Musing

Past Academic, Drug‐Related and Sexual Behaviors Predict Risky Sex After High School

MY FARMING skills extend only as far as the backyard vegetable garden, but I know what it means to eat the seed corn. For whatever reasons people -- or societies -- are driven to such an extreme, they will be consuming their own future. Unfortunately, that is what the Bush Administration's budget is proposing for the several million young people who have already left school or are edging out before graduation. At the U.S. Department of Education, a frantic effort is under way to develop regulations for the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which emphasizes children in grades K-8. Its reading initiative and Title I provisions, for example, focus on the early grades. Meanwhile, over at the U.S. Department of Labor, federal officials aren't sweating over what to do about young people who haven't benefited from current reforms (high schools, after all, have changed very little). They just want to phase out or severely reduce the few programs designed to hold on to vulnerable young people. Officials explain that the programs have not proved themselves successful. This is a somewhat disingenuous excuse, considering that the funds, at least for the Youth Opportunity Grants, became available only 18 months ago. The Administration's proposed budget would cut youth programs in the Department of Labor by 11%, most of it taken from the Youth Opportunities Grants. In the new budget, that program would be down to just $45 million from $225 million this fiscal year. The budget would also reduce funding for the youth activities under the Workforce Investment Act, namely the Youth Advisory Councils. In sum, the Bush Administration doesn't seem to care much about young people who are about to enter the work force -- or the streets. So why should anyone except a young person ill prepared for work be concerned? Because these young people are our seed corn. On average, 800,000 young people in this country drop out of high school every year. Over a decade, that's eight million potential workers, students, active citizens, and parents. Moreover, within two years, kindergarten enrollments will begin to decline, and, as the changes in demographics roll through the schools, we can anticipate considerably fewer high school students (except in a few states on the eastern seaboard and a few others in the far West). In a demographic study for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, Harold Hodgkinson comments, If you built schools for the 1.6 million more high school children from 1995 to 2005, many of them will be empty in 10 years. Because of these demographic changes, the growth of the labor force will be down to just 1% annually by 2015 and down to 0.2% by 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In other words, we need to make sure that every young person in this country can be productive. The practical reason is that they will be needed by the economy. And if you anticipate retiring before all this comes to pass, think of who (and how many) will be contributing to your Social Security. Ideally, schools ought to make sure that all students earn at least a high school diploma. But only a handful of schools do, and many urban high schools lose half of their students before graduation day. It will be a long time before such schools have the capacity to keep young people engaged. Yet out in the neighborhoods surrounding these schools there are places and programs that offer hope to young people who are looking for a way back to the main road, according to Dorothy Stoneman, president of YouthBuild USA. Started in East Harlem in the 1970s, this organization provides education, training, and youth development opportunities for young people as they work to refurbish housing in their low-income communities. …

