Blog

Do efforts to feed students help improve their performance in school? Mick Mulvaney, director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, grabbed headlines Thursday when he argued in favor of cutting federal funds to programs that provide food to poor students. His justification: There’s “no demonstrable evidence” that the programs help them do better in school. Tell that to Japan, where more than 10 million kids receive delicious, fresh food every school day, in large part because the...

The rapid rise in prescription opioid and heroin use in the United States has drawn significant public attention in the past several years. Between 2000 and 2015, over half a million Americans died from a prescription opioid or heroin overdose, and 91 Americans continue to die each day from opioid overdoses. Because heroin and opioids are often injected, they contribute to the spread of HIV and hepatitis C (HCV) through needle sharing. In 2013, deaths from HCV surpassed the number of deaths...

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin and U.S. Representative Danny Davis on Monday unveiled the Trauma Informed Care for Children and Families Act, which is designed to address the toxic stress and trauma that impacts many children from Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods. “As we work to address the root causes of violence, we need to focus on the impact that community violence and other traumatic experiences have on Chicago’s children,” said Durbin. “During a visit to the Cook County Juvenile...

Two hundred years ago, when the Academy was launched, a child growing up in New York, London, Medellín or Manila was part of a tiny minority. Only three percent of all the world's people lived in cities. The modern world is very different: for the first time in human history more than half of us now live in cities. By 2050, more than 70 percent of all children on Earth will be growing up in urban environments. In this increasingly urbanized world, cities play a major role in helping all...

Under President Trump, the federal role in education is set to be drastically curtailed. Last Thursday, Trump proposed slashing federal spending on schools by $9 billion. His education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has vowed to shrink her agency and return power to local officials, which could mean scaling back civil-rights enforcement. All of these signals may also foreshadow a retreat on school integration. Integration made a brief return to the national stage last year when President Barack...

Our nation’s college campuses are experiencing a surge in demand for mental health services. About 1 in 10 incoming freshmen reports feeling depressed frequently . The 2015 Annual Report for the Center for Collegiate Mental Health states that the use of college counseling centers grew by 30 percent , even though enrollment only increased by 5 percent. In addition, students’ concerns are increasingly complex. The percentage of students visiting college counseling centers who have a serious...

When the University of North Texas designed and planned their new 130 million dollar student union, all possible options and ideas were on the table. And why not? You only get one chance to build a facility like UNT’s new union, so you better get it right. As the master plan evolved, one idea that made the cut was a dedicated space for introspection. The process was student driven, and the students had spoken. They wanted a meditation room. As unusual as that request may have sounded to...

A group of surgeons and epidemiologists at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine are calling for more research on firearm injuries and the establishment of a national database to track them, citing racial disparity among Philadelphia victims as the "elephant in the room" of gun violence. Trauma surgeons partnered with colleagues at the Penn Injury Science Center to build on previous research about patterns of gun violence in Philadelphia neighborhoods. Their research,...

Many older patients in intensive care experience delirium, but until now it has been difficult for health care workers to gauge the severity of each patient’s condition. Now researchers from the Indiana University (IU) Center for Aging Research have developed a new easy-to-use tool designed to score and track delirium severity in the intensive care unit (ICU), helping health care workers make better decisions about the brain health of ICU patients. Delirium is a rapid change in brain...

The number of U.S. kids who overdose on prescription painkillers each year may be declining -- but the incidents remain a major public health problem, new research says. Since 2009, U.S. poison control centers have seen fewer calls about children and teenagers who've ingested prescription opioids, researchers found. Often, those incidents involved young children who'd gotten hold of an adult's medication. In other cases, it was a teenager who intentionally abused the drug, or used it to...

There’s little disagreement about the fact that economic inequality is problematic. But arguments persist over its origins, solutions, and which economic gaps are ultimately the most pernicious. In his new book, Toxic Inequality: How America's Wealth Gap Destroys Mobility, Deepens the Racial Divide, and Threatens Our Future , Tom Shapiro, a professor of law and sociology at Brandeis University, lays out how government policy and systemic racism has created vast gaps in wealth between white...

Our Louisville, Kentucky , neighborhood of Smoketown sits across the street from the largest concentration of health care services in our state. Yet people here live 9 years less than the typical Louisville resident. Poverty, racism, unemployment and other social determinants of health have created this gap between residents of Smoketown and those from more affluent parts of the city. An artist’s creativity has helped make that disparity concrete. Andrew Cozzens ’ Smoketown Life Line Project...