An American flag flies from a crane on July 4th next to the Champlain Towers South condo building, where scores of victims remain missing more than a week after it partially collapsed.; Credit: Lynne Sladky/AP

Preparations continue in Surfside, Fla. for the demolition of a portion of the Champlain Towers South still standing after much of the building collapsed in the early morning hours on June 24.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told reporters on Sunday that bringing down the remainder of the collapsed condominium in a controlled fashion is crucial to the safety of search and rescue teams.

Those teams have paused their work so demolition can take place. Levine Cava said officials are still unsure of a specific time that the demolition will occur.

"Our top priority is that the building can come down as soon as possible — no matter what time that occurs — and safely as possible," Levine Cava said at a morning news conference.

The number of confirmed dead from the collapse remains at 24. The number of people unaccounted for remains at 121.

Preparations for the demolition come as Tropical Storm Elsa is tracking towards southern Florida. The storm is expected to hit the area Monday and Tuesday.

The instability of the building could be made worse by the storm, which is expected to bring strong winds and rain at the beginning of the week. Mayor Levine Cava said that as soon as the demolition has occurred, search and rescue efforts are expected to resume.

Ahead of Elsa's arrival in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a state of emergency Saturday for 15 counties, including Miami-Dade.

On Sunday, he expressed optimism that the Surfside area may be spared from the worst of the storm.

"We could see some gusts, but it has tracked west over the last day and a half — more so than the initial forecast," he said. "So, we'll just keep watching that."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

When a promising new drug to treat obesity was approved by the Food and Drug Administration for sale in the U.S. last month, it was the first such treatment to gain approval since 2014.

In clinical trials, weekly injections of semaglutide — or Wegovy, as it's been branded -- helped people drop an average of 15% of their body weight. That's an average of about 34 pounds over 16 months, before their weight plateaued, a far greater weight loss, obesity specialists say, than achieved with other drugs on the market. At least as important, Wegovy raised none of the alarm bells with the FDA or obesity doctors that it might trigger serious side effects of the sort experienced by some people taking fen-phen or some previous medical treatments for obesity.

But with a price tag for Wegovy of $1,000 to $1,500 a month, a very big question remains: Will insurers cover its significant cost for the many millions of people like Marleen Greenleaf, who might benefit?

Greenleaf grew up on the island of Trinidad, where her entire family paid little heed to what they ate and paid a high medical price, she says: "My husband has diabetes, my sister has diabetes, my brother has diabetes."

Since then, she's tried — and failed — at numerous diets, says Greenleaf, now 58 and an administrator at a charter school in Washington, D.C. Then, in 2018, she signed up for the clinical trial of a new drug — a once-weekly shot that changes the way her brain signals hunger.

A drug that finally stops her cravings

She noticed the change soon after her first injection of Wegovy: "For me, there was something that triggered in my brain to tell me that I was not hungry," she says. No more fierce cravings for the chocolate chip cookies she adores. Without the cravings she was able to slow down and reconsider the foods she'd been reaching for.

"I also wanted to eat healthier," she says. "I was looking at options, reading labels, looking at the calories — not just the calories, but also the sugar."

Over the 68-week research trial, Greenleaf dropped 40 pounds. Her blood pressure fell, which meant she qualified to donate her kidney to her husband, who was on dialysis.

"It was one of the best gifts of life that I could have ever given," she says.

But after that study ended, Greenleaf regained some of the weight. Wegovy is considered a long-term, possibly lifelong medication to treat chronic obesity. In the pre-marketing clinical studies, weight loss topped out at a total average weight loss of 15-18%, even as people continued to take the drug. And, as was the case with Greenleaf, once they stopped getting the weekly injections some of that weight came back.

Now, Greenleaf wants to resume the Wegovy shots.

"My only challenge actually is getting the insurance company to approve it," she says.

Reimbursement for obesity drugs' cost is patchy

Insurance coverage, it turns out, is a giant question — not just with Wegovy, but with obesity drugs in general. Some private insurers do include some prescription obesity drugs in the list of medicines they'll cover; it's too early to tell whether Wegovy will make those lists. Many doctors and patients are optimistic, because it is a higher dose of an existing diabetes medication called Ozempic, which is often covered by insurers.

A few select state Medicaid programs will cover medications that treat obesity, in some circumstances. But, significantly, Medicare does not cover obesity drugs — and many private insurers typically follow Medicare's lead.

Yet the demand for a good treatment is there, says Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, a leading obesity researcher at Harvard. She was not involved in conducting the Wegovy clinical trial, but closely followed it. "I'm excited about it," she says, because of the dramatic weight loss.

The drug acts on the brain so people eat less and store less of what they eat. That helps address the excess weight as well as helping with numerous related diseases of the liver or heart, for example.

Why the FDA has been slow to approve obesity treatments

There is a long history of drugs that have looked like promising treatments for obesity, then failed. Decades ago, amphetamines, were prescribed, until their addictive properties became apparent. In the 1990s, the combination of fenfluramine and phentermine — administered as the diet drug fen-phen — was heavily marketed, only to later be pulled from the market for causing heart valve problems.

Those experiences and others have made physicians skeptical.

"In obesity medicine field, we've learned to be cautiously optimistic each time we have a new medication that looks promising," says Dr. Ihuoma Eneli, director of the Center for Healthy Weight and Nutrition at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, who was not involved in the study of Wegovy.

So far, Eneli does not see any obvious concerns with the class of drugs that includes Wegovy, and calls the results so far "very promising." Wegovy is similar to another drug made by Novo Nordisk — Saxenda — which has been on the market since 2014, and which Eneli occasionally prescribes to her pediatric patients who are struggling with obesity.

In clinical research studies, the primary side effects reported after taking Wegovy affected the digestive system: nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, constipation, abdominal pain or intestinal infections.

Eneli says such side effects and their frequency are milder than the problems that have arisen in the past. That good safety profile may mean the drug is "less likely to come up with unanticipated risks," she says.