A Thousand Faces Jessie van Eerden (bio) Hard to brush the West Texas wind from my hair. All the silt and mesquite smoke knotted up. One morning he climbs the hill, always with pen and notebook, whistling like a surreptitious bird to let me know where he is. The mist rises from the river warmer than the cold air and, still in camp, I pull on all my thermal layers and start to brush my hair. Same long johns and wool socks, same enormous Chihuahuan Desert silence, his man-size self gone small up on the bluff. I spend considerable time on the knots, then climb the hill to him, following turkey and wild mule tracks across the washes, passing signs of an old firepit and possible shelter, some cans and blue glass—no plastics, so an old site. Despite the leave-no-trace protocols, I always want to see the traces, am heartened by somebody’s edibles wrapper, the old blue glass, a shoe sewn together many times, then discarded at the camp on the Mexican side where they once made wax from candelilla. From the hilltop, we can see across the few miles to the canyon we’ve just paddled through. Downriver, a ranch, an old water tower, the invisible sound of someone running a chainsaw. We drove out here to West Texas from Virginia, canoe strapped to the Subaru roof, to paddle the Rio Grande through Boquillas Canyon, to see the world laid bare. Seeking the most elemental sort of revelation: stone unto wind and water and all stages of winter light. Revelation from the Latin [End Page 89] stem revelare: to unveil, uncover, lay bare. We wanted to see how an ancient river has unveiled faces in the canyon wall, cutting the rock downward over millions of years as the western rim of the Sierra Del Carmen rose. How the slow river has shown the path through limestone and shaley slope to the feral horse and the lion. We have made this trip during the COVID-19 pandemic. We minimize contact at gas stations, keep rubbing alcohol in the car and masks on the dash, aware the Texas infection rates are dismal. We both teach at a university on winter break, and our middle-age togetherness, after failed marriages, is relatively new, just over a year old. I harbor that basic desire, too, then, to know more deeply the person I love, to have him laid bare. May we see each other’s faces in a new light, out of our semester routines. From motels on the drive out, he calls his children nightly at their mother’s. I have no children of my own and that I also carry, a question that might yield, who knows, under desert light. It is late December. We have shifted our noses to the southwest, like the lucky beasts we are. In my hair, the wind through the carrizo cane, the black phoebes crying out, tying knots. ________ Come, morning, and remake us and all the grasses and silver-iced trees and the rye grasses, the butternut trees. A small fable of revelation from my childhood: A girl heads out, in the late-fall cold of hardwood mountains, to make a leaf rubbing. How to choose—the poplar, the black walnut, or sassafras? Dawn pinks up her face; she takes her time choosing. She picks up several to press in a book, the serrated and veined, all crisp with color. She holds each petiole, the midrib like a tiny spine. For the rubbing, she chooses a sugar maple glowing gold-orange-red as if painted. She sets the leaf on a smooth, hard place and overlays her paper and rubs her charcoal flat-side down. The outline says hello. Into being comes the jagged lobe, the gutter of sinus, a lobe again, and another, the bones clean in their bright-dark presence. She loves how the leaf is remade on the page torn from her notebook, a full nothing until the charcoal scrubs and discovers. This is revelation. [End Page 90] In this fable, the girl is growing up in a tucked-away mountain church and thus learns young...

Underground Railroads: Performance and Community at the Underground Railroad Theater’s Youth Program Maggie Moore Abdow (bio) This article is based on an interview with Maggie Moore Abdow, director of the Underground Railroad Theater’s Youth Program (Cambridge MA) since 2004, and her summary of that exchange. The interview (11/3/2009) was conducted by Saul Slapikoff, member of Radical Teacher’s editorial group and former board member of URT. The theater was founded in Oberlin, Ohio. Its name honors the fact that Oberlin was one of the last stops on the Midwestern Branch of the Underground Railroad. Active for some 30 years, URT has a history of outreach to underserved families, with shows for young audiences, families, and adults performed across the United States and internationally. Its Community and Education Program functions through performance and rigorous community and education programming. (The cluster editors) Collaboration is never easy, and all the more so when it aims to bring [End Page 56] controversial issues to public attention. For the young people involved in the Underground Railroad Theater’s Youth Program (Youth Underground) in Cambridge, MA, the challenge is also to find ways of positioning themselves in relation to their families, communities, and schools, especially as they, and many in their audience too, may be exploring and grappling with the very issues raised in their performances. Inevitably, these young people face new and often unanticipated challenges, putting themselves on the line. Alongside them, the challenge is also for the adults working with these youth, notably Maggie Moore Abdow as program director and Vincent Earnest Siders as teacher and drama director, working together since the program was first piloted four years ago. This is what faced members of the Underground Railroad Theater’s Youth Program and their mentors in 2008, when they set out to perform in Voices in Conflict, about the current Iraq war, and then Swords into Ploughshares in 2009, which explored historic instances of peaceful resistance. In the summer of 2009, URT’s Youth Program also hosted the Palestinian Al-Rowwad cultural group— young people from Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, Palestine, who brought to the United States a theatrical production they created concerning their lives in a refugee camp in occupied Palestine. As can be expected, the challenges for Youth Underground never let up. Each performance had its own focus and core commitment to a collaboration that would culminate in public performance, but each also faced its own contingencies. Thematically, these three projects’ focus on conflicts and resolutions put them in an inspiring if painful dialogue with one another to begin with. But at times this challenge was made even more difficult because of personal circumstances such as disciplinary problems at school, loss of family members in the Haiti earthquake, and other difficulties that inevitably affect high school students, especially those from vulnerable homes and neighborhoods. Since such problems cannot be kept out of the rehearsal room, a major task facing the group was to find ways to channel differences and difficulties into powerful and coherent performance. In Cambridge, MA, this meant negotiating neighborhood loyalties and difference— loyalties that emerge powerfully as the graduates of eleven K-8 primary schools converge on the one high school that is to serve all. In this sudden encounter, differences of class, race, ethnicity, and academic performance emerge starkly. A visit to the lunch room will show readily how Cambridge youth self-segregate into groups based on neighborhood identity: North Cambridge, Coast and Port (abutting the Charles River), East and West Cambridge, and Area 4. Except for the wealthy West Cambridge, all these ethnically diverse neighborhoods include subsidized Section 8 housing, with Area 4 the only one referred to by its police designation. Though it is understood among these young people that one does not cross neighborhood boundaries or cross-socialize in class, the Youth Underground, especially through its summer program, does create a neutral territory that lets these young people continue their relationships outside of the theater and in school. This challenge of creating cohesion despite the differences and antagonisms that bubble up at high school affects Youth Underground’s efforts to recruit [End Page 57] its members and maintain continuity. Other...

