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States have taken different approaches in addressing the need for increased compensation among teachers by spreading pay increases across multiple years, linking increases to performance, and connecting them to sweeping K-12 policy changes, such as school vouchers. The earn-as-you-learn Registered Apprenticeship model is an increasingly popular policy choice, which helps to close equity gaps for students from low-income backgrounds and students of color who want to enter the profession. Some efforts to reduce the teacher shortage, such as easing requirements to be a teacher, remain controversial and potentially counterproductive when considering education quality.

The unstable funding of higher education exacerbated by current damaging environmental contexts has created a need to rethink current approaches and opportunities regarding the financing of higher education. States and campuses must strategically leverage the current significant federal investments to meet their postsecondary objectives including closing equity gaps and increasing student access and success. This process will provide the foundation for a more robust state, federal, and campus partnership coordinated by state higher education offices to maximize the ability to create a "whole of government" approach to meeting student's needs.

The Faculty Development Programs (FDP) were intended to increase substance abuse education in mainstream professional training programs by attracting and educating core faculty to teach about addictions. Five psychology faculty in the PhD program at the University of New Mexico participated in the only FDP funded within the discipline of psychology. Although none had a primary focus or expertise in substance use disorders prior to the FDP, all four of the Assistant Professors became addiction researchers. During the 5 years prior to FDP, 11% of their publications had focused on addictions, a figure not significantly different from other psychology department faculty. This figure rose to 43% during the 5 FDP years, and 70% during the 5 years after FDP. The number of addiction courses taught in the department of psychology rose from 5, to 11, to 22 during these same three 5-year periods. Graduate theses and dissertations on addiction topics also rose from 1.1 per year prior to FDP (all chaired by the same faculty member), to 3.4 per year during FDP and 3.5 per year after FDP. In the 5 years following FDP, 46 theses and dissertations focused on addictions, chaired by 13 different psychology department faculty. Effects of FDP were also apparent among PhD graduates of the department, who showed significant increases in knowledge about addictions, willingness and confidence to treat (rather than refer) substance use disorders, and a doubling of addictive disorders in their post-degree caseloads. This diffusion effect is also seen in the presence of 11 new "second generation" research faculty in the department of psychology who were trained by FDP faculty, and who work full-time in addiction research, of whom six have already been awarded extramural funding. Although only one of the original five FDP fellows remains on faculty, clear effects of FDP endure in departmental teaching and scholarship, and in the addiction training and research of PhD graduates. Based on this program case study, FDP appears to be a promising model for institutionalizing substance abuse research and teaching within a scientist-practitioner training program, and for developing new investigators in addiction research. (Contains 1 figure and 2 tables.)

Elongation of Very Long chain fatty acids-like 4 (ELOVL4) is a fatty acid elongase responsible for the biosynthesis of very long chain (VLC; ≥ C26) fatty acids in the retina, brain, skin, Meibomian gland, and testes. Heterozygous inheritance of mutant ELOVL4 causes juvenile macular degeneration in autosomal dominant Stargardt-like macular dystrophy (STGD3). Retinal photoreceptors are enriched with VLC polyunsaturated fatty acids (VLC-PUFAs), which have been shown by our group and others to be necessary for the survival of rod photoreceptors. Our group performed a series of studies using mice conditionally depleted of retinal Elovl4 (KO) aimed at understanding the role of VLC-PUFAs in long-term retinal health and function, focusing on the role of these fatty acids in mediating synaptic function between the photoreceptors and the rest of the neural retina. The absence of VLC-PUFA from the retina of KO mice resulted in a marked decrease in retinal b-wave responses of the electroretinogram as well as a decrease in the amplitude of the oscillatory potentials mediated by the neural retina. Although there were no measureable differences between KO and wild type (WT) mice in either pre-synaptic rod calcium channel function or post-synaptic bipolar cell glutamate receptor responses, ultrastructural analysis revealed a marked decrease in the diameter of synaptic vesicles in rod terminals. Recent quantification suggests that this decrease in synaptic vesicle size due to the absence of VLC-PUFAs in KO mice, and the consequent decrease in glutamate content, could account for the decrease in b-wave response amplitudes that were previously measured in these animals.