistic, N=1 supersymmetric particle physics. In particular, the exact matter spectrum of the MSSM, including three right-handed neutrino supermultiplets, one per family, and one pair of Higgs-Higgs conjugate superfields is obtained by compactifying on Calabi-Yau manifolds admitting specific SU(4) vector bundles. These "heterotic standard models" have the SU(3)_{C} X SU(2)_{L} X U(1)_{Y} gauge group of the standard model augmented by an additional gauged U(1)_{B-L}. Their minimal content requires that the B-L gauge symmetry be spontaneously broken by a vacuum expectation value of at least one right-handed sneutrino. In a previous paper, we presented the results of a renormalization group analysis showing that B-L gauge symmetry is indeed radiatively broken with a B-L/electroweak hierarchy of O(10) to O(10^{2}). In this paper, we present the details of that analysis, extending the results to include higher order terms in tan[beta]^{-1} and the explicit spectrum of all squarks and sleptons., Comment: 60 pages, 6 figures

E8 x E8 heterotic string and M-theory, when compactified on a Calabi-Yau threefold admitting an SU(4) vector bundle with Wilson lines, can give rise to the exact MSSM spectrum with three right-handed neutrino chiral superields, one per family. Rank preserving Wilson lines require that the standard model group be augmented by a gauged U(1)_B-L. Since there are no fields in this theory for which 3(B-L) is an even, non-zero integer, the gauged B-L symmetry must be spontaneously broken at a low scale, not too far above the electroweak scale. It is shown that in these heterotic standard models, the B-L symmetry can be broken, with a phenomenologically viable B-L/electroweak hierarchy, by at least one right-handed sneutrino acquiring a vacuum expectation value. This is explicitly demonstrated, in a specific region of parameter space, using a renormalization group analysis and soft supersymmetry breaking operators. The vacuum state is shown to be a stable, local minimum of the potential and the resultant hierarchy is explicitly presented in terms of tan[beta]., Comment: 16 pages; typos fixed, analysis generalized

We present a vacuum of heterotic M-theory whose observable sector has the MSSM spectrum with the addition of one extra pair of Higgs-Higgs conjugate superfields. The quarks/leptons have a realistic mass hierarchy with a naturally light first family. The double elliptic structure of the Calabi-Yau compactification threefold leads to two ``stringy'' selection rules. These classically disallow Yukawa couplings to the second Higgs pair and, hence, Higgs mediated flavor-changing neutral currents. Such currents are induced in higher-dimensional interactions, but are naturally suppressed. We show that our results fit comfortably below the observed upper bounds on neutral flavor-changing processes., Comment: 52 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, requires feynmf

We present data for the time-dependence of wooden spheres penetrating into a loose non-cohesive packing of glass beads. The stopping time is a factor of three longer than the time $d/v_\circ$ needed to travel the total penetration distance $d$ at the impact speed $v_\circ$. The acceleration decreases monotonically throughout the impact. These kinematics are modelled by a position- and velocity-dependent stopping force that is constrained to reproduce prior observations for the scaling of the penetration depth with the total drop distance., Comment: 4 pages, experiment

We present data for the penetration of a variety of spheres, dropped from rest, into a level non-cohesive granular medium. We improve upon our earlier work [Uehara {\it et al.} Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 90}, 194301 (2003)] in three regards. First, we explore the behavior vs sphere diameter and density more systematically, by holding one of these parameters constant while varying the other. Second, we prepare the granular medium more reproducibly and, third, we measure the penetration depth more accurately. The new data support our previous conclusion that the penetration depth is proportional to the 1/2 power of sphere density, the 2/3 power of sphere diameter, and the 1/3 power of total drop distance.

We report on craters formed by balls dropped into dry, non-cohesive, granular media. By explicit variation of ball density $\rho_{b}$, diameter $D_{b}$, and drop height $H$, the crater diameter is confirmed to scale as the 1/4 power of the energy of the ball at impact: $D_{c}\sim(\rho_{b}{D_{b}}^{3}H)^{1/4}$. Against expectation, a different scaling law is discovered for the crater depth: $d\sim({\rho_{b}}^{3/2}{D_{b}}^{2}H)^{1/3}$. The scaling with properties of the medium is also established. The crater depth has significance for granular mechanics in that it relates to the stopping force on the ball., Comment: experiment; 4 pages, 3 figures