North Carolina’s dubious ranking of having the 10th highest rate of uninsured people in the nation continues to play out across the state in ways that challenge our collective well-being and community stability, even as it leads to worse health outcomes and diminished livelihoods for hundreds of thousands of our neighbors.
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Last Wednesday, Superintendent Mark Johnson was joined by important members of the House and Senate for what they promised would be “a major announcement regarding education in North Carolina.” While the hype for the announcement was major, the announcement itself was a dud. The “major announcement” was a plan to divert funding for classroom supplies from school districts to an app that would give every teacher $400 to spend on classroom supplies.
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In 2014, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) filed federal lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), alleging that both institutions’ admissions practices are discriminatory. The widely publicized Harvard case hinged on the question of whether Harvard’s admission policy discriminates against Asian American students by holding them to a higher standard than other applicants.
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Perhaps we didn’t see this coming. Perhaps we should have. In what has to rate among the most explosive state court rulings in recent years, a judge on Feb. 22 tossed out two hotly contested amendments to the North Carolina constitution, including one that would make it harder for many citizens to vote.
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News media attention may have shifted of late to the government shutdown, the Michael Cohen circus and other Trump Administration misadventures, but the crisis of immigrant children being forcibly separated from their parents has never been resolved. What's more, recent evidence shows that the problem was and remains even worse than was originally understood.
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Here’s a welcome good news story about kids’ health and the environment: In North Carolina, public health officials have been working for more than 30 years to eliminate childhood lead poisoning – and have come very close to doing so. Child blood levels have dropped dramatically population-wide. Unfortunately, some pockets of high exposure still remain...
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Many of us may remember the often very implausible notions we had of “where babies come from” when we were kids. And even as we learned more details when we got older, many of us still entered adulthood with only a partial understanding of the complexities of pregnancy, childbirth and sexual and reproductive health care.
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Editor's note: Kim Mackey is a social studies teacher with Wake County Public Schools. She recently wrote an open letter to State Superintendent Mark Johnson, because she says her ticket to his special event this Tuesday had been "revoked." In an email, a copy of which was shared with Policy Watch, Johnson wrote that the event was "at capacity."
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The United States sees an average of 22,000 firearm suicides and 14,600 firearm homicides, including 300 deaths in mass shootings, each year. In at least 42 percent of mass shooting cases, shooters put up “red flags” – maybe even blatant threats on social media – before opening fire.
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Legislation introduced last week to expand Medicaid should be welcome news to the hundreds of thousands in North Carolina who currently can’t see a doctor when they need one. House Bill 5 was introduced by lead sponsors Reps. Gale Adcock, Carla Cunningham, Verla Insko, and Jean Farmer-Butterfield, and Senate Bill 3 was introduced by lead sponsors Sens. Ben Clark, Dan Blue, and Gladys Robinson – all Democrats. A Republican-led bill is expected soon in the NC House.
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Same-sex couples in North Carolina won the freedom to marry in 2014, but LGBTQ people continue to be denied equal protection under the law in many other areas of life. North Carolina is currently the only state in the nation that prevents those in same-sex relationships from accessing protective orders for domestic violence.
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Did you know that student performance in North Carolina charter schools is increasingly falling behind traditional public schools? Probably not. After all, that message was absent from state charter office Director Dave Machado’s presentation to the Board last week, nor will you find it in the related Charter Schools Annual Report submitted to...
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