Assessment of the 12-lead ECG as a screening test for detection of cardiovascular disease in healthy general populations of young people (12-25 Years of Age): a scientific statement from the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology.

Achieving Transportation Equity: How Can We Support Young People’s Autonomy and Health in a Rapidly Changing Society?

The Evidence for SBIRT in Adolescents

Reviewed by: God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success by Ilana M. Horowitz Robert Benne God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success. By Ilana M. Horowitz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 240 pp. The author, Ilana Horowitz, has as interesting a history as the subject matter of her book. She was born in the Soviet Union of non-religious Jewish parents who had to hide whatever Jewish rituals they had left. After immigrating to the United States she went to non-religious Jewish schools and continued her agnosticism. She entered an elite university, Stanford, and earned a Ph.D. in sociology. It was a great surprise to her to live in a neighborhood where many Christian families were devoutly religious. She began wondering how their religious intensity affected the educational outcomes of their children. Finding little research on that subject, she plunged into extensive empirical research and produced this book. [End Page 112] Her research shows that an "upbringing of religious restraint" leads to better educational outcomes for young people. By "religious restraint" she means that such young people are taught to be disciplined, respectful of elders and teachers, and devoted "to live a life that is pleasing to God" (15–17). They have higher grades and rates of graduation than similar young people who are not seriously religious. This difference is particularly true of working- and middle-class youngsters. There is not such a large difference between religious and secular children of highly educated upper-middle and higher-class parents. While the religiously intense young tend to do better with regard to grades and graduation in the lower grades and high school, they do not aim at elite education beyond high school. They do not aspire to go to the top schools. On the surface, this seems odd, but there are interesting reasons why the religious do not aim for the highest ranked schools. First, they do not pursue elite levels because that has little to do with living a life pleasing to God. They think they can get as well prepared for their vocations in nearby schools that are not so highly ranked. Second, as elite colleges exhibit more "wokeness," the religious young—reinforced by their parents—shy away from them. The author thinks this is a shame because such students would add religious and viewpoint diversity to those elite schools (177). Another interesting finding is that "abiders"—another word she uses for the seriously religious—tend to make less money than their secular counterparts. One reason is that they want more time with their families than high octane work allows. Another is that they like to live in areas that are more religious rather than the highly secular environs of large cities where more money can be made (179). There are other goods associated with the religiously intense. "They are significantly less likely to experience emotional, cognitive, or physical despair. They feel less anxious, healthier, and more optimistic about life" (179). They are content with social order, including traditional gender norms (181). The author even suggests that the decline of religion among young people is less than fearful Christians believe (11). Perhaps most encouraging to religious adults is that these young people take their Christianity into their public, secular lives (173). [End Page 113] All and all, this book offers some hope to Christians in a world that seems to be becoming more hostile to religion, especially orthodox religion. I found it very encouraging. While the book is very comprehensive, there is one gap that I wish she would have covered. How many serious young Christians are now home-schooled or go to Christian schools? There seems to be an ever greater number taking those routes, partly because their families believe that public schools are increasingly under the sway of anti-Christian ideologies. The author seems oblivious to those developments. Nevertheless, this is a very substantial book that should bring some satisfaction to Christians who worry about the decline of Christian faith and life in the next generations. Robert Benne Institute of Lutheran Theology Brookings, South Dakota Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

