Boston School Research Articles

Type 2 Diabetes Risk in Youth Using SSRIs Appears Lower Than Previously Reported

Type 2 Diabetes Risk in Youth Using SSRIs Appears Lower Than Previously Reported

Lexicographic choice under variable capacity constraints

AbstractIn several matching markets, to achieve diversity, agents' priorities are allowed to vary across an institution's available seats, and the institution is let to choose agents in a lexicographic fashion based on a predetermined ordering of the seats, called a (capacity‐constrained) lexicographic choice rule. We provide a characterization of lexicographic choice rules and a characterization of deferred acceptance mechanisms that operate based on a lexicographic choice structure under variable capacity constraints. We discuss some implications for the Boston school choice system and show that our analysis can be helpful in applications to select among plausible choice rules.

Bright Flight: Desegregating Boston’s Elite Public Schools, 1960-2000

This article uses Boston as a case study to examine how elite, public schools that admitted students on the basis of “merit” perpetuated segregation and inequity in urban school systems. Merit justified the unequal allocation of educational opportunities, and the group that benefited most from merit-based admissions were families who could afford to send their children to private primary schools before “testing into” public secondary schools. I argue that merit-based admissions facilitated bright flight: the loss of high-achieving students from neighborhood schools. This study complicates and offers a new perspective on Boston school desegregation and has timely implications for our current historical moment.

Using the Model for Improvement and Plan-Do-Study-Act to effect SMART change and advance quality.

Using the Model for Improvement and Plan-Do-Study-Act to effect SMART change and advance quality.

Editorial introductions

Current Opinion in Gastroenterology was launched in 1985. It is one of a successful series of review journals whose unique format is designed to provide a systematic and critical assessment of the literature as presented in the many primary journals. The field of gastroenterology is divided into 12 sections that are reviewed once a year. Each section is assigned a Section Editor, a leading authority in the area, who identifies the most important topics at that time. Here we are pleased to introduce the Section Editors for this issue. SECTION EDITORS Miguel RegueiroMiguel RegueiroMiguel Regueiro earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, his medical degree at Drexel (Hahnemann) University, USA, and completed his internal medicine internship, residency, and clinical and research fellowship training in gastroenterology at Harvard Medical School's Beth Israel Hospital, USA. Dr Regueiro was Professor of Medicine and Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, USA, from 2000 to 2018. There he served as the IBD Clinical Medical Director, Senior Medical Lead of Specialty Medical Homes, was Professor with Tenure, and honored as the UPMC Endowed Chair for Patient Centered Care in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases. Dr Regueiro is currently the Chair of the Department of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition, and Vice Chair of the Digestive Disease and Surgery Institute at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. He serves as Medical Co-Chair of Digestive Disease and Surgical Institute Research Governance committee and is Professor of Medicine at the Lerner College of Medicine, Cleveland Clinic, USA. He also holds the Pier C. and Renee A. Borra Family Endowed Chair in Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Digestive Disease and Surgery Institute. Dr Regueiro's main clinical and research interest is Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD) with a focus on the natural course of these diseases and postoperative prevention of Crohn's disease. Recently, he has been involved in transformative medicine initiatives and developing new models of healthcare, including the first-of-its kind specialty medical home and neighborhood for IBD. Dr Regueiro is investigating alternative models of care in population-based health that integrates patients, payers, providers, pharmaceutical industry, and other facets of healthcare delivery around these novel programs. Stuart J. SpechlerStuart J. SpechlerStuart J. Spechler, MD is Chief of the Division of Gastroenterology and Co-Director of the Center for Esophageal Diseases at Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas, as well as the Co-Director of the Center for Esophageal Research at the Baylor Scott and White Research Institute. Prior to joining Baylor University Medical Center in January 2017, Dr Spechler was the Chief of the Division of Gastroenterology for the VA North Texas Healthcare System, Professor of Medicine, and holder of the Berta M. and Cecil O. Patterson Chair in Gastroenterology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and he had been the Director of the Center for Swallowing Disorders at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr Spechler's research has focused primarily on disorders of the esophagus, especially GERD and its complications, and eosinophilic esophagitis. He has chaired three VA Cooperative Studies on medical and surgical treatments for gastroesophageal reflux disease. He described the condition known as “short-segment Barrett's esophagus” in 1994. Dr Spechler has published more than 300 scientific reports, editorials, review articles, and book chapters on esophageal disorders. He is best known for his work in the areas of GERD, Barrett's esophagus, and eosinophilic esophagitis. Dr Spechler has served on the editorial boards of numerous journals including Gastroenterology, Gut, Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Digestive Diseases and Sciences and Diseases of the Esophagus, and he has served as Chair of the Gastroenterology Teaching Project and the Esophago-Gastro-Duodenal Section of the American Gastroenterological Association.

In Memoriam: Lionel H. Opie, MD (1933-2020).