But, the new drug will be of little use, she and other doctors who treat obesity say, if it's not also affordable for patients.

"Before I even bring up that drug with my patients, I'm looking to see which insurance they are having on the left side of my screen — because that will determine whether I bring it up," Stanford, the Harvard physician, says. "If it's out of reach, like I said, I won't bring it up."

Stanford says her patients on existing obesity medications do extraordinary things to keep their coverage so they can afford to stay on the drugs.

"Several nurses here at the hospital that are my patients stayed working — they were supposed to retire — so they could stay on their injectable medication," Stanford says,"because that's how beneficial it was to them."

Why some are willing to pay out of pocket

Some people, like David Scheesley, 42, says he would consider paying for Wegovy, even if he had to pay the full sticker price. The Hanford, Calif., correctional officer has tried since 2019 to lose weight on various diets — low-fat, all-meat, all-vegetable — without success. His weight has led to other health concerns — with his blood fats and his heart — which makes Scheesley think of his 5-year-old son.

"I want to see him for a lot of years; I don't want to have a stroke," he says. "I don't want to have diabetes. I want to be there for him. So, for me personally, that [monetary cost] is not astronomical, if it can give me some more time."

Novo Nordisk, the company that makes Wegovy, is in talks with insurers, and acknowledges that ensuring health insurance coverage of its drug is critical. The challenge, says Douglas Langa, executive vice president of Novo Nordisk North America, is getting doctors, patients, and politicians to recognize obesity as a disease — and that therefore insurance should cover the cost of medicine to treat it.

"There's a medical component to [obesity] that needs to be recognized; this is a disease state like we should be treating any other disease state," Langa says. He says about 40% of private insurers cover Saxenda, the similar weight-loss medication the company makes.

Langa tells insurance companies this, making the case for why prescriptions for Wegovy should be covered. His company is also heavily lobbying Congress to pass legislation to allow Medicare to cover obesity medications. It makes sense from a financial perspective, he argues, because obesity is the root disease underlying so many other diseases.

"We do believe insurers understand that [untreated obesity] is a gateway into 60 other health conditions," Langa says. The need is hard to ignore, he adds. More than 100 million people in the U.S. alone struggle with obesity.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Sonata Software announced that its Unified Enterprise Mobility Platform, Halosys, has been enhanced with additional features that boost optimization and usability

Panelists in a discussion on ‘Mobility Megatrends 2050’, highlighted that in the next decade, with electrification, autonomous driving, smart and connected infrastructure, modal diversity, and mobility that is integrated, resilient, shared, and sustainable – powered by disruptive business models, will transform and shape up of the automotive industry. The industry is racing towards a new world, driven by sustainability and changing consumer behaviour, encompassing electric vehicles, autonomous cars, mobility fleet sharing, and always connected.

“The technology services industry, at some level, is recession proof,” Premji said at the company’s 76th annual general meeting on Tuesday. “In good times, clients spend on new initiatives and business transformation and serving customers digitally. They focus on reducing costs when times are not so good,” he said addressing a question on inflation concerns.

​So, we think that now we are entering into earnings season with this business update and particularly the banking sector should do well, both PSU and private banks.

As of January 2, 2010 restaurants, bars and other businesses that serve food and drink in Catawba County became smoke-free. Many health advocates and local residents are pleased that they can now enjoy a healthier dining experience. The ban is a result of a new law that prohibits smoking in all restaurants and bars across North Carolina.

The Catawba County Board of Commissioners, at its January 19, 2010 meeting, joined with other local governments across the region in approving the agreement. The main points of the agreement hinged on Concord and Kannapolis modifying their ability, contained in their IBT certificate, to withdraw 10 million gallons of water per day (MGD) from the Catawba River at all times, by significantly limiting withdrawals during times of drought. The agreement limits withdrawals to 6 MGD during times of most severe drought, or �exceptional� drought; 7 MGD during �extreme� drought; 8.5 MGD during �severe� drought; and 9 MGD during �moderate� drought. Further, the agreement restricts Concord and Kannapolis from withdrawing more than 3 MGD from the Catawba until July 1, 2015, and after they first are withdrawing 5 MGD from the Yadkin River.

Two members of the Catawba County Board of Commissioners, Vice-Chair Lynn Lail and Commissioner Barbara Beatty joined UNC Charlotte officials and leaders from business and power industries to celebrate the start of construction on the University�s Energy Production and Infrastructure Center (EPIC). EPIC is a planned research endeavor between the University and private partners with the goal of expanding energy engineering and research within the region based on industry needs. The Catawba County EcoComplex will play an important role in EPIC through research partnership between Catawba County and UNC-Charlotte

A partnership of all fourteen fire departments and all five rescue squads in the county with Catawba County Emergency Services has resulted in a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that will fund a large amount of the costs to purchase new radios to significantly improve communications by and between the fire and rescue agencies and the County�s 911 Communications Center.

Proper dental care and routine trips to the dentist help to guarantee that children and adults not only have a healthy smile, but a healthy body as well. To help ensure that every child in Catawba County has access to dental care, Catawba County Public Health Dental Practice serves as a resource for children ages 4 to 17.

Children learn their habits, attitudes and beliefs from their parents and other caregivers, and that includes their willingness to try new and healthy foods. The American Dietetic Association and Catawba County Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) encourages adults to be good role models and teach children how to appreciate nutrition and enjoy healthful eating.

The final stages of the 2011 property revaluation process in Catawba County have begun with the presentation of the proposed 2011 Schedule of Values to the Board of Commissioners, and will continue into November, when property owners will receive notice of the new value of their property, and into December and early 2011 when the appeal process begins.

Lindsey Smith was recognized by the North Carolina Society for Public Health Education as a new health educator in North Carolina who has made outstanding contributions to the profession.

Family Builders, the adoption service of Catawba County Social Services, can now help adult adoptees, birth parents and their close relatives find each other. Not all counties in North Carolina offer this service, which is called Confidential Intermediary Services. Until recently all adoption records were sealed under North Carolina state law. In 2008, a new law took effect that allowed the release of certain records to adult adoptees and birth parents, if both parties agreed.