Economics Education and the Great Recession Richard Neumann (bio) One significant difference between the current Great Recession and the deep recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s is that no one is blaming public education for the crisis. No National Commission on Excellence in Education (authors of A Nation at Risk, 1983) has been appointed to make a case that public schools' ineffectiveness in preparing a competitive workforce brought about the economic meltdown. No claims have been made that higher average Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), American College Test (ACT), or National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, or better ranking of American students on international math tests would have prevented the malaise that now besets our economy. But is public education really off the hook? Do most high school graduates have adequate knowledge and skills for political participation? Do most have a good understanding of the relationship between economics and politics; of the influence of corporations, political action committees, and lobbyists on policy development? Do most have the knowledge and disposition to deliberate critically about a political platform of deregulation and the potential consequences of dismantling [End Page 36] regulations on financial institutions? Do they have the wisdom, capacity, and initiative to help our nation avert catastrophe? As I argue below, the answer to these questions is no: shortcomings of public education in preparing young people for democratic citizenship have played a central role in the current economic crisis. While these deficiencies are many, this discussion focuses on just one part of the terrain—economics education. Click for larger view View full resolution Neon Boneyard, Las Vegas, Nevada Most Americans have not had formal education in economics. A little more than a quarter (27.5%) of American adults over age 25 hold a bachelors degree. At the turn of the century, an estimated 40% of college students had taken a course in economics as part of their degree program. For most Americans, formal education in economics, if any, is obtained in high school: 84.5% of citizens over age 25 have a high school diploma; in recent years approximately 41-43% of high school seniors have taken an economics course.1 In 2007, 40 states required economics standards to be implemented, but only 17 states required an economics course be taken for high school graduation. Testing of students' economics knowledge occurred in 23 states in 2007, two fewer than 2004.2 For students who complete a high school economics course, the outcomes are not encouraging. An assessment of high school students' knowledge conducted in 2000, using the validity and reliability-verified Test of Economic Literacy, found "there are significant deficiencies in the economic understanding of typical high-school students, whether or not they have taken an economics course." [End Page 37] The study involved 7,243 students in 384 classes in 36 states.3 Another indicator of young peoples' economics knowledge is NAEP, an ambitious effort created by Congress in 1969 to measure student achievement that some refer to as the nation's report card. Results from the first NAEP survey of economics knowledge in grade 12 reveal that 58% of students scored below the "proficient" level. The 2006 NAEP economics assessment reportedly asked students to answer questions regarding "market, national, and international economies," but it does not indicate that students were asked questions concerning their understanding of the influence of lobbyists and of corporate contributions to political campaigns on the development of economic policy, or the potential impact of weak regulation of financial institutions on U.S. and international economies. The report does, however, provide an example of the level of economics understanding that students performing at the "basic" level, the level achieved by most test-takers, should be able to demonstrate: "the ability to recognize the inverse relationship between the market price of a product and the amount buyers are willing and able to purchase." As necessary as this ability may be, the level of understanding it reflects is hard to characterize as even "basic," given the economic issues citizens must grapple with in our society.4 The Economics Framework for the 2006 National Assessment of Educational Progress is based on the following definition of economic literacy...

