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The article presents information on how the change of ownership of the Oshkosh, Wisconsin-based newspaper "Oshkosh Northwestern," affected the quality of the paper. The "Oshkosh Northwestern," was one of the most successful newspapers in Wisconsin during the 1900s. In the fall of 1997 the two families that owned it brought in a team of consultants to upgrade the publication. The improvements set the stage for the paper to be sold three times in less than three years. The paper was first sold by its family owners to OgdenNewspapers Inc. on May 15, 1998. A little more than a month later in early July 1998 it was acquired by Thomson Corp. On July 21, 2000 the Northwestern became property of Gannett Co. Inc. The newspaper became demonstrably worse in the five years after its family owners sold it to a series of chains. With fewer reporters writing fewer local stories and generating less copy for the local section, circulation fell more than 4 percent from the time Gannett acquired the paper in 2000 through the end of 2002.

This paper explores the context of a Kindergarten team in a suburban P-3 school in Wisconsin developing literacy coaching support. Facing recent neoliberal accountability reforms that have greatly expanded teacher competition, dismantled teachers' unions, and added the role of the coach to the school, "confidence" is an issue that the coach and teachers struggle with as they seek to improve minority student achievement. Using a case study design and feminist sociological framework highlighting emotional labour, the affective economy, and the psychosocial possibilities of the work of Pierre Bourdieu , this research examines professional capital as a form of educators' experience. Ultimately, we see that the landscape of power and emotions is complex as it divides "good" and "bad" White and middle-class teachers. Possibilities for extending the uses of feminist sociological theory in early childhood literacy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Receiver Operating Characteristic curves have been widely used to represent the performance of diagnostic tests. The corresponding area under the curve, widely used to evaluate their performance quantitatively, has been criticized in several respects. Several proposals have been introduced to improve area under the curve by taking into account only specific regions of the Receiver Operating Characteristic space, that is, the plane to which Receiver Operating Characteristic curves belong. For instance, a region of interest can be delimited by setting specific thresholds for the true positive rate or the false positive rate. Different ways of setting the borders of the region of interest may result in completely different, even opposing, evaluations. In this paper, we present a method to define a region of interest in a rigorous and objective way, and compute a partial area under the curve that can be used to evaluate the performance of diagnostic tests. The method was originally conceived in the Software Engineering domain to evaluate the performance of methods that estimate the defectiveness of software modules. We compare this method with previous proposals. Our method allows the definition of regions of interest by setting acceptability thresholds on any kind of performance metric, and not just false positive rate and true positive rate: for instance, the region of interest can be determined by imposing that ϕ (also known as the Matthews Correlation Coefficient) is above a given threshold. We also show how to delimit the region of interest corresponding to acceptable costs, whenever the individual cost of false positives and false negatives is known. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the method by applying it to the Wisconsin Breast Cancer Data. We provide Python and R packages supporting the presented method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Assessment, Feedback, Incentives, and eXchange (AFIX) is a quality improvement model used to increase childhood and adolescent immunization rates in the United States. We evaluated implementation of a similar quality improvement model to boost adult immunization rates. Methods: During November 2016 through May 2017, adult immunization outreach specialists conducted 124 in-person visits to clinics in Wisconsin that immunize adults, submit immunization information to the Wisconsin Immunization Registry (WIR), and agreed to participate in adult AFIX. Outreach specialists ran immunization assessment reports using the WIR and showed a paper copy of the report during the visit. Health care providers were encouraged to implement at least 1 of 18 strategies (eg, reminder-and-recall intervention, giving adult immunization resources to patients) to increase adult immunization rates. Outreach specialists conducted follow-up with health care providers at 3, 6, and 9-18 months after the initial visit to encourage strategy implementation. We compared AFIX sites with control clinics on practice type, geographic location, and clinic size. Results: Clinics that participated in adult AFIX had a significantly larger increase in median adult immunization rates for completion of the human papillomavirus vaccine series at the 9- to 18-month follow-up than control clinics did (10.4% vs 7.7%; P =.02). The median immunization rate for 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine/23-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine completed in series was higher, but not significantly so, among adult AFIX clinics than among control clinics (12.6% vs 10.7%; P =.18). Conclusions: Adult AFIX resulted in increased awareness about adult immunization recommendations and may be a useful tool for increasing adult immunization rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Context: The lack of court-ordered support for race-based policies that maintain and create integrated schools has forced communities of color to seek other avenues to obtain equitable education, such as school choice. Individual states and the federal government, as seen in grant provisions through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, are encouraging the expansion of choice at the very time that options for increasing student diversity, particularly racial diversity, are being narrowed by the courts. