Today, many states are increasing their percentage of spending on juvenile justice and criminal justice while maintaining or reducing spending on education. New York and California have been spending about $250,000 per year per juvenile in their juvenile justice systems. MN has reached the half a billion dollar mark for maintaining its prison system this year after five years of double digit growth.
DetailsTo not support children that are unable to read or function well in the classroom is to insure continued failing schools and more and bigger prisons.
America is already the largest criminal nation in the world in per capita and in gross prison numbers – and that is expensive in financial and quality of life measurements.
DetailsThe author, Nancy Folbre points out that , full-time, year-round child care for young children costs more than public university tuition in 44 states.
DetailsMinnesota Reading Corps is a statewide initiative to help every Minnesota child become a successful reader by the end of 3rd grade.
DetailsEducation is the engine of progress and prosperity. No nation can achieve its potential for greatness without investing in its human capital. The extent to which children successfully negotiate the treacherous passage to adulthood depends on the earliest years of brain and emotional development. That explains why early childhood education is crucial to society.
America’s public policy regarding at-risk children is an economic and moral failure:
DetailsMy mission in life and in this cause is moral, but my arguments begin with the practical. Public education is the real world for 90 percent of your children, and America’s. The wisest path to public education reform in our country is to deliver the children in far better shape to formal school. That is what early investment is all about. It is neither socialism…nor the creation of a “nanny state,” but rather simple decency and wisdom and what our country is about when we are at our best.
DetailsA few weeks ago I listened to Larry Rosenstock from High Tech High in San Diego talk about his inner city high schools that send one hundred percent of their graduates onto college. It is real, it is achievable, and it is simple in how it works. Educators and students are given ample…
DetailsBecause the waiting list for subsidized daycare is one year into the future for the father of the children I represent (as a county guardian ad-Litem) there is a good chance that his two small children will be taken from him by the county and adopted by someone he has never met.
It is also possible that he may not be able to visit his children if they are adopted.
State must make early childhood investments a priority KELLY DORAN During a speech in Hong Kong near the end of his China trade mission late last year, Gov. Tim Pawlenty expressed his amazement at the “scope” of China’s rise to economic superpower status. Then, in an apparent moment of sober revelation, Pawlenty reportedly proclaimed that…
DetailsRetired teacher Carolyn Light Bell’s Star Tribune article today has brought me to reflect on the rich Minneapolis Public School education I received and how it helped me to build a terrific life. Without my public school education, I would have been one more low-skilled worker in a nation with a $6/hour minimum wage and…
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