The agenda for the next meeting of the Catawba County Board of Commissioners, 9:30 a.m., Monday, April 4, 2011, 1924 Courthouse, Newton, is now available.

Representatives from Public Health�s Women, Infants and Children program will be attending the upcoming Family Fair at Catawba Valley Community College (CVCC) April 16 from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. to provide information and schedule appointments for families who qualify for WIC assistance.

Three area mayors and several other local officials recently participated in Mayors for Meals in Catawba County. This event was sponsored by Catawba County Social Services� Senior Nutrition Programs, which operates Meals on Wheels, Seniors Morning Out and other senior nutrition programs serving more than 1,000 people.

A new Seniors Morning Out location has opened at Bethlehem United Methodist Church in Claremont. This program, which is operated by Catawba County Social Services, provides a nutritious lunch, plus social activities, for persons age 60 or older.

A Catawba County Department of Social Services program that helped teenagers enrolled in a poverty reduction and teen pregnancy program better understand the myths of government support programs has been named a winner of a 2011 National Association of Counties (NACo) Achievement Award.

Area youth participating in the NC Cooperative Extension�s 4-H program helped children at Catawba County Public Health plant vegetable seeds. The activity was one of a series of visits by local North Carolina Cooperative Extension staff and volunteers to Public Health�s Women, Infants and Children (WIC) clinic designed to encourage WIC families to grow and eat fresh vegetables.

The facility is now testing biodiesel fuel being produced by several companies in the region and from the harvest of crops growing around the landfill to test which ones grow best in the local climate while producing the best oils for biodiesel.

The Catawba County Sheriff�s Office, in conjunction with The Cognitive Connection and The Foothills Coalition, is sponsoring an Operation Pill Stoppers program that now provides fixed locations for citizens to properly dispose of their unused and unwanted medications.

�Catawba Communities,� a monthly show which will feature information about programs and services provided by local governments, school systems and associated agencies across Catawba County, will premiere on Charter Communications� Government Channel (Channel 3) on Tuesday, August 23, 2011, at 8:00 p.m.

Presentations are an example of a traditional 4-H program that dates back to at least the 1950s. They involve giving a 5-12 minute talk on a topic using tabletop visuals and posters to illustrate main points.

The award was presented for the agency's Children and Aging Strategic Planning Projects in the category �Profiles in Community Collaboration�. The entry described the Children�s Agenda Planning Committee and the Aging Leadership Planning Project. In both cases, Social Services took the lead in collaborating with area agencies to develop reports about the needs of children and older adults.

Colonel Michael W. Gilchrist, Commander of the Highway Patrol, presented the awards to EMT Paramedic and Crew Chief Brad Harris and EMT Paramedic Eric Jones for their role in pulling a person from a burning vehicle.

The program of the North Carolina Department of Transportation provides limited funds for low-income persons who need to maintain or insure their car so they can continue working. It is administered by Catawba County Social Services

Used cooking oil will be accepted only at the Blackburn Solidwaste Convenience Center at 3864 Rocky Ford Road, Newton, NC 28658. No business waste accepted. The Blackburn Solidwaste Convenience Center is open Monday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

County programs which developed QR (Quick Response) codes for building permits; reach families affected by economic distress, and serve as an ongoing, immediate source of food for students during weekends and extended breaks from school; and promote healthy, sustainable policies that improve physical activity and nutrition in schools were honored.

A Catawba County Social Services program that serves as an ongoing, immediate source of food for students who often go hungry, during weekends and extended breaks from school, and a Green Vendor Exhibition designed to shine a spotlight on existing and potential vendors that specialize in providing recycled and environmentally-friendly products and services, have been named winners of 2012 National Association of Counties (NACo) Achievement Awards.

The Catawba County Public Health Dental Practice celebrated a �grand re-opening� on May 31 by welcoming visitors to an open house at its new space inside the Public Health building. Located just down the hall from its former location, the practice has doubled in size and capacity in order to provide a comprehensive dental home for children ages 1-21 in Catawba County.

The EcoComplex is a system that recovers all useable products and by-products from a group of private and public partners located in a close-knit defined area. This group of partners works together to use each other�s waste products either as a source of energy (electricity, steam, or heat) or as a raw material for the production of their own product (pallets, lumber, compost, brick shapes/art). The EcoComplex is also focused on making and using �green� energy and on economic development.

A delegation of high school students representing the Catawba County Youth Council and 4-H attended NC Citizenship Focus, which was held in Raleigh, where more than 200 youth and adults representing over 75 counties exchanged ideas, gained knowledge and learned through hands on experiences about the different levels and branches of government.

A new agreement extends borrowing privileges at Lenoir-Rhyne University Library to registered users of Hickory Public and Catawba County Libraries.

The agreement would substantially increase the number of items collected for recycling across Catawba County, with further expansion of items collected as needed over time; begin �single stream� collection of recyclable commodities so recycled materials would no longer be required to be separated at curbside; increase Republic Services� investment in Catawba County by $13 million; and protect more than 150 local jobs.

Chinese maker of products for the textile industry has located its first US manufacturing facility in Conover, creating 78 new jobs.

Catawba County will mail data verification, income and expense request, to property owners as 2015 revluation process continues on May 17, 2013. Owners are requested to verify the information found on the data verification sheet, provide pertinent additional information and make any necessary corrections, and return the form to the revaluation office. http://www.catawbacountync.gov/events/revalmailer13.asp

Catawba County Public Health's annual report, emergency preparedness outreach have won national honors from the National Association of County Information Officers.

County employees in the first Leadership Academy recently helped families in transition through a Family Care Center project.

Budget Office wins national award, for producing budget document judged easy to read and understand, for 25th straight year

Annual Financial Report for Fiscal Year 2012-2013 shows Catawba County improved its financial position with conservative approach.

Social Services program honored as one of only 15 programs in U.S. making critical difference in lives of youth in foster care.