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The article uses critical race theory to examine the outcomes of specific school reforms, based on market theory models of school choice, that were designed to alleviate schooling inequities in urban districts. Setting: The context of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, serves as a microcosm of urban districts that have embraced school choice to create more equitable schooling options. Milwaukee, like most metropolitan areas, has a history of court-ordered desegregation that served as a temporary solution to racially segregated schools. Given the federal and district court turn from supporting race-based desegregation policies in schools, Milwaukee and other metropolitan districts are looking for new models to serve students of color in their districts and cities. Research Design: This article is a conceptual paper that incorporates data from a variety of sources to support the authors' conclusions. Data Collection and Analysis: Data for this project were taken from the U.S. Census Bureau, documents from newly created small high schools, such as Web sites and curriculum designs; current newspaper articles discussing issues of small high schools; archival newspaper articles documenting the creation of the 1990 choice and charter programs; professional experiences as a member of the Bill and Melinda Gates institutional selection and small-school team support system; and an empirical study that documents teachers' attempts to provide curriculum and instruction in newly created small schools. Conclusions/Recommendations: In combination, these data sources tell the story of market theory reforms that will continue to struggle to meet reformists' goals to serve all Milwaukee populations so long as policy makers and the courts continue to deny the irrefutable power that race and class exercise in parental choice in U.S. urban schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dynamic modes of political economic regulation impact provision for the parks system in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Green spaces during Milwaukee's first liberal era consisted mostly of private properties accessible only to the city's elite and/or to those willing to pay a fee to drink in its boisterous bier garlens. Collective open space investment at the turn of the 19th century signaled the beginning of a second, decades-long era of Keynesian state provision for parks. A steady decline in that investment for Milwaukee's parks since the 1980s has provided the context for a set of new, yet seemingly liberalized governance experiments to emerge from the now defunct managerialist system. In this paper I employ regulation and regime theories in conjunction with thirty-six in-depth inter- views to argue that these new parks experiments hail the beginning of a third era in parks provision. The new era is marked by an apparently neoliberal shift in regulation for open space on the basis of state actions to market public parks provision to a multiplicity of private actors. It is different from the first liberal era because the state withdraws its fiscal commitment to parks but still employs them to continue its active role in environmental and-by extension-social regulation. A multiplicity of local parks governances are promoted in the name of environmental citizenship but are problematic because they form new and localized geographies of social reproductive discipline in the benevolent rhetoric of responsibility, choice, and empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the transmission of family values, work and welfare among poor urban Black women in the U.S. In this paper, the authors present findings about the dynamic interaction among family values, family transmission processes, and young people's attitudes and behavior regarding both work and welfare, a dual focus that is seldom seen in research about occupational attainment. The authors examine the values about work and welfare and their transmission in relation to work status and perceptions of future work among a group of 50 poor Black women aged 15 to 23 from inner-city Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The findings of the authors indicate both that and how the intra-familial value transmission processes are important to the economic lives of young adults. These findings provide direct support for the expansion rather than reduction of economic and social welfare policies and related programs that will maximize the abilities of all family members to contribute to social capital development.

Information about several papers discussed at the international conference held on June 4-6, 2012 on death, grief, and bereavement at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse in La Crosse, Wisconsin is presented. Topics include the importance of rituals in helping families to come to terms with the loss, hospice and palliative care, and care for seriously ill and dying newborns. The conference featured a broad range of practitioners including nurses, counselors, and social workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]