Three years ago, in New Castle, Pennsylvania, District Attorney Joshua Lamancusa was at a hearing for a 29-year-old who’d been falling behind on his court bills. If he kept missing the payments he risked ending up in jail, so Lamancusa asked him what was going on. “He said he couldn’t get a job. And I asked him, ‘Have you applied?’ …
National Teachers Association urged science teachers at all levels to emphasize that ‘no scientific controversy exists regarding the basic facts of climate change.’
Phil McKenna Inside Climate News 13 Sept 2018 “If there are controversies or other issues to deal with, we want them to have a good solid foundation in evidence-based knowledge to carry out that conversation,” said David Evans, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association. Credit: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images In response to what it sees as increasing efforts to …
Can Parks Make Kids Better at Math?
By RACHEL DOVEY, in NextCity, Sept 11, 2018 Central Park in New York City. (Credit: Library of Congress) Kids need parks — from obesity and asthma rates to psychological indicators, research repeatedly shows that green space has a tremendous impact on children’s health. But could trees, swings and bike paths also make kids good at math? A study published this month in the British Journal of …
The meaning of home or ‘hogar’
Download “The Meaning of Home” handout in English (PDF) Download “El significado de ‘hogar’” en español (PDF) ECO MEANS HOME : ‘ECO’ COMES FROM THE GREEK WORD OIKOS, MEANING ‘HOME’ ECO SYSTEM (“home” + “system”) Ecosystem means all the relationships in a home – from microorganisms, plants, animals and people to water, soil and air. An Ecosystem includes the terrain and …
The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy: The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem.
By MATTHEW STEWART in the Atlantic, May 2018 The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy: The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem. 1. The Aristocracy Is Dead … For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often …
40 percent of American college students go to community colleges. And among the poorest 40 percent of Americans, only 12 percent of young people born in the 1980s earned a bachelor’s degree by age 25
A college degree is not optional for most good jobs in today’s economy, so more and more students from low-income backgrounds are pursuing higher education, and they are most likely to end up at community colleges. Despite President Trump’s recent comments that “We do not know what a ‘community college’ means,” these institutions comprise more than 40 percent of the country’s undergraduate …
What if School Lunch Programs Promoted Public Health, Good Jobs, and the Environment? From LA to Cook County, local governments are using their purchasing power to transform the food system.
By Anna Lappé and Jose Oliva in The Nation, 25 May 2018 Students eat lunch at the cafeteria at Marston Middle School in San Diego, California, March 7, 2011. (Reuters / Mike Blake) Eleven billion dollars. That’s the total tally of the national school-food program in the United States and just a small fraction of what public institutions in this country spend every year in …
Democracy, public schools and charter schools
Charter schools are at heart a less democratic system than public schools. By Steven Singer on Common Dreams.org, May 2018 Charter schools have turned our children into the products of businesspeople. Enough. (Photo: AgainstAusterity.org) There are good charter schools. I admit that. There are bad public schools. I admit that, too. But if one had to choose between the worst public school and the …
Green schools
Zayed Future Energy Prize Winner Green School Bali Is Raising A Generation Of World Changers April 28th, 2018 by Kyle Field on Clean Technica Turning down the bumpy dirt road, it was not clear what, if anything, was at the end but we continued, albeit at a slower pace than we had enjoyed on the paved road. Rounding the bend revealed a checkpoint where …
Environmental issues are anything determining environmental outcomes. What is the next system, new political economy devoted to sustaining human and natural communities?
April 2nd, 2018, NextSystem.org, Ted Howard’s remarks to the Environmental Funders Network in Cambridge, England, on February 2nd, 2018. Good afternoon. I want to begin by thanking the conference organizers for extending an invitation to address you during your important annual deliberations. I come before you today not as an expert on environmental matters, but as someone who has devoted his …