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 […]

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 […]

Alex Cohen is the Director of Learning and Evaluation for the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. A patient visits a doctor. He suffers from chronic pain. In fact, he’s been suffering for a while, and he’s been receiving painkillers for months. And recently, he’s been upping his dosage and visiting multiple doctors to get enough. But the doctor he’s seeing today doesn’t know this. If she knew about his prescription history, she might engage him in a conversation about his opioid use, suggest alternative pain remedies or even refer him to substance abuse treatment. Instead, she writes him a prescription, and he leaves. Making patients’ opioid prescription histories readily accessible to […]