Alex Cohen is the Director of Learning and Evaluation for the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. As opioids and tobacco continue to claim Hoosier lives, many are looking toward K-12 school-based prevention programs to stem the tide. One of the most well-known prevention programs is Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or D.A.R.E. At its height, D.A.R.E. was implemented across the world, with more than $750 million spent on the program annually. But study after study has found little evidence for the impacts of D.A.R.E. on drug use. This is a common problem: Keeping kids off drugs and alcohol is not easy. As a result, not every intervention works. The good news is […]

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 […]