Dental care was recently provided for hundreds of children by Catawba County Public Health.

Lisa Przekop, director of admissions at University of California, Santa Barbara, says that many high schoolers this year wrote their application essays about depression and anxiety during the pandemic.; Credit: Patricia Marroquin/Moment Editorial/Getty Images

College-bound high schoolers are making their final deliberations ahead of May 1, the national deadline to pick a school. That day will mark the end of a hectic admissions season drastically shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many colleges dropped standardized testing requirements, and because some high schools gave pass/fail grades and canceled extracurriculars and sports, admissions counselors had to change how they read and evaluate applications.

"[It was] definitely the craziest of all my 36 years, without a doubt," says Lisa Przekop, director of admissions at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The UC school system received the most applications in the United States.

Like many others, Przekop says all of her staff has been working remotely throughout the pandemic. But if pivoting to working from home wasn't a challenge enough, Przekop says the school saw an increase in applications of 16%.

"On top of all that, we had to devise a way of doing our admissions selection process without the use of SAT or ACT scores," she says. "So any one of those things would have been a major change, but to have all of them at the same time was beyond anything really that I could've imagined."

Przekop spoke with All Things Considered about how what counselors looked for in applications this year changed, what topics they saw in admissions essays and how the process might have actually improved in spite of the pandemic.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview Highlights

Has it all added up to more time spent on every individual application?

Quick answer, yes. Things are much more nuanced now. And although a student may have, for instance, planned to do certain activities, well many of those activities were canceled. The other big difference was students were a lot more depressed this year, obviously. Everybody's more anxious, including students. They're applying for college which is stressful in and of itself. And so what we found is a lot of students used their essays to talk about depression, anxiety, things like this. To read essay after essay after essay about depression, anxiety, stress — is taxing. And so we really had to encourage staff to take more breaks as they were reviewing. So it definitely slowed the whole process down at a time when we had more applications to review.

Can you give any insight into what you are basing your decisions on this year?

Absolutely. Maybe in the past I would've focused on that GPA right away. Now when I'm looking at that academic picture, I have to look at the fact that did the student challenge themselves as much as they could have? Were the courses even available? Do I see any trends in their academic performance? If their spring term of last year, their junior year, was all pass/no pass, can I safely assume that they did well in those courses? And that's where you really had to rely on what the students shared in their essays to try to piece that together.

Are you noticing greater diversity in the students applying to UC?

In terms of ethnic diversity, yes, we are seeing that. In terms of diversity of experience — for instance, first generation students and students with lots of different socioeconomic backgrounds — we're definitely seeing that. I'm seeing students who are very committed to the environment more so than i've seen before. I'm seeing students who are more politically aware and active than I've seen before. So I'm definitely seeing a pattern of behaviors that look a little bit different than students in the past.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

; Credit: /The Washington Post via Getty Images

Editor's note: This is an excerpt of Planet Money's newsletter. You can sign up here.

According to the National Institute For Early Childhood Research, nearly half of all three-year-olds and a third of all four-year-olds in the United States were not enrolled in preschool in 2019. That's in large part because many parents can't afford it. Imagine a future where we changed that. A future where every American child had access to two years of preschool during a critical period of their mental development. How would their lives change? How would society change? If President Biden gets his way, and Congress agrees to spend $200 billion on his proposal for universal preschool, then we may begin to find out.

But it turns out, we kind of already know. In fact, a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research gives us a glimpse of what that world could look like. It adds to a burgeoning amount of high-quality research that shows just how valuable preschool is — and maybe not for the reasons you might think.

An Accidental Experiment

The story begins back in the mid-to-late 1990s. The Mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, wanted to improve the city's schools. One of his big goals was to provide universal, full-day kindergarten for Boston's kids. But the budget was tight, and following a task force's recommendations, he and local lawmakers decided to move resources from preschool (for four-year-olds) to kindergarten (for five-year-olds) in order to achieve it.

The result was an even more limited number of slots for city-funded preschool, and the city officials had to figure out how to fairly divvy up those slots. They resorted to a lottery system, randomly selecting kids who would get in.

Fast forward two decades later, and the economists Christopher R. Walters, Guthrie Gray-Lobe, and Parag A. Pathak saw this as a golden opportunity to see how preschool can affect people's lives. The fact that Boston's school administrators randomized who got admitted meant there were two virtually identical groups of kids with only one difference: one group got an extra year of education by going to preschool. That gave the researchers the opportunity to compare and contrast the two groups of kids and credibly see how kids' lives changed as a result of getting into preschool.

Four thousand four-year-olds took part in Boston's preschool lottery between 1997 and 2003. Walters, Gray-Lobe, and Pathak acquired data on them from the Boston school system. And then they were able to get additional data from other sources that gave them insight into ways that the childrens' lives might have benefited from an additional year of preschool education. These kids are now all twentysomethings — a fact that should make you feel old.

Consistent with other studies that find preschool has a huge effect on kids, Walters, Gray-Lobe, and Pathak find that the kids lucky enough to get accepted into preschools in Boston saw meaningful changes to their lives. These kids were less likely to get suspended from school, less likely to skip class, and less likely to get in trouble and be placed in a juvenile detention facility. They were more likely to take the SATs and prepare for college.

The most eye-popping effects the researchers find are on high school graduation and college enrollment rates. The kids who got accepted into preschool ended up having a high-school graduation rate of 70% — six percentage points higher than the kids who were denied preschool, who saw a graduation rate of only 64%. And 54% of the preschoolers ended up going to college after they graduated — eight percentage points higher than their counterparts who didn't go to preschool. These effects were bigger for boys than for girls. And they're all the more remarkable because the researchers only looked at the effects of a single year of preschool, as opposed to two years of preschool (as President Biden is now proposing for the nation's youth). Moreover, in many cases, the classes were only half-day.

Intriguingly, while attending preschool at age four had clear effects on these kids' entire lives, it did not improve their performance on standardized tests. These findings fit into a large body of research that suggests the true value of preschool is helping little ones to develop "non-cognitive skills," like emotional and social intelligence, grit, and respect for the rules.

