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We present an optical aberration correction technique for ultracold quantum gas experiments which directly utilizes the quantum gas as a wavefront sensor. The direct use of the quantum gas enables correcting aberrations that are otherwise impractical to measure, e.g. introduced by vacuum windows. We report a root-mean-square precision and accuracy of 0.01{\lambda} and 0.03{\lambda}, respectively, and also show independently the reduction of aberrations through measurement of the trap frequency of our optical tweezer. These improvements were achieved for a tweezer size that is well below our imaging resolution. The present work is in particular intended to serve as a tutorial for experimentalists interested in implementing similar methods in their experiment., Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures

This project is part of the American School District Panel (ASDP), a research partnership between the RAND Corporation and the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College (CRPE). This report concludes research on five school systems to reveal the academic, social, and political challenges posed by the pandemic and what leaders and their staff are doing to address student learning loss. This report provides a possible explanation for why lackluster student test scores continue and why school systems struggle to implement and scale targeted student supports. Significant findings in this report include: (1) A crisis in the quality of classroom teaching is, leaders say, diverting time and resources away from targeted supports for students and toward improving classroom instruction; (2) Leaders report less day-to-day chaos, but unexpected challenges in staffing and teacher development have curtailed recovery efforts. As a result, their COVID recovery plans have been difficult, if not impossible, to carry out; (3) Plans for tutoring and other customized help have been undone by leaders' need to build (or rebuild) teachers' core skills; and (4) Millions of dollars and the best of intentions and efforts notwithstanding, leaders are struggling to overcome challenges to providing baseline services to students. [For the preceding report, see "Navigating Political Tensions over Schooling: Findings from the Fall 2022 American School District Panel Survey" (ED626297).]

We realize a Laughlin state of two rapidly rotating fermionic atoms in an optical tweezer. By utilizing a single atom and spin resolved imaging technique, we sample the Laughlin wavefunction, thereby revealing its distinctive features, including a vortex distribution in the relative motion, correlations in the particles' relative angle, and suppression of the inter-particle interactions. Our work lays the foundation for atom-by-atom assembly of fractional quantum Hall states in rotating atomic gases.

Public schooling has always been politically fraught, but current disagreements over issues related to race, sexuality, gender, and COVID-19 have reached a tipping point. According to this report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and RAND, half of school system leaders say that these disagreements are disrupting schooling. Almost one in three district leaders also said their educators had received verbal or written threats about politically controversial topics since fall 2021. The findings come from surveys issued to 300 district and charter network leaders and interviews with superintendents. Their responses shed light on how political polarization has affected classrooms and how districts are responding. This report presents results from the fall 2022 survey of the American School District Panel (ASDP). The ASDP is a research partnership between RAND and CRPE. The panel also collaborates with several other education organizations, including the Council of the Great City Schools and Kitamba, to help improve outcomes for students throughout the United States.

In this report, we update our ongoing research on five school systems to reveal the academic, social, and political challenges posed by the pandemic and what system leaders and their staff are doing to address student learning loss. The report is part of the American School District Panel, a research partnership between the RAND Corporation and the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Key findings include: (1) Student absences and staff shortages have sidelined the adoption of academic acceleration strategies; (2) Districts are working hard to rebuild teacher capacity and collect better data on student performance; (3) Some districts are turning back to familiar instructional strategies developed before the pandemic. Others are offering different types of support for student academic recovery to address learning loss; and (4) The pandemic has changed district priorities and reshaped the work of superintendents and senior administrators. Districts haven't given up on restoring lost learning or improving classroom instruction. But to help students who spent months out of school, they're applying high-dosage tutoring, project-based learning and career-infused education in a piecemeal fashion, rather than pursuing academic acceleration as a comprehensive approach. [For the previous report in the series, "Whack-A-Mole: School Systems Respond to Disrupted Learning in 2021," see ED618897.]