In Memoriam: Lionel H. Opie, MD (1933-2020).

The History of the Synapse.

Why did I choose this particular topic for my lecture rather than the history of neuroscience or the history of the neuron? Simply because I believe that every disciple has the obligation to pay homage to their mentors once in their lifetime. My formation as a neuroscientist involved three such mentors spanned across three countries. The first was Spain, where I was born, completed my medical studies, and had my first glimpse of neuroscience at the Cajal Institute with Fernando de Castro. It was him who, in 1961, advised me to spend some time abroad, and to that purpose he obtained me a scholarship from the French government, that allowed me to settle in Paris. Once in France I had the good fortune to meet Prof. René Couteaux, another generous mentor, who took care of my stay in the country. Two years later, he made me a proposition to which I could only answer in the affirmative by offering me a research position in France. I got married (the best thing that happened in my life), and spent the next 57 years working on the cerebellum. The third person I want to honor and remember in this presentation is Sanford Louis Palay who was my postdoc professor during the 2 years I worked at Harvard Medical School in Boston. And as it turns out, all three of my mentors have made positive contributions to the history of the synapse. So, without further delay, let us dive in. Anat Rec, 303:1252-1279, 2020. © 2020 American Association for Anatomy.

Searching for Sarah: Black Girlhood, Education, and the Archive

Roberts v. City of Boston is a well-known legal case in the history of US education. In 1847, the Boston School Committee denied Sarah C. Roberts, a five-year-old African American girl, admission to the public primary school closest to her home. She was instead ordered to attend the all-black Abiel Smith School, about a half-mile walk from her home. In March 1848, Sarah's father, Benjamin, sued the city of Boston for denying Sarah the right to attend the public school closest to her home. The case wound its way through the courts, eventually reaching the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. In 1850, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled in favor of the city of Boston, affirming that the Boston School Committee had “not violated any principle of equality, inasmuch as they have provided a school with competent instructors for the colored children, where they enjoy equal advantages of instruction with those enjoyed by the white children.” And thus, the doctrine of separate but equal was born in Massachusetts.

First person profile: Sir Murray Brennan, MD: A legendary surgical oncologist, Dr. Brennan's research on soft tissue sarcomas and his willingness to mentor others have left a mark on the field.

First person profile: Sir Murray Brennan, MD: A legendary surgical oncologist, Dr. Brennan's research on soft tissue sarcomas and his willingness to mentor others have left a mark on the field.

Pulmonary Hypertension Roundtable: The Role of Exercise in Clinical Practice and Clinical Trials

On May 20, 2019, Guest Editor Ronald Oudiz, MD, Director of the Pulmonary Hypertension Program at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, led a discussion with Aaron Waxman, MD, PhD, Director of the Center for Pulmonary Heart Disease at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and Robert Naeije, MD, Professor Emeritus at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium.

How bacteria cause pain and what that reveals about the role of the nervous system

Flesh-eating bacteria employ a devious strategy. When the bacteria, known as Streptococcus pyogenes , slip under the skin via a small cut or bug bite, they eat away at the tissue underneath, causing a condition called necrotizing fasciitis. One of the early, defining symptoms is that a minor wound or abrasion becomes intensely painful, far more painful than it ought to feel. When flesh-eating bacteria called S. pyogenes , pictured here, slip under the skin via a small cut or bug bite, they eat away at the tissue underneath. It turns out these infections are incredibly painful because the bacteria hijack the body's pain-sensing neurons. Image credit: Science Source/Eye of Science. No one knew why this type of infection hurt so much until neuroimmunologist Isaac Chiu and colleagues at Harvard Medical School in Boston showed that S. pyogenes hijacks the body’s pain-sensing neurons, dialing up the misery. These neurons, in turn, communicate with the immune system, greatly reducing its response to the infection, according to research published last May in Cell (1). This communication creates a double whammy for the host: intense pain and a tough battle to fight off the bug. Approximately 700 to 1,200 people in the United States get necrotizing fasciitis from Streptococcus every year; one-third of them die, and many others suffer scarring and even amputations. Over the past several years, Chiu and other researchers have started to build a picture of how certain bacteria, fungi, and viruses can ramp up pain—or in other cases numb their hosts. These interactions are complex: Sometimes they benefit the microbes, sometimes the host. But this work has already made one thing clear: There are three, not two, major players in infection. There’s the pathogen itself, the immune system, and the nervous system. And it’s the cross-talk among members of …

Power to Change: Math as a Social-Emotional Language in a Classroom of 4 and 5 Year Olds

Tells the story of how mathematics influenced a long term investigation around feeling powerful within an early childhood classroom. Written by Early Childhood Teacher, Elinor J. Albin, and Dean of Faculty, Gretchen Vice, this essay outlines the guiding questions by which teachers at The Advent School in Boston, MA connect mathematics to overarching themes and social-emotional learning. “Power to Change” concludes with observations about how and why mathematics provided a language for building social-emotional intelligence in four and five year olds.