"The combination of findings — that we don't see an impact on test scores, but we do see an impact on these behavioral outcomes and the likelihood of attending college — is consistent with this idea that there's some kind of behavioral or socio-emotional, non-cognitive impact from preschool," says Christopher Walters, an economist at UC Berkeley who co-authored the study.

In other words, there's growing evidence that preschool can permanently improve kids lives — but it's not necessarily because it makes them smarter. It seems more related to making them more disciplined and motivated, which is just as important (or perhaps even more important) for their future livelihoods as how well they perform on reading or math tests.

The Bigger Picture

This latest study isn't the first to show the outsized effects of providing a preschool education. The Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman has spent many years studying the results of small, randomized experiments with preschool in the 1960s and 1970s. The most famous such experiment was The Perry Preschool Project, which was conducted in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The program provided two years of high-quality preschool for disadvantaged three- and four-year-olds.

Heckman and his colleagues found that the Perry Preschool had seismic effects on the kids who participated. They were much less likely to get arrested, go on welfare, or be unemployed as adults. They earned significantly more. In a recent study, Heckman and his team found that even the kids of the kids who went to the Perry preschool had significantly better outcomes in life.

All in all, Heckman and his team estimate that every dollar the Perry Preschool project invested in kids had a return on investment of 7-10 percent per year, through increased economic gains for the kids and decreased public spending on them through other social programs when they got older. That's a substantial return, equal to or greater than the average annual return from the stock market, and much greater than most other things our government spends money on.

Other preschool programs studied by Heckman and his colleagues have had even greater benefits. In the 1970s, a couple of programs in North Carolina experimented with high-quality childcare centers for kids. The centers offered kids aged zero to five education, medical checkups, and nutritious food. Heckman and his team found these centers delivered a 13 percent annual return on investment to the public for every dollar they invested. The program helped Heckman develop what's known as "the Heckman Curve," which asserts that the government gets more bang for the buck the earlier it provides resources to educate people. Educating toddlers, Heckman says, is much more powerful than educating high-schoolers, college students, or adults in, for example, job-training programs.

As astounding as Heckman's findings about preschool have been, naysayers have long questioned whether such effects could be replicated with larger scale programs, like the one President Biden is now proposing. This new study out of Boston, which looks at a large-scale program conducted across the entire city, is another brick in the growing edifice of evidence that shows preschool is a worthy investment, not just for kids, but for society overall.

Did you enjoy this newsletter segment? Well, it looks even better in your inbox! You can sign up here.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

; Credit: LA Johnson/NPR

Writing a graduation speech is a tricky task. Should you be funny, or sincere? Tell a story — or offer advice? For Yusef Pierce, a graduating senior in California, the job of putting together his public address was a bit more challenging.

"Being inside, I can't really refer to other graduation speeches," Pierce says. He's speaking by phone from inside the California Rehabilitation Center, a medium-security prison in Norco. "I was just trying to come up with what sounded like a graduation speech."

He is the first person to graduate with a bachelor's degree from the Inside-Out program at Pitzer College, a liberal arts school outside Los Angeles. In a normal year, the school would bring traditional students by bus to the prison to take classes alongside the students who are in prison.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, those classes are happening online. Pierce shared his Zoom square with 10 other guys, all wearing the CRC's blue uniforms and seated at those classic classroom desks, where the chair and the table are attached. This spring, his classes included topics like feminism for men, microeconomics and mass incarceration.

In one of those classes on a recent evening this spring, professor Nigel Boyle goes around asking each student what they're looking forward to doing that week. Pierce replies: "I'm looking forward to doing a lot of homework!"

"Every professor wants a Yusef in your class," says Boyle, who leads the Inside-Out program and teaches Pierce's Wednesday night class about mass incarceration. "You want that student who's bright, does the work, but is also helping to bring along the others."

It was only natural then that Pierce would be one of the college's graduation speakers.

"We don't label the student speaker as a valedictorian," explains Boyle. "But it happens that Yusef has a 4.0, and he's got a really interesting story to tell."

Pierce is in his early 30s and is a bit of a nerd and a class leader. He also writes poetry and paints. "It is true that oppression often requires that individuals make themselves extraordinary in order to simply survive," reads his artist's statement in an online exhibit of his work. "My paintings are entire conversations on canvas."

Eventually, he says, he wants to be a college professor, working with formerly incarcerated students.

"So he wants my job," says Boyle, laughing, "and he'd be much better at it than I am."

Boyle serves as the academic adviser to all of the incarcerated students, and he has become a mentor to Pierce, navigating him through the graduation process. In one of the last classes of the semester, Boyle hosts an impromptu fashion show, wearing his own blue cap and gown, backing away from the camera to give the onlooking students a full view of his outfit.

The guys inside cheer and whistle. "Do a spin," one guy shouts. "Beautiful! Beautiful!" another yells.

As the cheering dies down, Boyle looks for Pierce on the screen. "He doesn't know this, so it may be a slight surprise," he tells the class, "but, Yusef, you will also be receiving these cords." He drapes dark orange cords around his shoulders. "These cords are for students who graduate with honors in their degrees. Congratulations, Yusef, you are going to graduate with honors."

***

The story of how Yusef Pierce wound up in these college classes, wound up inside prison at all, starts with trauma. When he was a teen, his older brother was shot and killed. "He was murdered in the front yard of our home, right in front of my face," he explains, "and so I had to call my mom and let her know what had happened." All these years later, it's still something he doesn't like to talk about. He considered putting it in his graduation speech, but took it out, worried it might be too much for his mom to hear.

"It had a traumatic effect on all of us," Drochelle Pierce tells me over the phone, from her house in Victorville, Calif. She remembers a change in Yusef around that time.

