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Twelve-year old Anna has asthma. She lives in a low-income neighborhood and gets her care at a clinic affiliated with a major teaching hospital. Despite high-quality medical care, Anna’s asthma is not well controlled. Last year she missed almost two weeks of school, had two urgent care visits, and a brief but scary (and expensive) hospital stay. Her pediatrician believes that the old, rent-subsidized apartment where Anna’s family lives may be part of the problem: The presence of mold,...

As the November presidential election draws nearer, it is clear that for the first time in American history a woman will be the presidential candidate for a major political party. And while we have significant work to do to achieve true justice and equity, women overall experience more opportunity than they ever have. For many little girls growing up today, this country is looking more promising. But not all. Girls who have traditionally been marginalized — girls of color, those who grow up...

This week's Invisibilia podcast and show explore what happens when people flip the script, responding to situations in ways that are completely unexpected. We tend to respond to aggression with aggression, kindness with kindness. Usually that works just fine. But sometimes turning 180 degrees can change the world. Think Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. In this Invisibilia excerpt on NPR's Morning Edition, we tell the tale of a mellow Washington, D.C., dinner party that was suddenly...

The Black Lives Matter movement has drawn much-needed national and worldwide attention to the deaths of African-Americans at the hands of those sworn to protect them, igniting a long-overdue discussion about the systemic injustices African-Americans face in the realms of policing and criminal justice. As a society, however, we need to take that discussion a step further. We must acknowledge the obvious fact that black livesof all ages matter. Among other things, this means putting a stop to...

In 2012, when the New York Times reported that Google was offering its employees a chance to try out mindfulness techniques, the paper of record adopted a tone of befuddlement. “Sharing feelings?” the story asked; “Sitting quietly for long, unproductive minutes? At Google?” Four years later, workplace mindfulness initiatives are everywhere. When cloud computing giant Salesforce opened a new San Francisco tower this spring, it set aside a room on each floor as a device-free “mindfulness zone”...

If, as the idiom goes, money indeed does talk, then state and local governments in the United States have a very important announcement : They care more about felons than schoolchildren. That’s the alarming conclusion of a new report from the U.S. Department of Education, which shows that state and local government spending between 1979 and 2013 on incarcerating citizens has increased at three times the rate of expenditures on K-12 education for taxpayers—a 324 percent increase ($17 to $71...

Last summer, the high-school English teacher T.J. Whitaker revised the reading list for his contemporary literature course with the addition of a new title— The Savage City , a gritty nonfiction account of race and murder in New York City in the 1960s. The 24-year teaching veteran said he chose the book to give his students at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, a chance to read “an honest depiction of the Black Panther Party and the corruption that existed in the NYPD during the...

This article is by Orly Morgan, board member AlterNATIVE Education, Columbia College Class of 2017. Summer is known as a time for students to rest and relax after months of classes; but for AlterNATIVE Education , summer means business. The team is quickly preparing to train facilitators, book flights and put the finishing touches on curriculum that it will teach to Native American students on 10 different reservation communities around the country AlterNATIVE Education is a not-for-profit...

The Boston Globe's spotlight team continues to do great reporting. In May, they ran a story about hundreds of students who had been sexually abused by staffers at close to 70 private schools in New England. Yesterday, they ran a story about the retaliation many faced at private schools after reporting. When a small boarding school in the Berkshires discovered that a music teacher was having a sexual relationship with a female student, administrators responded in a way many parents would...

A new report finds that children whose parents or caregivers misuse alcohol or have a substance abuse problem face an increased risk of medical and behavioral problems. The study calls for pediatricians to take an active role in assessing a child’s risk and to support the family to get the help they need. Experts have known that children whose parents or caregivers misuse alcohol or use, produce or distribute drugs face an increased risk of medical and behavioral problems. In the new...

In Evelyn Rebollar’s classroom, a student is listening to music on his phone while typing away on a laptop. Behind him, a classmate is fiddling with a deck of cards. One student is playing the computer game Age of Empires in the back corner. A couple tables away, one of his peers is chatting with another teacher in French. Rebollar is sitting at the front of the room, though the tables are arranged so most students aren’t facing her. The setup might seem strange: All of these students are in...

Steve Teles ranks among America’s leading academic experts on the application of conservative ideas to problems of governance. He chronicled the rise of the conservative legal movement in a 2010 book . This spring, he and co-author David Dagan have released a new study: Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned Against Mass Incarceration . Not a conservative himself, Teles writes as a sympathetic outsider, always looking for ways to bridge ideological gaps in the service of better policy. With...