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The staying in (pre)school blues
July/August 2005
by Trey Popp ’97
Stop worrying about high school rebels. Their very little brothers and sisters might be in worse shape.
Walter Gilliam, the new director of Yale’s Edward Zigler Center for Child Development and Social Policy, studied 3,898 publicly funded pre-kindergarten classrooms in 40 states and found that preschoolers are expelled at more than three times the rate of K-12 students. The figures varied considerably from state to state, but the weighted results of his report, released in May, indicate that ten percent of the nation’s preschool teachers had expelled at least one child in the last year. Boys are four times more likely to be expelled than girls, and African American children are twice as likely to be expelled than whites or Latinos.
“Kids get expelled for two main reasons,” Gilliam says. “Either because there’s some kind of a zero-tolerance policy [on biting or the like] that’s been violated, which is fairly rare, or more commonly because teachers are concerned about liability” should somebody get hurt.
But Gilliam says the children’s behavior is only part of the equation. The other variable is whether or not a given school is equipped to help turn its most difficult children around. In that respect, not all preschool programs are created equal. Those run by public schools or Head Start tend to do a better job than community-based programs at keeping kids in the classroom—largely because they afford teachers greater access to behavioral consultants and special education placements for problem kids. “When teachers had access to a behavioral consultant on a regular basis, who could come out and provide help, expulsion rates were cut nearly in half,” Gilliam says. Unfortunately, he adds, adequate support is the exception to the rule. That’s bad news, because well-designed preschool programs have well-documented social, educational, and economic benefits.
Religion and the Air Force Academy
by Bruce Fellman
Divinity School professor Kristen Leslie '86MDiv has found that senior officers and administrators, faculty, and cadets of the U.S. Air Force Academy have encouraged the growth of a culture dominated by “stridently evangelical themes.”
On June 22, an Air Force review confirmed many of Leslie’s contentions. Leslie, an ordained Methodist minister and therapist who teaches pastoral care and counseling at Yale, was hired by the academy two years ago to help improve counseling services for victims of sexual assault. Last year, Leslie and a team of Yale Divinity students were invited to attend cadet training in Colorado Springs to find ways to enhance the skills of the chaplains. One day Leslie was watching a group of cadets try to encourage a woman who'd become frozen with fear on a ropes course. The group started to chant, “Jesus will save you.” This, said Leslie, “struck us as odd because the cadets didn’t know the woman or her religious affiliation.”
The cadet corps is overwhelmingly Christian, but only about 30 percent of the students identify themselves as conservative evangelicals. And the Yale team discovered that evangelizing was not limited to cadets. One chaplain reportedly declared during Protestant worship services that those who were “not born again will burn in the fires of hell.” Chaplains and faculty members urged cadets to convert their fellow students. And Brig. Gen. Johnny Weida, the academy’s second-in-command, sent an e-mail to all cadets that said, “The Lord is in control. He has a plan for every one of us.”
In a July 30, 2004, memorandum to the commanding officer of the chaplain corps, Leslie and Captain MeLinda Morton, an academy chaplain who has since resigned her commission, noted pervasive “challenges to pluralism” in a culture increasingly dominated by born-again Christians. The memo was made public this spring. The ensuing Air Force review found a “lack of awareness over where the line is drawn between permissible and impermissible expression of beliefs.”
Plastics and the brain
by Bruce Fellman
Parents and public health officials may have reason to be concerned about a common chemical. According to a study conducted at Yale, bisphenol A (BPA), the building block of a group of plastics known as polycarbonates, can disrupt the development and function of a key memory center in the brain. The research, published in the June issue of Environmental Health Perspectives, showed that BPA, at concentrations well within the daily exposure limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency, caused a significant decline in synapse formation in the hippocampus of female rats.
Neil J. MacLusky, a neurobiologist at Helen Hayes Hospital in New York City, along with Yale researchers Csaba Leranth and Tibor Hajszan, discovered that the chemical was a potent inhibitor of estradiol. This natural estrogen plays a key role in regulating the density of synapses and, hence, the number of connections to other nerve cells. When the Yale team injected low doses of BPA into rats and, within a half hour, killed the animals and later examined slices of hippocampus, the drop in synapse formation was “dramatic,” says MacLusky.
The BPA trade organization maintains that “there is no basis for human health concerns from exposure to the chemical,” which is found in the linings of metal cans, in hard, clear plastic baby bottles and sports bottles, in dental sealants, and a large variety of other products. (Nearly six billion pounds of BPA are produced annually.) And MacLusky readily admits that the chemical, which can enter the human food chain when, for example, a baby bottle or can is heated, “may well be harmless at the levels observed in foodstuffs and drinks.” But particularly in the case of infants, the researcher urges parents to use glass bottles to sidestep the risk, however small, of potential problems in brain development. “It’s just prudent to avoid exposure,” says MacLusky.
A better picture of antibiotic resistance
by Marc Wortman
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria kill some 90,000 Americans each year. Biologists have been racing to understand how bacteria become resistant, and to find ways to circumvent it. This April, a team of Yale scientists announced in the journal Cellthat they had seen the structural changes that occur when bacteria develop a well-known form of drug resistance. The research required a creative approach to a biological puzzle, and their discovery may make it possible to design new antibiotics.
