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 […]

Claire Fiddian-Green is the President & CEO of the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. Comprehensive tobacco control efforts play a critical role in reducing smoking and lowering the health and economic toll of the smoking epidemic. But Indiana woefully underfunds these initiatives, falling far below federal recommendations and dollars spent in other states, according to a new report commissioned by the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. Indiana devoted just $8.2 million in federal and state spending in 2016 to preventing Hoosiers from starting to smoke, helping them quit, and protecting people from secondhand smoke. This is only 11 percent of the $73.5 million recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention […]

Claire Fiddian-Green is the President & CEO of the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. E-cigarettes, which came onto the market about a decade ago, have been heralded as a means to assist adult smokers in their attempts to quit smoking. And some high-quality research supports this position: adult smokers who switch from cigarettes or cigars to e-cigarettes have had good success in decreasing their use of nicotine and even quitting altogether. The trouble is, e-cigarettes – such as the dominant brand, Juul, which has about 55% market share – have become an appealing avenue to introduce young people to nicotine. According to Jonathan Winickoff, a pediatrician at Massachusetts General Hospital and […]