"It was just kind of one thing after another. He got into a little bit of trouble. He allowed people that he associated with to kind of influence him in a direction that really wasn't him." Yusef finished high school, but in his early 20s he was arrested and convicted of armed robbery. Drochelle Pierce says she was beside herself when she learned his sentence would be nearly 20 years. "I tell you, honestly, I never envisioned that Yusef would ever go to prison. Never, never. Never."

A few months into Yusef's prison sentence, she wrote him a letter. "What's done is done," she wrote. "You, now more than ever, must diligently seek and obtain higher education."

It wasn't a new message. Education had always been at the center of her relationship with Yusef. When he was young, he remembers riding in the car with his mom, a sociology textbook open on his lap. "She wouldn't let me turn on the radio," he says. "She would make me read to her."

"Oh, I made [my kids] read everything," Drochelle Pierce says. "If they read it out loud, I knew they were reading it. That's the only way I would know that they were actually reading anything."

Today, the two talk on the phone nearly every day. "He was always a deep thinker," says Pierce. She knows she sounds like a typical proud mother, but she can't help it: "Yusef is very smart."

In California, college classes can shorten a prison sentence. So when the opportunity first arose for Yusef Pierce to take courses in prison, it felt like simply a means to an end. "I just want to get home sooner," he remembers joking with a friend at the time. "If they gave us time off for going to college, I would walk out of here with a Ph.D.!"

But by the time Pitzer College started offering classes for a bachelor's degree, Pierce found to his surprise that he really liked college.

"I loved it because it gave me validation," he says. "To know that somebody was reading my stuff and that somebody felt like the things that I was thinking about and writing were worth something. I got really addicted to that validation, and it just really turned me into an overachiever. And I just took class after class after class."

That drive paid off.

After writing and rewriting a number of drafts, on May 15 Pierce delivered his final graduation speech to hundreds of Pitzer graduates and their family members and friends. The content he landed on? That letter his mom sent him all those years ago.

"I realize now that I've saved this letter because it was meant for me way back then to share it with you all today," he says, dressed in his white cap and gown, draped in a kente stole, with the prison classroom where he has spent so much time in the background. "It reads, 'Dear son, I was so glad to see you Monday ...' "

As he reads the letter aloud, he gets to the part where his mother, a big poetry fan, included the lines from Invictus, a poem by William Ernest Henley. Pierce looks directly into the camera as he reads; he knows this part by heart.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Drochelle Pierce watched the speech on her laptop at home, with family gathered around. "We were all crying. We were just boohooing. It was just so sweet," she says.

The final line of the poem:

It matters not how strait the gate, / How charged with punishments the scroll, / I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.

"I love that so much," she says. "I sent that to my son because I wanted him to think in terms of 'OK, here you are now. What happens to you from this point going forward, it really depends on you.' "

She is proud of her son and inspired by him too. "Look what he did. He turned a bad situation into something very, very positive. Here he is, graduating with his degree."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

; Credit: LA Johnson/NPR

Undergraduate college enrollment fell again this spring, down nearly 5% from a year ago. That means 727,000 fewer students, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse.

"That's really dramatic," says Doug Shapiro, who leads the clearinghouse's research center. Fall enrollment numbers had indicated things were bad, with a 3.6% undergraduate decline compared with a year earlier, but experts were waiting to see if those students who held off in the fall would enroll in the spring. That didn't appear to happen.

"Despite all kinds of hopes and expectations that things would get better, they've only gotten worse in the spring," Shapiro says. "It's really the end of a truly frightening year for higher education. There will be no easy fixes or quick bounce backs."

Overall enrollment in undergraduate and graduate programs has been trending downward since around 2012, and that was true again this spring, which saw a 3.5% decline — seven times worse than the drop from spring 2019 to spring 2020.

The National Student Clearinghouse attributed that decline entirely to undergraduates across all sectors, including for-profit colleges. Community colleges, which often enroll more low-income students and students of color, remained hardest hit by far, making up more than 65% of the total undergraduate enrollment losses this spring. On average, U.S. community colleges saw an enrollment drop of 9.5%, which translates to 476,000 fewer students.

"The enrollment landscape has completely shifted and changed, as though an earthquake has hit the ground," says Heidi Aldes, dean of enrollment management at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, a community college in Minnesota. She says her college's fall 2020 enrollment was down about 8% from the previous year, and spring 2021 enrollment was down about 11%.

"Less students are getting an education"

Based on her conversations with students, Aldes attributes the enrollment decline to a number of factors, including being online, the "pandemic paralysis" community members felt when COVID-19 first hit, and the financial situations families found themselves in.

"Many folks felt like they couldn't afford to not work and so couldn't afford to go to school and lose that full-time income," Aldes says. "There was so much uncertainty and unpredictability."

A disproportionately high number of students of color withdrew or decided to delay their educational goals, she says, adding to equity gaps that already exist in the Minneapolis area.

"Sure, there is a fiscal impact to the college, but that isn't where my brain goes," Aldes says. "There's a decline, which means there are less students getting an education. That is the tragedy, that less students are getting an education, because we know how important education is to a successful future."

To help increase enrollment, her team is reaching out to the high school classes of 2020 and 2021, and they're contacting students who previously applied or previously enrolled and stopped attending. She says she's hopeful the college's in-person offerings — which now make up nearly 45% of its classes — will entice students to come back, and appeal to those who aren't interested in online courses. So far, enrollment numbers for fall 2021 are up by 1%. "We are climbing back," she says.

A widening divide

Despite overall enrollment declines nationally, graduate program enrollments were up by more than 120,000 students this spring. That means there are more students who already have college degrees earning more credentials, while, at the other end of the spectrum, students at the beginning of their higher ed careers are opting out — a grim picture of a widening gap in America.

"It's kind of the educational equivalent of the rich getting richer," Shapiro says. "Those gaps in education and skills will be baked into our economy, and those families' lives, for years to come."

The value of a college degree — and its impact on earning power and recession resilience — has only been reinforced by the pandemic. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans with a college degree were more likely to stay employed during the pandemic, and if they did lose a job, they were more likely to get hired again. Unemployment rates were higher for those without a degree or credential beyond high school.