Optimizing schools’ start time and bus routes

Maintaining a fleet of buses to transport students to school is a major expense for school districts. To reduce costs by reusing buses between schools, many districts spread start times across the morning. However, assigning each school a time involves estimating the impact on transportation costs and reconciling additional competing objectives. Facing this intricate optimization problem, school districts must resort to ad hoc approaches, which can be expensive, inequitable, and even detrimental to student health. For example, there is medical evidence that early high school starts are impacting the development of an entire generation of students and constitute a major public health crisis. We present an optimization model for the school time selection problem (STSP), which relies on a school bus routing algorithm that we call biobjective routing decomposition (BiRD). BiRD leverages a natural decomposition of the routing problem, computing and combining subproblem solutions via mixed integer optimization. It significantly outperforms state-of-the-art routing methods, and its implementation in Boston has led to $5 million in yearly savings, maintaining service quality for students despite a 50-bus fleet reduction. Using BiRD, we construct a tractable proxy to transportation costs, allowing the formulation of the STSP as a multiobjective generalized quadratic assignment problem. Local search methods provide high-quality solutions, allowing school districts to explore tradeoffs between competing priorities and choose times that best fulfill community needs. In December 2017, the development of this method led the Boston School Committee to unanimously approve the first school start time reform in 30 years.

Hiroko Kunitake, MD, MPH.

Dr. Hiroko Kunitake is a staff colon and rectal surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. Hiroko was born in Lake Forest, Illinois, and received her undergraduate (biochemical sciences) at Harvard College and medical school training at the University of California-Los Angeles. She also received a Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts in Piano Performance at the USC Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California. She went on to perform her general surgery residency training at Massachusetts General Hospital and completed her colon and rectal surgery residency training at the University of Minnesota. After spending a few years at Boston University, she went back to MGH, where she has stayed on as staff since 2016.

First Person: Howard Koh, MD, MPH: Physician devotes his career to improving public health on many fronts.

First Person: Howard Koh, MD, MPH: Physician devotes his career to improving public health on many fronts.

Editorial introductions

Editorial introductions

Targeting specimen misprocessing safety events with failure modes and effects analysis.

Targeting specimen misprocessing safety events with failure modes and effects analysis.

Мотивация обучения как аспект самоопределения личности на этапе ее допрофессионального развития

This article analyzes the problem of raising learning motivation in high school students. Proceeding from key provisions of the theory of values, self-determination and positive psychology the authors analyzed the processes which stimulate or undermine the learning motivation of high school students. The article describes the results of the study conducted in schools of Boston (United States), where high school students were enrolled in the training program at the workplace («School-to-work»). The findings revealed that teacher’s support of students’ autonomy significantly contributes to academic performance. Promoting a positive future orientation was recognized as an important component of the efficiency of an educational program. Comparative results of the study on interplay between the level of educator’s care, autonomous motivation and positive emotions to the learning process among high school students of Germany and the United States have shown that teachers who provide such support, give high school students an opportunity to make choice and take independent decisions, contribute to formation of a positive autonomous learning motivation.

Resisting “Law and Order” in California: Howard Moore Jr., Angela Davis, and the Politics of Prison Radicalism

Resisting “Law and Order” in California: Howard Moore Jr., Angela Davis, and the Politics of Prison Radicalism

Problem of Child Runaway from Observation Homes: A Challenge to the Existing Laws-A Critical Study of Raipur and Durg Child Observation Homes of Chhattisgarh

Children are the most valuable assets of any country because they are the future youth who bear the responsibility of overall development of the society. They are primarily innocent and ignorant by nature but when they get indulged into various crimes, and are under trial or are punished, they are termed as Children in Conflict with Law and are kept in Children Observation Homes totally separate from the adult criminals. The history of such Child Observation Homes goes back to the 1920’s Boston School, where the child criminals were separated from the adult offenders for reformation. With the advent of time, Legal Acts like The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015, Precedents of Supreme Court cases, and Manual of Ministry of Child and Women Development are the source as well as the regulating authorities of such Children Observation Homes, which aim together to make efforts to adjudicate and dispose of the matter in the best interest of the children. They seek to reform and socially re-integrate such children in a child-friendly atmosphere of the Observation Homes established under the said law, by fulfilling their key needs with proper care and treatment. But frequent reporting of runaway of Children from these homes has set a question mark on the functionality of these homes and raises the issue to its fullest whether the aims of Child reforming laws are being met in reality. Thus, this research paper puts forth the overall problem of Child runaway from Observation Homes taking the cases of Raipur and Durg Observation Homes of Chhattisgarh as special references and puts light on the status, reasons and possible solutions in the form of suggestions to resolve this greater menace of the realm of Child Justice.