Blog

We welcome guest author Godwin Higa, Principal, Cherokee Point Elementary School City Heights, San Diego whose work with childhood adversity and trauma is making a difference in the lives of children.  At Cherokee Point, located in San Diego's City Heights neighborhood, nearly all of our students deal with some sort of childhood adversity. A hundred percent of our students receive free lunches, and most live under the federal poverty guideline. Many of our students' families face daily...

Last week, the Brookings Institution released a  report on inequality in America's cities and metropolitan areas. Authored by Alan Berube and Natalie Holmes , the report compares the incomes of earners in the 95th percentile to those in the 20th percentile, and constructs a "95/20 ratio" for the United States' 100 largest metro areas, and for each metro area's largest city. Among the report's main findings: There is still substantial variation in inequality levels across the...

Picture a nine-year-old boy—we’ll call him Brian—sitting down one day during the spring semester with his No. 2 pencil to take the National Assessment for Educational Progress, the test best known as the Nation’s Report Card. If he’s like two-thirds of students in the United States, he won’t fully understand what he is reading. He will have been so unprepared in literacy that he cannot hit the proficient mark on this fourth-grade material. This will not...

A Massachusetts nonprofit uses music to help survivors of trauma, and it’s led by a former rock star. Robin Lane came to fame with her Boston-based band Robin Lane and The Chartbusters. Their biggest hit, “ When Things Go Wrong ,” aired in the first hour on day one of MTV. A lot of the singer/songwriter’s life reads like an unlikely series of namechecks: her father played piano and wrote hits for Dean Martin; she hung out with Neil Young and sang on one of his albums;...

The United States is currently in the middle of a grand experiment in wages . On January 1, 14 states officially raised their minimum wages, 12 of which did so through legislative action as opposed to an automatic adjustment. With minimum wage advocates making major gains in state legislatures in 2015, the tweaks that went into effect on New Year's Day seem designed to answer the question: Will raising the minimum wage actually kill jobs? That's the argument among opponents of wage...

Luvenia Jackson knows students can’t learn when they’re in jail. During 40 years in education, the Clayton County Public Schools superintendent has seen that academic performance cannot improve systemwide under zero-tolerance discipline . Instead of leading to safer buildings and higher achievement, the strict policies cause excessive suspensions, lost instruction time, and students to be needlessly traumatized by criminal charges—all over behavior that can be...

B ritish Prime Minister David Cameron thinks parents need government-approved advice on raising kids. British parents aren't exactly thrilled with this recent proclamation. One of Cameron's new policy prescriptions, unveiled Monday with an announcement that England will pour £70 million over the next five years into “relationship support,” was state-backed parenting classes. Vouchers, he said, would help cover the enrollment of low-income families. Behind...

Argosy began in 1882 as a magazine for children and ceased publication ninety-six years later as soft-core porn for men, but for ten years in between it was the home of a true-crime column by Erle Stanley Gardner, the man who gave the world Perry Mason. In eighty-two novels, six films, and nearly three hundred television episodes, Mason, a criminal-defense lawyer, took on seemingly guilty clients and proved their innocence. In the magazine, Gardner, who had practiced law before turning to...

The Hogg Foundation for Mental Health is pleased to announce a call for applications  (CFA) for the evaluation of a new Community Reentry Pilot Project focusing on the role of peer support in improving outcomes for justice-involved individuals with mental health issues. Financial support for this evaluation project may range between $20,000 and $30,000 over a 12-to-18 month period. The Hogg Foundation has a long-standing interest in identifying the potential benefits and challenges of...

As she does most workdays, Christine Gray spent her time on a recent rainy, cold day driving to people’s homes in Williamson County to offer help with mental and physical health crises. The first door she knocked on during a three-hour span spent with a reporter was at a house where a man called 911 to say burglars were constantly breaking into his home and that he had even cooked waffles for them. The second call was a teenager withdrawing from taking 20 Xanax pills. The third call...

The Texas Legislature meets every other year. For 140 calendar days. The state’s legislative agenda is so densely packed that keeping track of any policy area, mental health included, is a dizzying task. This summary tells you what you need to know about bills that were passed, commissions that were formed, and reforms that were pushed. Funding for Veterans Caring for our nation’s veterans is one issue that the entire legislature can support. This legislative session was no...

Despite recent improvements to their training, a new study in the journal of Police and Criminal Psychologysuggests the police are as susceptible as the general public to holding false beliefs about psychology that apply to their work. The research, conducted in the UK, also showed that police officers have more confidence than the public in their false beliefs. Chloe Chaplin, a programme facilitator at the London Probation Trust, and Julia Shaw, senior lecturer at South Bank university,...