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Blog No. 30. A Good Day at the White House: “My Brother’s Keeper” and Food Labeling.

The Obama Administration has not had many good days in quite a while, and with the arrival of the crisis in Ukraine, it may not have many for some time. Yet last Thursday, February 27, just before Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea, it was a day at the White House that deserves to be remembered with favorable nods to both the President and First Lady.

For his part, President Obama spoke eloquently of the circumstances of black and Hispanic young men and announced a new initiative, “My Brother’s Keeper,” to address those circumstances. Later that day, Michelle Obama appeared with the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, to announce proposed new rules for food labeling, a project that she had been working on for several years. Each announcement, we believe, was one that Republicans can applaud (or at least quietly approve).Read More »Blog No. 30. A Good Day at the White House: “My Brother’s Keeper” and Food Labeling.

Blog No. 27. Pre-K Education: Great Debate or Great Puzzle?

Letter puzzle - BLog 27 Pre-KRINOcracy.com believes strongly that early education is important, and that it is imperative in the case of children of lower socioeconomic status. Indeed, It appears that Head Start might have been more aptly named “Catching Up.”  An October 22 article in the New York Times reported a recent study showing that the educational handicaps of such children can be observed from almost the very start:

New research by Anne Fernald, a psychologist at Stanford University, which was published in Developmental Science this year, showed that at 18 months children from wealthier homes could identify pictures of simple words they knew — “dog” or “ball” — much faster than children from low-income families. By age 2, the study found, affluent children had learned 30 percent more words in the intervening months than the children from low-income homes.

If the Republican Party is to live up to its aspiration of being “the party of opportunity,” as the 2012 Platform proclaimed, it has no more important task than bringing opportunity to those children.  But, how to do that is not so clear.Read More »Blog No. 27. Pre-K Education: Great Debate or Great Puzzle?