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The Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative, designed and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was a multiyear effort to dramatically improve student outcomes by increasing students' access to effective teaching. Participating sites adopted measures of teaching effectiveness (TE) that included both a teacher's contribution to growth in student achievement and his or her teaching practices assessed with a structured observation rubric. The TE measures were to be...

How could the United States do this? How could it separate 2,000 children from their parents, perhaps never to be reunited? How could it lose track of thousands more? How could it keep children in cages, in tents, in camps? This is a country that has assimilated wave after wave of immigrants and refugees, so that children might have a better life than their parents. This is the wealthiest civilization that the world has ever known, one with a bipartisan commitment to equality of opportunity...

On May 24, a multi-racial gaggle of Congress members wriggled for prime positioning around Donald Trump as he prepared to sign the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act into law. The bill considerably scales back the Dodd-Frank Act reforms passed in 2010 in response to the financial crash and was passed with the votes of 33 Democrats in the House and 17 in the Senate. It essentially frees small community banks and credit unions from many of the Dodd-Frank...

For Markus Heilig, the years of dead ends were starting to grate. A seasoned psychiatrist, Heilig joined the National Institutes of Health in 2004 with grand ambitions of finding new ways to treat addiction and alcoholism. “It was the age of the neuroscience revolution, and all this new tech gave us many ways of manipulating animal brains,” he recalls. By studying addictive behavior in laboratory rats and mice, he would pinpoint crucial genes, molecules, and brain regions that could be...

Many students face barriers to healthy social, emotional, and academic development, but a range of strategies can help overcome those barriers. The Issue Social and emotional learning (SEL) equips young people with competencies to lead productive and healthy lives. There are barriers, however, that prevent many students of color and other marginalized youth from developing social and emotional competencies. For all students to benefit, SEL must be grounded in a larger context of equity and...

One of the most frightening experiences for any parent is the moment you realize that your child may have a substance abuse problem. You are scared to death about what they may be taking, the late nights, the change in sleeping habits, the poor grades, or the awful distance growing between you and the person you care so much about. Most parents desperately want to help their child but they don’t know how. Many feel helpless, anxious, very worried, and some downright scared! Not only are they...

Are you interested in integrating health and housing practices? Many practitioners in our community are—and they’ve noted that the biggest housing challenges contributing to inequitable health outcomes in their communities are unaffordable housing, segregation based on race and income, poor-quality housing, and housing instability. How can you help decisionmakers and public agencies understand the connection between housing and health? How have hospitals gotten involved in housing? And how...

What happens when all government agencies in a town, county, or state work together to build healthier communities? They create jobs, make sure families can afford healthy food, and build parks where all kids can play. And ultimately, they build communities where all people feel healthy, empowered, and connected to the place they call home. It’s impossible to make this vision a reality unless everyone works together. Behind the scenes, government agencies must collaborate. That means...

Last year Hope and Heal Fund made its inaugural grant to Berkeley Media Studies Group (BMSG) to begin the process to change the current narrative on gun violence in California to one that is hopeful and solution-based. Today we are excited to announce that the issue brief, More than mass shootings: Gun violence narratives in California news , is live now on BMSG’s website here: http://www.bmsg.org/resources/publications/gun-suicide-community-domestic-violence-news-narratives-california . The...

Therapists can be challenged to know the right tools when working with families with trauma histories. Dr. Scott Sells, the author of Treating the Traumatized Child: A Step-by-Step Family Systems Approach , is offering a free webinar on using feedback loops. Webinar: Convert Trauma Undercurrents Into Feedback Loops: How to Draw Out “Before” and “After” Feedback Loops for Your Clients Date: Tuesday, July 24, 2018 Time: 1:00-2:00 pm, Eastern Standard Time Cost: Free To register, Click here...

You've read the series. Now watch the documentary that brings "The Children of Central City" to an emotional, hopeful close. The multi-part special report by Jonathan Bullington and Richard Webster, with photos and video by Brett Duke and Emma Scott, premiered June 13 on NOLA.com and in The Times-Picayune. Produced as a project with the USC Annenberg School, it provides an in-depth look at the impact of growing up surrounded by violence in one of New Orleans' most culturally significant and...

The separation of children from their parents at the US-Mexico border under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy is, to many people — liberals and conservatives alike — a viscerally repellent act. Reports like the recording ProPublica obtained of children crying for their parents, or accounts of children in temporary foster care crying themselves to sleep every night, inspire in a lot of people the idea that something deeply wrong is happening. They make it apparent that not...