Alex Cohen is the Director of Learning and Evaluation for the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. It’s well known that good jobs often require a strong understanding of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. Yet K-12 performance in STEM lags in Indiana, driven in large part by substantial disparities across race and income. In 2017, only 51 percent of Indiana students passed the math portion of the ISTEP+ in grades 3-8. The pass rate for students with free- and reduced-price lunches was just 36 percent. And the pass rate for black students was 25 percent—less than half the rate for white students. Raising STEM achievement, particularly for low-income and minority […]

With hard work and good timing, innovators in every sector could arise to help mitigate the profound and negative consequences of COVID-19.