Vouchers & Quantum Computing

ProQuest Professional Education Lesson

Many States that have recently elected Republican governors are committed to education reform through the establishment of voucher programs.

Vouchers are tuition payment made by the government to private, parochial, or other public schools to allow parents to transfer their children out of low performing public schools. A large percentage of these students come from urban areas with a high percentage of minorities. These students are generally achieving below grade level and in danger of dropping out of school.

Vouchers are intended to provide these parents with the State funding that empowers them with school choice when regular school assignment is by geography. The goal is to ensure that students are not trapped in failing schools and that competition will drive improvement in the existing low performing public school. Voucher tuition payments go to the school of the parents' choice and are financed by reducing the state funding to the public school from which the student is transferring.

The sheer volume of the rhetoric about vouchers would lead many to believe that they are proven to be successful. But is there any evidence that vouchers are an effective tool of education reform?

During the last two decades, there have been many independent and reputable research studies that focused on finding ways to improve education policy and practice, including existing voucher programs in eleven States. The results of these studies conclude that vouchers produce few, if any, statistically significant effects on student achievement.

Despite this resounding lack of evidence, many states are currently engaged in fiery debate over the pros and cons of voucher programs and other proposed changes to their education codes.

Listed below are some educator challenge questions designed to help teachers understand more about the pros and cons of the debate on vouchers. Principals can use this information to create an in-service activity for staff that meets the State professional development requirements for CEUs.

Principals need to determine what type of report or presentation to assign for accountability. Recommended is a report of at least fifty words that address each of the essential questions

• What proof is there that demonstrates the effectiveness of voucher programs in increasing student achievement and how compelling is it?
  
  
• What effect on parents is there when voucher payments are less than the tuition of their school of choice?
  
  
• Why would the school of choice not accept the voucher payments and the students they represent?
  
  
• What impact does the removal of funding from the low performing public school have on the students and teachers left behind?
  
  
• What impact on State budgets and management of education is there when a voucher system is implemented?
  
  
• How is school choice and vouchers related to politics?

Click Topic Search tab > Enter Educational Vouchers > Click Educational vouchers AND Public schools > View Documents.

In a step toward a generation of ultrafast computers, physicists have used bursts of radio waves to briefly create 10 billion quantum-entangled pairs of subatomic particles in silicon. The research offers a glimpse of a future computing world in which individual atomic nuclei store and retrieve data and single electrons shuttle it back and forth.

This is one of a range of competing approaches to making qubits, the quantum computing equivalent of today's transistors. Transistors store information on the basis of whether they are on or off. In the experiment, qubits store information in the form of the spin of an atomic nucleus or an electron.

The storage ability is dependent on entanglement, in which a change in one particle instantaneously affects other particles even if they are widely separated. The new approach has significant potential, scientists said, because it might permit quantum computer designers to exploit low-cost and easily manufactured components and technologies now widely used in the consumer electronics industry.

Unlike today's binary computers, in which transistors can be in either an "on" or an "off" state, quantum computing exploits the notion of superposition, in which a qubit can be constructed to represent both a 1 and a zero state simultaneously.

The potential power of quantum computing comes from the possibility of performing a mathematical operation on both states simultaneously. In a two-qubit system it would be possible to compute on four values at once, in a three-qubit system on eight at once, in a four-qubit system on 16, and so on. As the number of qubits increases, potential processing power increases exponentially.

There is, of course, a catch. The mere act of measuring or observing a qubit can strip it of its computing potential. So researchers have used quantum entanglement—in which particles are linked, so that measuring a property of one instantly reveals information about the other, no matter how far apart the two particles are—to extract information. But, creating and maintaining qubits in entangled states has been tremendously challenging.

The new approach is based on a highly purified silicon isotope that is doped with phosphorus atoms. One of the principal advantages of the new silicon-based approach is that the group believes that it will be able to maintain the entangled state needed to preserve quantum information as long as several seconds, far longer than competing technologies which currently measure the persistence of entanglement for billionths of a second.

The advance indicates that there is an impending convergence between the subatomic world of quantum computers and today's classical microelectronic systems, which are reaching a level of miniaturization in which wires and devices are composed of just dozens or hundreds of atoms.

Assign students to create a report of at least 150 words (or a presentation of at least seven slides), citing at least three resources from the Pathfinder search listed below. The report should address at least three of the essential questions for critical thinking listed below (teachers may want to substitute or add their own):

• What properties of matter make quantum computing possible?
  
  
• What are the advantages of quantum computers over the existing technology?
  
  
• What technical problems must be solved in order to use quantum computing effectively?
  
  
• What practical large-scale applications would quantum computing provide that are not yet feasible?

Type Quantum Computers in the Basic Search box > Click Quantum Theory AND Computers

Your students can use our custom ProQuest models for written and PowerPoint-style reports.

Teachers may be interested in a ProQuest flexible rubrics model for evaluating inquiry-based learning activities.

Educators may also wish to employ the Quizinator Web tool (free, but registration required) for creating a variety of printed resources, including short assessments.