January 2022

By Julien Lafortune and Joseph Herrera, Public Policy Institute of California, January 31, 2022 Amid concerns over growing absenteeism since schools reopened this fall , the state legislature is considering a change in how schools are funded. Currently, California is one of seven states that fund schools using average daily attendance (ADA), meaning that districts do not receive funding for students on days they are absent. Critics contend that attendance-based funding penalizes schools...

By Heather Cox Richardson, Photo: Unsplash, Letters from an American, January 27, 2022 Numbers released today by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which is part of the U.S. Federal Statistical System producing data and official statistics, show that the U.S. economy grew by an astonishing 6.9 percent annual rate from October to December 2021. That puts the growth of the U.S. economy for 2021 at 5.7 percent in 2021. Despite the ongoing pandemic, this is the fastest full-year growth since 1984.

By Asher Lehrer-Small, Photo: Asher Lehrer-Small, The 74 Million, January 27, 2022 P aullette Healy can tick off the ways her family’s life has been plunged into uncertainty and fear over the last three months: Her younger child’s repeated nightmares and increased anxiety, the hours she’s poured into collecting forms from her kids’ doctor and psychiatrist to prove she’s a fit parent and an arduous and probably costly legal process that still looms to clear her name. From early November...

By Rachel Hatzipanagos, Randall Michelson, The Washington Post, January 20, 2022 The typical celebrity chef food show follows a familiar formula: chef visits a new locale each week, shepherded by a local to restaurants where they eat mouthwatering dishes over a good conversation. Los Angeles chef Roy Choi wanted to do something different with his show “Broken Bread.” “People love looking at food on TV, and so it’s kind of weirdly disguised as a food show,” Choi said. Each episode, Choi...

By Poppy Noor, Photo: Rex/Shutterstock, The Guardian, January 27, 2022 Ron Johnson, the US senator for hot takes, famed for such hits as “[the Capitol riot] seemed like a peaceful protest to me” and “mouthwash has been proven to kill the coronavirus ”, is at it again. On Wednesday, Johnson, the senior Republican senator from Wisconsin, told local news station WKBT: “People decide to have families and become parents. That’s something they need to consider when they make that choice.” He...

This past Sunday, I had one of those most glorious and luxurious of days. It started with breakfast in bed with my girlfriend brought to us by my sweet guy. Then he wandered off, and she and I were left with hours of time to fill with all of our luscious feminine energy. Next up was a 90 minute Healing in Motion movement class, during which we got to embody different types of weather and did some mirroring movement exercises as well. This led to our bodies opening up, stretching, and...

CONCORD, NH — The New Hampshire Department of Education is partnering with The Regulated Classroom to assist educators throughout the state in preparing their students for learning and equipping educators with resources to reduce stress and dysregulation in the classroom. “This new collaboration is aimed to support teachers who may be experiencing disruptions in their school environments, who today, are struggling with dysregulated students that have had inconsistent and disrupted...

By Arthur Acolin, Alex Ramiller, et al., Photo: Imagenet/Shutterstock, Housing Matters, January 26, 2022 Homeownership is a key tool for wealth building, particularly for households with low and moderate incomes, for whom homeownership is often their primary means of asset building. Yet barriers to entry, including down payments and other borrowing constraints, prevent many households from accessing and equitably benefiting from homeownership. Shared-equity homeownership (SEH) programs are...

By Musa al-Gharbi, Photo: Amy Harris/Rex/Shutterstock, The Guardian, January 27, 2022 A ccording to a number of polls and surveys , significant majorities of Republican-aligned voters seem to believe the big lie that Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 US presidential election and, consequently, the Biden administration is illegitimate. Taking these data at face value, a growing chorus insists that we’re living in a “post-truth” era, where members of one political party, the Republican...

By Laura Bliss, Photo: Lane Turner/The Boston Globe via Getty Images, Bloomberg City Lab, January 26, 2022 In 2019, just 0.5% of U.S. commuters rode a bike to work, the smallest share of any mode. But tiny shifts can make a big difference. Data-driven bike plans, safety improvements and supportive political leadership helped boost bike commute rates in several cities in recent years, according to a new report from the League of American Bicyclists. In “ Benchmarking Bike Networks ,” the...

By Mical Raz, Photo: Michael Blackshire/The Washington Post, The Washington Post, January 28, 2022 A new study has found that babies of poor mothers who received cash stipends last year had changes in their brain activity patterns. As the expanded, refundable child tax credit (CTC) has expired and key politicians, in particular Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), have been withholding their support for reviving this important anti-poverty program, its supporters have expressed hope that this...

Have you ever believed the worst about a situation that may or may not have happened? For instance, you call home from work, and your partner doesn’t answer. Immediately, you believe that there has been a horrible accident, and you just don’t know about it yet. That is called catastrophic thinking. This article will focus on this phenomenon and how to overcome this rumination of doom. What is Catastrophic Thinking? Catastrophic thinking is an anxious behavior that may be part of the symptoms...