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After a rash of police killings last summer, H. Richard Milner, a professor of urban education at the University of Pittsburgh, set out to answer a question that had been gnawing at him for some time. As a noted expert on race in education, he frequently received calls from journalists seeking comment on how to help teachers talk about race in the classroom, typically following the fatal police shooting of a black victim. And he always thought the questioning was misguided and inadequate.

Since the opening in January of many sessions in the 50 states, the District of Columbia and the territories, legislatures have addressed a myriad of issues from budgets, job growth, health care, immigration, the opioid epidemic, police-community relations, education and others ( featured in the State Legislatures Magazine ). Many of these proposals will impact how well communities will prosper and thrive, fewer will impact childhood adversity directly, and an even smaller number will...

When I first heard about the CDC-Kaiser Permanente ACE Study , it felt like a light bulb had actually gone on. Finally, FINALLY, someone was validating what I saw every single day teaching in East Oakland. For eight years, I taught at an elementary school in the most violent part of Oakland , the part that the police called the “Killing Zone.” The kids in my class had seen friends, neighbors, and family members shot or stabbed, and routinely hid in bathrooms and closets when gang fights...

What this report finds: Income inequality has risen in every state since the 1970s and in many states is up in the post–Great Recession era. In 24 states, the top 1 percent captured at least half of all income growth between 2009 and 2013, and in 15 of those states, the top 1 percent captured all income growth. In another 10 states, top 1 percent incomes grew in the double digits, while bottom 99 percent incomes fell. For the United States overall, the top 1 percent captured 85.1 percent of...

Children with serious behavioral disorders might fare better at school if they get some exercise during the day, a new study suggests. The researchers focused on children and teenagers with conditions that included autism spectrum disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety and depression. They looked at whether structured exercise during the school day -- in the form of stationary "cybercycles" -- could help ease students' behavioral issues in the classroom. Over a...

Across the past decade, the juvenile justice community has been shift ing its thinking from being “tough on crime” to being “smart on crime.” This change has been largely attributed to an enhanced understanding of both youth development and the effectiveness of interventions to reduce recidivism and promote positive outcomes for youth. In fact, in 2013 the National Research Council concluded that: Evidence shows convincingly that reforming juvenile justice in accord with well-established...

Building on some previous posts- this is a link to the pnas results published online in October 2016. http://www.pnas.org/content/113/42/E6335.full.pdf

The Iñupiat people, a tribe native to Alaska, did not have a written language for much of their history. Instead, for thousands of years, their culture was passed down orally, often in the form of stories that parents and grandparents would tell and entrust to their children. In recent years, those stories, and the lessons and values and history that they contain, have become harder to preserve, as the young people of the tribe, growing up in the modern world, have drifted further and...

In 2014, two gun-rights organizations, Florida Carry and the Second Amendment Foundation, sued the city of Tallahassee and various of its officials over a pair of laws, passed in 1957 and 1988, that prohibit residents from discharging firearms in public parks. Those local regulations retroactively violated a Florida state law, passed in 2011, preempting local governments from passing any ordinances that regulate guns. On Tuesday, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum will appear before Florida’s...

As Colorado’s housing costs skyrocket, a growing number of school districts, local leaders, and lawmakers are taking steps to make housing more affordable for teachers and staff. For years, resort communities like Aspen, Colorado, and a rural district in the state’s Eastern Plains have leased housing to employees at below-market rates. More recently, subsidized housing for educators has cropped up in pricey urban areas such as San Francisco, Boston, and Baltimore. [For more of this story,...

I read the Facing Addiction in America, the Surgeon General’s Report on Alcohol, Drugs and Health with a combination of enthusiastic appreciation and dismay. Those impressions were further reinforced recently on hearing the SG, Rear Admiral Vivek Murthy in person, at the Patrick Kennedy Forum on addiction in Chicago. I see the report as a major step—a diagonal one. It moves us significantly forward, but it is also a movement sideways. It both fulfills and fails short of its humane intention...

Most of us understand that a baby’s earliest months and years are the most critical for brain development. But did you know that a baby’s relationships with parents and caregivers actually stimulate that process? That’s right: An infant’s connections to nurturing, trusted adults help build the foundation for emotions, language, behavior, memory, physical movement – you name it. Right from the start, as parents, we need to bond with these brand-new little people, teach them how the world...