Public education depends on expertise, work, money, and cooperation from multiple actors who have different interests and beliefs. These lead to competition and negotiation--in other words, politics. Failure to consider the politics of reform implementation and sustainability has doomed many promising K-12 school improvement initiatives. This paper analyzes more than 10 years of data on the implementation of the portfolio strategy to identify practical lessons on managing the politics of reform K-12 schools. Sustaining complex reforms like the portfolio strategy in a political environment requires leaders to: (1) Continually seek new supporters and renew the support of existing ones; (2) Expect and prepare for attacks and be alert to the unnecessary harms caused by their own actions, which bolster opposition; (3) Develop information strategies that document intermediate results, alert leaders to emergent problems and actively counter hostile narratives; (4) Be attentive to competing agendas and political liabilities within their own alliances; and (5) Prepare for leadership succession so that reforms have a chance to last long enough to make a difference. These observations challenge the conventional wisdom that sustainable reforms can be built only upon the percolating up of good ideas and initiatives from below. Reform leaders are essential to knitting together fragile coalitions who may be motivated by different goals and aligning new programs and initiatives--and politically reinforcing them over time--so their benefits can accumulate.

This is Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE)'s second consensus panel report on the pandemic and delays in students' learning. Based on the evidence available a year ago, CRPE reported the average K-12 student in America mastered less academic content due to the pandemic and associated disruptions to schooling. Negative impacts were generally larger in math than in reading, substantial across all grade levels, larger where students had less access to in-person instruction, and larger for Black, Hispanic, and low-income students. This year's report, based on 23 studies published since last July, offers even stronger evidence of the pandemic's negative consequences for student growth and development. The pauses to in-person schooling and related changes in family and community life over the past year continued to interrupt most children's academic growth, but the consequences are not evenly distributed. Children whose schools were closed the longest had their learning interrupted the most--and most often, that affected low-income children and children of color in big cities. In 2022 as in 2021, the authors aim to present a coherent baseline of what is known, unknown, and needs to be known at this stage of the pandemic--and the beginning of a recovery from the pandemic. These reports are designed to help system leaders, community leaders, policymakers, researchers, philanthropies, the media, and others to define ambitious goals and clear metrics that ensure our education system meets every student's needs over the coming years. [This report is an update to "How Much Have Students Missed Academically Because of the Pandemic? A Review of the Evidence to Date" (ED614130).]

In this report, we complement our latest fall 2021 survey research from the American School District Panel with in-depth interviews of leaders on the ground in five school systems. Our goal with these interviews was to learn from system leaders about the academic needs of children as they return to school, how districts and charter schools are addressing those needs, and how the pandemic has affected schools. In Brief: (1) Education leaders across the country recognize that students are falling behind academically during the pandemic. Some districts are responding by emphasizing grade-level instruction and just-in-time supports rather than remediation. We interviewed top leaders in five school systems committed to this approach to learn more about its implementation; (2) We found that implementing acceleration required school systems to work with schools in new ways, but the strategy was complicated by a host of factors that made getting to instruction difficult: challenging student behaviors, staffing shortages, and the politicization of health, safety, and education. All these pressures have made leading school districts in 2021-22 like playing a game of Whack-A-Mole; and (3) School districts across the country are working hard to catch students up. But the Whack-A-Mole experience of leading during the pandemic raises questions about how these pressures will affect system leaders and leadership and whether, in the future, schools alone will be able to do enough to help all students get the help they need to recover. [For latest fall 2021 survey research from the American School District Panel, "Flux in the Educator Labor Market: Acute Staff Shortages and Projected Superintendent Departures. Selected Findings from the Fourth American School District Panel Survey. Data Note: Insights from the American Educator Panels. Research Report. RR-A956-9," see ED617372.]

A significant number of researchers have applied deep learning methods to image fusion. However, most works require a large amount of training data or depend on pre-trained models or frameworks to capture features from source images. This is inevitably hampered by a shortage of training data or a mismatch between the framework and the actual problem. Deep Image Prior (DIP) has been introduced to exploit convolutional neural networks' ability to synthesize the 'prior' in the input image. However, the original design of DIP is hard to be generalized to multi-image processing problems, particularly for image fusion. Therefore, we propose a new image fusion technique that extends DIP to fusion tasks formulated as inverse problems. Additionally, we apply a multi-channel approach to enhance DIP's effect further. The evaluation is conducted with several commonly used image fusion assessment metrics. The results are compared with state-of-the-art image fusion methods. Our method outperforms these techniques for a range of metrics. In particular, it is shown to provide the best objective results for most metrics when applied to medical images.