BackgroundThe rise in cervical cancer trends in the past two decades has coincided with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic especially in the sub-Saharan African region. Young people (15 to 24 years old) are associated with many risk factors such as multiple sexual partners, early sexual debut, and high HIV incidences, which increase the chances of developing cervical cancer. The National Cancer Prevention and Control Strategy for Zimbabwe (2014–2018) highlights that no cancer communication strategy focusing on risk factors as primary cancer prevention. Therefore, the study aims to determine the knowledge, attitude and practices of young people in Zimbabwe on cervical cancer, screening, human papillomavirus (HPV) and vaccination.MethodsA cross-sectional survey assessing young people’s knowledge, attitude and practices concerning cervical cancer was conducted in five provinces in Zimbabwe. A total of 751 young people were recruited through a three-stage cluster design from high schools and universities. Knowledge, attitudes and practices were assessed using questions based and adapted from the concepts of the Health Belief Model (HBM) and the Cervical Cancer Measuring tool kit-United Kingdom (UK).ResultsMost young people, 87.47% (656/750) claimed to know what the disease called cervical cancer is, with a mean score of 89.98% [95% CI 73.71.11–96.64] between high school and 86.72% [95% CI 83.48–89.40] among university students. There was no significant difference in mean scores between high school and university students (p = 0.676). A risk factor knowledge proficiency score of ≥13 out of 26 was achieved in only 13% of the high school respondents and 14% of the university respondents with a broad range of misconceptions about cervical cancer risk factors in both females and males. There was not much difference on comprehensive knowledge of cervical cancer and its risk factors between female and male students, with the difference in knowledge scores among high school (p = 0.900) and university (p = 0.324) students not statistically significant. In contrast, 43% of respondents heard of cervical cancer screening and prevention, and 47% knew about HPV transmission and prevention. Parents’ educational level, province and smoking, were some of the factors associated with knowledge of and attitude towards cervical among high school and university students.ConclusionThis study revealed that young people in Zimbabwe have an idea about cervical cancer and the seriousness thereof, but they lack adequate knowledge of risk factors. Cervical cancer education and awareness emphasising causes, risk factors and care-seeking behaviours should be commissioned and strengthen at the community, provincial and national level. Developing a standard cervical cancer primary prevention tool that can be integrated into schools can be a step towards addressing health inequity.

The ‘Lisbon strategy’, adopted by the member states of the European Union (EU) in 2000, aims to make Europe the most dynamic and competitive knowledge‐based economy in the world by 2010. The overall aim is to increase the levels of investment that member states put into scientific research up to and beyond 3% of their Gross Domestic Product. Although this aim will certainly not be met in the expected timeframe, it is noble and important nonetheless. > …even if the members of the EU increase investment into research, it will be in vain if they do not also work to increase the number of researchers However, even if the members of the EU increase investment into research, it will be in vain if they do not also work to increase the number of researchers. Indeed, the current number of researchers per 100,000 citizens in the EU is considerably lower than the figure for the USA or Japan. As scientists, we have virtually no possibility to influence how much money our governments spend on research and development, but we can have a much more active role in making science a more attractive career option for young people—notably high‐school students. Various projects and initiatives in EU countries and the USA have sought to achieve this aim by forging closer links between schools and universities or research institutes. Here, we describe the Cus‐Mi‐Bio (Centre University School of Milan for Bioscience Education; www.cusmibio.unimi.it) project that was developed at the University of Milano, Italy. The project's aim is to raise the levels of interest and enthusiasm of high‐school students for the life sciences, and hopefully to attract some of them to a career in science. There are various negative perceptions of science that need to be overcome when persuading students that it is a worthy career …

