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While the Boston School Department’s budget crisis ensured that some jobs would be cut, the numbers announced by Superintendent Carol Johnson last week are staggering. A full 900 positions will be eliminated, including 403 in teaching. This translates to a six-percent reduction in the city’s teaching staff and a corresponding increase in class sizes, just as City Hall was turning its focus to boosting school performance. The city cannot look to the state for help, as Governor Deval L. Patrick ’78 has promised to hold education spending constant...
...subtler ways as well. They can undermine the long-term prosperity of the nation, denying the America of 10 or 20 years from now the well educated workforce it will need. Harvard economics professors Claudia Godin and Lawrence Katz have estimated that increasing education led to a 0.37-percent rise in productivity among American workers since 1915. Education cuts threaten to stifle this growth and jeopardize American productivity and long-run economic expansion. This effect could be particularly disastrous given that local political factors often prevent education cuts from being easily reversed. If shrinking budgets like those being implemented...
...imposed and absurdly doctrinaire—after all, the federation does claim to advocate for a universal right to abortion on demand from puberty onward. Any practical difficulty in compliance would have been minor since, when the policy was implemented, abortion and related services accounted for less than one percent of IPPF’s budget...
...Experience shows that rejecting that model is both feasible and advantageous. A review of the effects of the Hyde Amendment by the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute found that it reduced the abortion rate of women on Medicaid by as much as 37 percent, with a negligible impact on maternal mortality. If you think such results are not replicable in the developing world, look at Nicaragua. In 2006, it adopted one of the strictest abortion laws in the world, yet in the following year it saw a 58-percent drop in its maternal mortality rate...
Harvard researchers have successfully tested a new cancer vaccine in mice that could make previously expensive treatments accessible outside state-of-the-art medical centers. The therapy—which destroyed tumors in 90 percent of mice tested—uses small implants to avoid costly cell reprogramming outside the body. The latter technique requires practitioners to have extensive training and specialized facilities that are only available at elite hospitals. The findings, published in the journal Nature Materials last month, seek to combat those tumors that fool the immune system’s normal process of identifying dangerous substances. Normally...