Claire Fiddian-Green is the President & CEO of the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. This week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released a report on tobacco use among U.S. middle and high school students for the period 2011-2016. The report showed that use of tobacco over that timeframe did not change significantly, with 7.2% of middle school students and 20.2% of high school students indicating current use of a tobacco product. The most popular tobacco product among high school students is e-cigarettes, followed by cigarettes, cigars, smokeless tobacco, hookah, pipe tobacco and bidis. Why should Indiana care about these latest findings? As noted in a study released by the Richard […]

Alex Cohen is the Director of Learning and Evaluation for the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. School closure is among the most controversial interventions in education, and the issue is back in the spotlight with Indianapolis Public Schools’ recent vote to close or transition four high schools. The impetus for the high school restructuring at IPS is the low enrollment at these schools, which led to the district operating mostly empty buildings. This has imposed a financial burden on the district and spread limited resources even thinner. The hope is that closing or restructuring high schools into middle schools and concentrating resources at only four high schools will lead to higher-quality […]