A Day at SFA takes young children on a tour through Stephen F. Austin State University's Lumberjack land. Whether visiting Homer Bryce Stadium where the ferocious Lumberjacks dominate the field, the Johnson Coliseum where Lumberjack athletes show off their talents,or the newly built STEM center with its magical planetarium, this is a book for Lumberjack fans of all ages. Images bursting with color lead readers through the tall pines in the award-winning azalea garden to the famous Ag Pond tucked behind the Military Science building.

The Texas State Historical Association is pleased to offer a reprint edition of Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas, Gregg Cantrell’s path-breaking biography of the founder of Anglo Texas. Cantrell’s portrait goes beyond the traditional interpretation of Austin as the man who spearheaded American Manifest Destiny. Cantrell portrays Austin as a borderlands figure who could navigate the complex cultural landscape of 1820s Texas, then a portion of Mexico. His command of the Spanish language, respect for the Mexican people, and ability to navigate the shoals of Mexican politics made him the perfect advocate for his colonists and often for all of Texas. Yet when conflicts between Anglo colonists and Mexican authorities turned violent, Austin’s accomodationist stance became outdated. Overshadowed by the military hero Sam Houston, he died at the age of forty-three, just six months after Texas independence. Decades after his death, Austin’s reputation was resurrected and he became known as the “Father of Texas.” More than just an icon, Stephen F. Austin emerges from these pages as a shrewd, complicated, and sometimes conflicted figure.

Success for All is a comprehensive reform model for elementary school that combines state-of-the-art curriculum, research-based instructional methods, assessments, and professional development with one-to-one tutoring, extensive family support services, and other strategies to ensure that every child is successful in the early grades and then builds on that success throughout the elementary years. Started in 1987, it is the most widely used of all reform designs. It is currently in about 1800 schools serving more than a million U.S. children, mostly in high-poverty schools. It is also the most extensively researched comprehensive reform program, with two dozen evaluations carried out in eight research institutions. Success for All: Research and Reform in Elementary Education is the first edited volume presenting research on Success for All in the U.S. and in five other countries for which the program has been adapted. This book presents a description of Success for All, an overall summary of all achievement studies, reviews of research, original presentations of new research, and discussions of the impacts and the implications of this research and dissemination for educational policy and practice in many arenas.

This book covers recent advances in efficiency evaluations, most notably Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) methods. It introduces the underlying theories, shows how to make the relevant calculations and discusses applications. The aim is to make the reader aware of the pros and cons of the different methods and to show how to use these methods in both standard and non-standard cases. Several software packages have been developed to solve some of the most common DEA and SFA models. This book relies on R, a free, open source software environment for statistical computing and graphics. This enables the reader to solve not only standard problems, but also many other problem variants. Using R, one can focus on understanding the context and developing a good model. One is not restricted to predefined model variants and to a one-size-fits-all approach. To facilitate the use of R, the authors have developed an R package called Benchmarking, which implements the main methods within both DEA and SFA. The book uses mathematical formulations of models and assumptions, but it de-emphasizes the formal proofs - in part by placing them in appendices -- or by referring to the original sources. Moreover, the book emphasizes the usage of the theories and the interpretations of the mathematical formulations. It includes a series of small examples, graphical illustrations, simple extensions and questions to think about. Also, it combines the formal models with less formal economic and organizational thinking. Last but not least it discusses some larger applications with significant practical impacts, including the design of benchmarking-based regulations of energy companies in different European countries, and the development of merger control programs for competition authorities.

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