News Day

When a prisoner dies, sometimes people pay attention to the issue of medical care in Minnesota prisons. Otherwise — not so much. Prisoners can’t vote. Their access to the press is limited, and their credibility doubted. Continue reading →

Following on the previous post about approaches in homelessness:

Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative works to provide a combination of housing and supportive services to help move into employment or deal with the other needs. For more on Beacon’s programs, see Sheila Regan’s recent article, Beacon offers hope to low-income renters.

Homeless youth face a special set of challenges: Cynthia Boyd’s MinnPost article features Lina Warner, who tells her story of couch-hopping and using YouthLink’s drop-in services to get through years of homelessness. The article’s focus is $4.2 million in funding from the Homeless Youth Act, passed last year by the Minnesota legislature.

The common theme in discussing policies and homelessness in Minnesota is that we know what to do, but don’t have the money to do it. That’s also a theme in this year’s bonding initiative for Heading Home: Minnesota’s Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness. Governor Mark Dayton has proposed bonding of $50 million, the largest amount of bonding dollars ever, according to a blog post by Beacon director Lee Blons. But, she notes, that’s only half of the amount called for by Minnesota Housing Commissioner Mary Tingerthal in the Heading Home plan.

(Photo from USA Uncut)

Solutions for homelessness? Well, there’s a legislator with a sledgehammer in Hawaii and protesters waving pitchforks and torches in Portland, but the more effective approach comes from Utah. Continue reading →

Last week’s Congressional Budget Office report said that the Affordable Care Act would reduce hours worked in the long run.

Republicans started jumping up and down in glee, saying that they knew it all along — Obamacare is a job killer.

Not so fast. Continue reading →

More time in school should give more education. Frustrated teachers say that’s not what happened when Chicago lengthened its shortest-in-the-nation school day in 2012. The longer day came from requiring students to show up at the same time as their teachers, which sounds great, but eliminated time that teachers used for preparation and for collaboration with colleagues. Continue reading →

Money is a terrible way to measure the value of a college major, writes Jordan Weissman in The Atlantic. He’s right, even if that goes against today’s conventional wisdom. For a college major, and for a life’s work, following your passion will serve you better than following the money. Continue reading →

Lots of people know how to close the achievement gap: better teachers, more standardized instruction, longer school days, free preschool for all, stricter discipline, more testing, less testing … the list goes on and on. No single solution is a silver bullet that can deliver success. Continue reading →

In my last post, I wrote about the study by Greg J. Duncan and Aaron J. Sojourner, Can Intensive Early Childhood Intervention Programs Eliminate Income-Based Cognitive and Achievement Gaps? They found than an intensive early childhood program including home visits and full-time, high-quality preschool from age one to three could essentially eliminate the income-based achievement gap by age three. Continue reading →

Wow – I can’t believe that I agree with an entire David Brooks column, in which he advocates “building lifelong social and emotional development strategies from age 0 to 25,” including ready access to contraception, teaching parenting skills, “counseling and treatment, in which the psychic traumas that go with poverty are recognized and addressed,” for kids in elementary schools, and lots of programs to help teens.  “It Takes a Generation” comes at the end of a week packed with news about what children need to succeed. Continue reading →

“We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it,” Dorothy Day said. We must also talk about homelessness, because it’s still here — right here in St. Paul (and also, of course, in Minneapolis and the rest of the state.) Continue reading →