Steve Ricci (1952–2020) Eric Smoodin (bio) I met Steve Ricci for the first time in September 1977, when I began the master's program, in what was then called critical studies, at UCLA. Steve had begun his MA just one year before, but he already seemed so far advanced, so ahead of most of us. That wasn't because of any intellectual showmanship or posturing. Rather, Steve was just very, very smart, and very committed, even then, to his scholarship. At least to me, he also looked the part; he had that great, thick head of longish hair and the round glasses with dark frames, and he was usually smoking European cigarettes and, at department parties at least, always sipping from a glass of Scotch. He may have been out of central casting as a 1970s-style film studies intellectual, but he was also the real deal. And as so many of us can attest, he was warm and approachable. When I was a teaching assistant for the first time, a year later, and a little panicked about how to grade student papers, I went to Steve for help. I had watched him, in the TA office, make meticulous comments on papers and type long narratives at the end of each one, and he was kind enough to walk me through a few grading lessons, suggesting what I might look for and the things I might ask students to work on. Even then, Steve had significant connections to Europe, especially Italy. He was responsible for one of my first publications, when I was still in grad school, a piece I wrote for a seminar about early television that Steve sent along to an Italian editorial collective, which then translated and included it in a book about Hollywood. I don't mean for these stories to be simply about my relationship with Steve. He and I were friends and grad school colleagues, but there were lots of people at the time, and in the program, to whom he was much closer. Instead, these are stories that are typical of Steve. After we both left grad school, I would see him now and again, occasionally, when I came back to Los Angeles, or at a Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, or someplace else. Those visits became much fewer and [End Page 307] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Steve Ricci. Photograph courtesy of Steve's wife, Mannig Gurekian. further between after Steve experienced significant health problems—every so often, on Facebook, when the Lakers won an important game, or on a birthday, or just through a quick comment on some photo or other. When Steve died, I read some of the online appreciations. They supplied information that I already knew about Steve's terrific scholarship, from The Mexican Cinema Project in 1994 to his groundbreaking study, Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943, from 2008. I had known broadly about his archival work and especially that he had been the founding director of UCLA's moving image archives studies program. But I hadn't known all of the details: his curatorial work in Italy, for instance, or the contributions he made to the American Film Institute, or his extensive service for the International Federation of Film Archives. The clearest image I have of Steve is still from more than forty years ago, talking about semiotics or psychoanalysis or especially Marxism. I know that there are so many friends from grad school, from Steve's long career as an archivist, from his life as a teacher, who think of him, as I do, as a vibrant presence in their lives. For those who knew him, for his family especially and for his many friends and colleagues, may his memory be a blessing. [End Page 308] Eric Smoodin Eric Smoodin is professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis. He is the author, most recently, of Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light (2020). Copyright © 2021 Association of Moving Image Archivists

Indonesian society is a pluralistic society, so it needs understanding of multicultural values ​​in every interaction through education. Cultural diversity must be understood and accepted as a uniqueness that is able to bring Indonesian society in the heterogeneous life of society. Schools play a key role in how an educational institution is able to transmit multicultural values. This study raises the problem (1) the application of multicultural context in the study of writing poetry in high school; and (2) student learning outcomes on the application of multicultural contexts on learning to write poetry in high school. This research design using qualitative descriptive approach through step 1: Preliminary observation, step 2: developing learning tools, compiling materials, and evaluation guides, step 3: applying the multicultural context to the learning of writing poetry to the class which is the activity enforcement in a classroom learning, 4) step 4: Formative evaluation and description of research results. The application of multicultural context in learning to write poetry is done through preliminary activities, core, follow-up, and reflection. Student attitudes after applied multicultural contexts begin to enthusiastically pay attention to teachers and mostly seem to seriously engage in discussion activities with group members. The skills of writing poetry on the aspect of the accuracy of word selection or diction, topics, and the message, have met the good category. In the skill students are able to choose the right word or diction, determine the theme, and understand the cultural differences that exist around them to be positively responded. Students are also quite able to understand the mandate implied in the poem to apply to everyday life.

Teenagers, young people and family planning a survey in five Romanian high schools

Teenagers, young people and family planning: a survey in five Romanian high schools