Education

This comprehensive report unveils the systemic challenges and aspirations of Asheville's Black community through participatory research. It emphasizes the community's perspectives on systemic racism affecting various sectors such as housing, education, employment, healthcare, and the criminal justice system.

A deeper, more complex story lies in the picturesque city of Asheville, North Carolina, known for its vibrant arts scene and historic architecture. It's the story of the Black community - a narrative woven with challenges, resilience, and hope. The "Every Black Voice" report, a comprehensive study conducted by the Racial Justice Coalition, reveals Black residents' lived experiences, struggles, and aspirations in Asheville, particularly in light of the city's reparations journey.

The media is replete with articles speculating about President Biden’s across-the-board  student loan debt relief plans, given that federal student loan debt exceeds $1.6 trillion spread across 43 million borrowers, according to the Federal Student Aid portfolio summary for 2022. These plans for broad-based forgiveness extend beyond the existing pause on student loan payments implemented through COVID-19 emergency relief, Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program waivers, and forgiveness for borrowers defrauded by for-profit institutions and borrowers with disabilities.

Research suggests that one in seven children in the United States have a diagnosable mental health condition. But despite efforts to increase access to care through school-based mental health services, most youth with a mental health condition do not receive the treatment they need. Telehealth services, however, have the potential to increase access to school-based mental health treatment by reducing districts’ need for on-site personnel—of which there is a national shortage—without compromising the quality of care. Therefore, states should consider maintaining the telehealth flexibilities they enacted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a means to improve access to critical school-based mental health services for youth, even after the public health emergency ends.

Kai Hong, Kacie Dragan, and Sherry Glied from P4A's NYU Wagner Research Hub published a paper in the Journal of Health Economics exploring the health impacts of New York City’s 2014 roll-out of a Universal Pre-Kindergarten program.

In the 2018 midterm elections, candidates across the political spectrum ran on platforms that included expansion and support of early education and childcare assistance programs. In many ways, this signals an increased awareness by our country’s representatives that families and communities are struggling to afford high-quality care, even for dual-earner households.

The recent P4A conference at NYU's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service highlighted the power of partnerships with policymakers and practitioners to make research relevant and actionable.

Budget cuts have forced many school districts to prioritize school programs, and extracurricular activities such as sports are often viewed as less essential than academics. Yet rather than reducing or eliminating sports programs altogether, some districts are electing to transfer some of the costs of sports participation to student athletes and their families. This opens the door to wide variation of fees and processes, and may contribute to inequities in sports participation for low-income students already at higher-risk for poorer health outcomes.

Students attending two-year colleges are more likely to be food insecure than other adults, particularly during economic recessions. Though we don’t identify the underlying causes of this trend, the high levels of food insecurity among two-year students should push policymakers to reexamine how the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) and other supportive services can best assist these students.

Over the last several decades, a robust body of evidence has emerged linking early childhood investments—in high-quality childcare, early learning, home visiting, and more—to better health and well-being, sometimes years later in adulthood. Especially for low-income children, these supports can help mitigate the negative effects of challenging or stressful environments, and set them on a life-long trajectory of positive health development.

ABC/CARE was a comprehensive, birth through age five early childhood development program that included early health, nutrition, parental education and early childhood education. Complementing their recent cost-benefit analysis of the ABC/CARE program, Dr. James Heckman and his team look at the differences in outcomes based on gender in their paper, Gender Differences in the Benefits of an Influential Early Childhood Program.

The research team found that high-quality early childhood education programs had the potential to deliver a 13.7% per child, per year return on investment through better outcomes in health, education, and employment. The economic return of the two programs was substantially higher than had been previously found for preschool programs serving 3- to 4-year-olds, which have previously estimated only a 7-10% return on investment.