"Almost all of the income gains and the employment gains for the last decade have gone to people with higher education degrees and credentials," Shapiro says. "Those who are getting squeezed out of college today, especially at community colleges, are just getting further and further away from being able to enjoy some of those benefits."

In the National Student Clearinghouse data, traditional college-aged students, those 18 to 24, were the largest age group missing from undergraduate programs. That includes many students from the high school class of 2020, who graduated at the beginning of the pandemic. Additional research from the Clearinghouse shows a 6.8% decline in college-going rates among the class of 2020 compared to the class of 2019 — that's more than four times the decline between the classes of 2018 and 2019. College-going rates were worse for students at high-poverty high schools, which saw declines of more than 11%.

For the communities and organizations tasked with helping high school graduates transition and succeed in college, the job this year is exponentially harder. Students have always struggled to attend college: "It's not new to us," says Nazy Zargarpour, who leads the Pomona Regional Learning Collaborative, which helps Southern California high school students enroll and graduate from college. "But this year, it's on steroids because of COVID."

Her organization is offering one-on-one outreach to students to help them enroll or re-enroll in college. As part of that effort, Zargarpour and her colleagues conducted research to help them understand why students didn't go on to college during the pandemic.

"Students told us that it's a variety of things, including a lot of just life challenges," she says. "Families being disrupted because of lack of work; families being disrupted because of the challenges of the illness itself; students having to take care of their young siblings; challenges with technology."

The biggest question now: Will those students return to college? Experts say the farther a student gets from their high school graduation, the less likely they are to enroll, because life gets in the way. But Zargarpour is hopeful.

"It will take a little bit of time for us to catch up to normal and better, but my heart can't bear to say all hope is lost for any student ever."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Students work on a classroom exercise at a school in Kibera, a poor neighborhood in Nairobi, Kenya.; Credit: Tony Karumba/AFP via Getty Images

You'd think the best way to get girls to succeed in school would to be design programs specifically for them — offer them mental health support or free menstrual pads.

But a new study, published in May in the journal World Bank Economic Review, begs to differ. Researchers David Evans and Fei Yuan reviewed 267 studies of education programs from 54 low- and middle-income countries to find the most effective ways to get more girls in school and improve their learning. Globally, more than 130 million girls remain out of school, according to the World Bank, due to poverty, child marriage and violence.

Instead of only examining girls' education programs, they looked at all kinds of programs. To measure access, they analyzed enrollment rates, attendance, drop-out, graduation and completion rates, and to measure performance, they looked at test scores.

Their biggest finding is that gender-neutral programs — such as handing out cash aid to families of school-aged children — can be just as effective at improving girls' education as programs designed just for girls.

The study is among the first to look both at ways to boost girls' access to school as well as their classroom performance, says Markus Goldstein, lead economist at the World Bank's Africa Gender Innovation Lab, who did not work on the report.

We spoke with Evans, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, and Yuan, a doctoral candidate in education policy and program evaluation at Harvard University, to discuss the best ways to boost education for girls in low- and middle-income countries. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What inspired you to conduct this study?

Evans: A lot of the previous work that examined this issue have focused on programs targeted to needs that are unique to girls, such as menstrual health. Those are worthy interventions, but if we only focus on programs that target girls, we might miss programs that benefit girls a lot but happen to help boys as well.

That's why we decided to look at all of the interventions we know of to identify the ones that are most effective at improving outcomes for girls, regardless of whether they're specifically for girls or not.

You found that the most effective programs for getting more girls into school cut the cost of education for students, regardless of gender, and their families. What are some examples of programs that worked well?

Evans: A lot of the most effective programs are ones that either eliminate school fees, provide scholarships or provide families a cash transfer to cover the other costs of having their daughter in school.

For example, in Ghana, lots of girls and boys pass their secondary school entrance exam, but they don't have the money to pay school fees. So, a program there provided scholarships to students who had already passed the entrance exam. It dramatically increased the high-school graduation rate of girls by 66%.

But the most effective interventions are those that address costs related to specific obstacles that girls face in a particular setting. In Afghanistan, for example, a [non-gendered] program built schools in rural communities. It decreased [the cost of] travel to school for both girls and boys and led to a more than 50% increase in girls' participation in primary school. That's dramatic.

Which programs were the most helpful for improving a girl's school performance, as opposed to just getting them into the classroom?

Evans: The most effective interventions to increase learning were programs that improved the quality of teaching. But it's not just throwing teachers into a conference room and giving them some lecture. It's also not about throwing fancy technology, like laptops or tablets, at classrooms. Hardware doesn't work. It's distracting for teachers and students.

Instead, a literacy program – which included coaching teachers, providing them with detailed teachers' guides and providing students with books – had a big impact on girls' education [in terms of test scores] in Kenya. So did another program in Kenya that helped teachers to teach children in a language they spoke at home (rather than English).

Were there any other types of programs that helped girls learn better in the classroom?

Yuan: Another intervention worth mentioning is called Teaching at the Right Level, based in India. The idea is that students in the same classroom may have many different reading levels. But because of constraints like large class sizes, teachers may not be able to tailor their teaching to the right level for every student. This leaves some students behind.

Teaching at the Right Level facilitated summer camps in which children were grouped by reading level, instead of age or grade. This allowed teachers to target their teaching to the specific levels of these students. In one region, after 50 days of focused teaching in these camps, children at the lowest achievement levels in India were able to catch up to the learning level of the third-highest achieving state in the country.

Many of the high-impact interventions you're referencing don't target girls specifically. Are you saying that girls' programs aren't necessary?

Evans: Not at all! We particularly focused on how to increase access to education and improve quality of learning. Some [girl-focused] programs have other goals – such as reducing violence against girls, improving girls' psychological and emotional wellbeing, reducing adolescent pregnancy or helping girls to transition from school to the workforce.

But when teaching is of bad quality, we just need to help schools improve the teaching. That's not necessarily a gender-specific problem.