Many antibiotics kill bacteria by binding to, and thereby crippling, their ribosomes (the structures used by all cells to make proteins). The crucial differences between resistant and nonresistant bacteria are often found in the RNA component of the ribosome. Thomas A. Steitz and Peter B. Moore, who are Sterling Professors of molecular biophysics and biochemistry and of chemistry, respectively, say they tackled the problem “backwards.” Instead of studying resistant human pathogens, they started with a harmless bacterium that naturally resists an important class of antibiotics. The large ribosomal subunits from that bacterium “form wonderful crystals,” says Moore—which made it especially easy to investigate with an imaging technique called x-ray crystallography.
The scientists mutated the bacterium’s ribosomal RNA to make it susceptible to the antibiotics. When Steitz and Moore compared their images of the resistant and nonresistant forms, they found that the resistant forms presented an obstacle to binding: an amino group in the ribosome that “pokes into the center” of the antibiotic molecule, Steitz said, “causing it to back off the ribosome by an angstrom or so.” Because the drug can no longer bind tightly to the ribosome, it is much less effective at killing the bacterium. “Astonishingly small effects can lead to resistance,” says Moore.
Steitz and Moore have cofounded Rib-X Pharmaceuticals, which expects to begin testing new antibiotic drugs in humans later this year.
Why cabbies might discriminate
by Bruce Fellman
They call it “hailing while black”: it’s harder, many African Americans say, for blacks to get passing taxis to stop than it is for whites. Law professor Ian Ayres '81, '86JD, agrees that the phenomenon is real and not just anecdotal. But his recent study in the Yale Law Journal suggests that other factors besides ordinary prejudice may be at work.
“Blacks tend to tip less than whites,” says Ayres, the Townsend Professor of Law and lead author of a paper that examined the tipping patterns of more than 1,000 taxicab riders in New Haven. “This may offer a disincentive for drivers to serve the black community.”
Ayres and his colleagues found that African American passengers tipped approximately half the amount of their white counterparts and were almost four times more likely to leave no tip at all. Moreover, African Americans tipped black drivers approximately one-third less than they tipped white drivers.
This pattern may reflect a historical discomfort with tipping, Ayres says: a century or more ago, many African Americans saw the practice as “a way to purchase a person’s dignity and have them scrape and bow for a nickel.” (Some whites agreed. Between 1905 and 1919, the Anti-Tipping Society of America, an organization of 100,000 traveling salesmen, lobbied successfully to have the practice abolished in seven states.) The legacy of this anti-tipping sentiment, Ayres says, is that a taxi driver can expect to receive a 56.5 percent lower tip from an African American passenger than from a white passenger. “So at least a portion of the well-documented driver-side discrimination may be caused, not by racial animus or by fears, rational or otherwise, about crime, but instead by inferences about how much passengers of different races are likely to tip.”
Michael Lynn, a Cornell marketing professor, found similar tipping patterns—and instances of discrimination—in the restaurant industry. Lynn has called for a multimedia advertising campaign to inform African Americans of the 15 to 20 percent tipping norm. But Ayres instead advocates the service compris system, common in Europe, by which the standard tip is included in cab fare and other service-oriented bills.
“There’s a popular story that the word ‘tip’ is an acronym for ‘to insure promptness,’ but this research shows it might better stand for ‘to insure prejudice,’” says Ayres. Service compris would also eliminate another imbalance: the study found that overall, black drivers collected about a third less in tips and were 80 percent more likely to be stiffed.
Finally, a test for ovarian cancer
by Elizabeth Svoboda '03
Ovarian cancer is called “the whispering disease” because its initial symptoms can be so vague. The best-known sufferer, comedian Gilda Radner, had mild stomach problems for years before doctors discovered her late-stage tumors. The primary screening tool available today, the CA-125 test, is only 50 to 80 percent accurate in the first stage. But gynecologist Gil Mor and his colleagues at School of Medicine are now developing the first reliable blood test for identifying early-stage ovarian cancer.
The greatest challenge Mor faced was isolating particular blood proteins that could serve as flags for the presence of the cancer. Microarray screening allows doctors to test patients' blood for thousands of different proteins—far too many for Mor to analyze them all. Instead, he decided to focus on proteins that had already been linked to other cancers.
Mor performed microarray tests on 86 women—28 healthy subjects, 18 with newly diagnosed ovarian cancer, and 40 with recurring forms of the disease—and limited himself to tracking the levels of 169 cancer-related proteins in their blood. Of these proteins, 35 were present in ovarian cancer sufferers at levels different from those in healthy women. Additional screening yielded four proteins with large differences in expression between cancer patients and controls: leptin, prolactin, osteopontin, and insulin-like growth factor II. When Mor administered his four-protein “cluster” test to another study group of 200 women, it picked out early- and late-stage ovarian cancer sufferers alike with 95 percent accuracy.
Mor’s results (published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in May) offer hope to the more than 25,000 women who contract ovarian cancer each year. But he doesn’t think the test is ready yet for widespread use. He plans to improve its accuracy by adding more proteins to the assay. “To get the highest level of specificity, you need to have a large cluster” of biomarkers, he says. “Looking at one protein by itself is never enough.”  |
