Alex Cohen is the Director of Learning and Evaluation for the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. From July 2016 to September 2017, Indiana’s emergency departments saw a 35 percent increase in opioid overdoses, according to data released this month from the CDC. The most dramatic increases occurred in metropolitan areas like Indianapolis. These numbers indicate that the opioid epidemic shows no signs of slowing down. And they point to a continued need for efforts to address opioid use disorder in Marion County and across the state. Toward that end, Indiana Executive Director for Drug Prevention, Treatment and Enforcement Jim McClelland and Social Services Administration Secretary Jennifer Walthall announced this month a […]

Alex Cohen is the Director of Learning and Evaluation for the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. Can a young, 20-something who just walked off the stage, college diploma in hand, step into a classroom and, with relatively little training, effectively teach in one of our nation’s more challenging K-12 environments? Finding talented teachers for high-need schools is a perennial issue. While there are plenty of organizations working to address this problem, perhaps the most well known—and hotly debated—is Teach For America. Teach For America, or TFA, selectively recruits recent college graduates to teach in high-need public schools. TFA generally attracts graduates who did not major in education and provides several weeks […]