Wouldn't it be more cost-effective to just offer scholarships or cash transfers to girls only instead of both genders, especially if far fewer girls are attending school than boys?

Evans: Sure, if you don't have the budget to waive school fees for everyone, eliminating school fees for girls is an effective way to do a girl-targeted program. That's what The Gambia did. But sometimes general, non-targeted interventions are more politically palatable for governments, since constituents have both daughters and sons.

Were you concerned that some of the gender-neutral programs might benefit boys more than girls?

Evans: That was something we were worried about – increasing inequality. But we found that overall, the impact of gender-neutral programs tends to be slightly larger on girls than boys both in terms of access and learning. These differences, for the most part, were not statistically significant. They were small. But it does mean that these general, non-targeted interventions are not increasing inequality between boys and girls. If anything, they're likely to decrease it.

What changes do you hope to see in how we work on girls' education around the world?

Evans: We want to make sure that people who care about girls' education draw on the full toolbox of programs that can improve girls' education. That includes girl-targeted programs. It also includes general programs.

We don't anyone to walk away from this and say, 'Oh, we don't need to worry about girls.' Instead, it means that if we are worried about girls, we have a broader array of tools to help them.

Joanne Lu is a freelance journalist who covers global poverty and inequity. Her work has appeared in Humanosphere, The Guardian, Global Washington and War is Boring. Follow her on Twitter: @joannelu

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that low-level crack cocaine offenders cannot benefit from a 2018 federal law.; Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that some crack cocaine offenders sentenced to harsh prison terms more than a decade ago cannot get their sentences reduced under a federal law adopted with the purpose of doing just that.

At issue in the case was the long and now notorious history of sentencing under the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which established harsh mandatory prison sentences based on the amount of drugs that the defendant possessed or sold. The triggering amount, however, was different for crack cocaine used most often by Black people, and powder cocaine, used most often by whites.

Indeed, the ratio was 100-to-1, so that a five-year mandatory minimum penalty, for instance, was triggered by possession of 5 grams of crack, whereas the same penalty was triggered by 500 grams of powder cocaine.

Nine years after enactment of these mandatory penalties, the U.S. Sentencing Commission found these disparities unjustified, and by 2010 Congress passed new legislation to reduce the disparity to from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1. But that left everyone previously sentenced under the old regime stuck with the harsher penalties. And in 2018, Congress passed and then-President Donald Trump signed into law a bipartisan bill to make the new ratios retroactive.

That allowed thousands of crack offenders who were serving prison sentences to be resentenced under the new law and new sentencing guidelines, with an average reduction of six years in their sentences. But while the new law allowed even drug kingpins to be resentenced, some prisoners were left out — a number now in the low hundreds, according to the Biden administration.

One of those was the prisoner at the center of Monday's case, Tarahrick Terry, sentenced to nearly 16 years in prison for possession with intent to distribute 3.9 grams of crack cocaine, less than the weight of four paper clips.

He claimed that his sentence, like others, should be revised in light of the 2018 law, but the Supreme Court rejected that argument. Writing for the court, Justice Clarence Thomas noted that Terry had been sentenced under a section of the law that applied to "career criminals," those who had two previous drug or violent convictions. Terry did, in fact, have two previous drug convictions as a teenager — for which he spent 120 days in jail.

So, as Thomas observed, Terry was sentenced under the provision of the law that was not included in the 2018 revision.

Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin and Cory Booker and Republican Sens. Charles Grassley and Mike Lee — the sponsors and drafters of the act — warned in a friend of the court brief filed in the case that excluding low-level offenders from the act's reforms would mean ignoring its purpose. "Had Congress intended to exclude individuals with low-level crack offenses from relief," they wrote, "Congress of course could have done so."

Thomas and the rest of the court rejected that argument. "We will not convert nouns to adjectives and vice versa," wrote Thomas, which is what he said Congress was asking the court to do. The 2018 law, he said, did not change the section of the law under which Terry was sentenced, so the argument that the revision modified the whole law just wouldn't wash.

Although the decision was unanimous, it included an interesting back-and-forth about race between Thomas, the only African American on the court and arguably its most conservative member, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, its only Hispanic and arguably most liberal member. Specifically, their disagreement was about the role race played in the adoption of mandatory minimum sentences that were wildly more harsh for possession or sale of crack cocaine than for powder cocaine.

As Thomas saw it, the 100-to-1 ratio for crack cocaine was enacted "with near unanimity" by Congress, because of two concerns expressed by Black leaders at the time: First, that crack "was fueling crime against residents in the inner cities who were predominantly black," and second that "prosecutors were not taking these kinds of crimes seriously enough because the victims were disproportionately black." Moreover, he quoted a 1995 U.S. Sentencing Commission report that concluded the 100-to-1 ratio created "a perception of unfairness," even though there was no reason to believe that "racial bias or animus undergirded the initiation of the federal sentencing law."

In a concurring opinion, Sotomayor declined to join that part of Thomas' opinion, because "it includes an unnecessary, incomplete, and sanitized history of the 100-to-1 ratio," including "race-based myths" about crack cocaine.

"The full history is far less benign," she said. It ignores the fact that Black leaders were promised federal investment in longer term solutions — including in job training and education programs — but that help never arrived. Nor, she noted, did the majority opinion mention that the bill containing the 100-to-1 ratio was "rush[ed] through to pass dramatic drug legislation before the midterm elections," and that the legislative history of the bill offered no justification for the 100-to-1 ratio, "save that it was the highest ratio proposed."

"Most egregiously, the Court barely references the ratio's real-world impact" — one so profound and unjustified, as demonstrated by subsequent research — "that the [Congressional Black Caucus] came together in unanimous and increasingly vocal opposition to the law."

In the end, however, Sotomayor agreed that "unfortunately," the reading of the law urged by the primary sponsors of the 2018 revision is not born out by the text. "Fortunately," she added, "Congress has numerous tools to right this injustice."

As for prisoner Terry, who brought Monday's case, he is now in the final months of his prison term, and according to the Biden administration is serving his remaining time in home confinement.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.