Claire Fiddian-Green is the President & CEO of the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. This week, ISTEP+ results for the 2016-17 school year were released, and the figures are deeply troubling. Consistent with last year, only 51% of Hoosier students in Grades 3-8 passed both the Math and English/Language Arts (ELA) portions of the ISTEP+. The results are far worse in 10th grade, where only 34% of students passed both the Math and ELA portions of the test. While it’s tempting to dismiss these results as the product of a flawed state test, that would be a mistake and a disservice to students, parents, teachers and school leaders. Recall that Indiana recently […]

Claire Fiddian-Green is the President & CEO of the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. Every April, we celebrate National Minority Health Month in order to call attention to the health disparities that affect racial and ethnic minorities across the country. This year’s theme of “Active and Healthy” living is timely, given the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation’s recently released report on the obesity epidemic in Marion County and Indiana. This obesity report found that one in three Hoosier adults is obese, and more than two in three are overweight or obese. In Marion County, the rate is even higher with 39 percent of adults having obesity, up from 26 percent in 2005. While […]