News and Opinions

This podcast episode features researchers from Baby’s First Years, a multi-year effort to test the connections between poverty reduction and brain development among very young children.

Duke student Phoebe Ducote writes about her recent experience meeting with the Wilson Lecture speaker, Adam Benforado, who recently spoke at the Sanford School of Public Policy.

Experts from Duke University are among a group of 161 researchers worldwide who made the discovery after examining data from thousands of patients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Unpredictable and involuntary income fluctuations negatively impact consumption, parenting, and children’s schooling beyond the effects of income level.

As we celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month, lawmakers should take a closer look at Latino families to find new ideas and solutions. To lift children out of poverty, we need an updated blueprint for policy conversations…

A Census report released in September determined that the poverty rate more than doubled from 5.2% to 12.4% in 2022. The reason, in part, according to the report, was because billions of dollars in aid for families ended.

A new economic analysis has linked conduct problems among kindergarten students with significant costs to society in terms of crime and associated medical expenses and lost productivity when they are adults.

Schools’ use of telehealth services expanded during the pandemic, and emerging research suggests it could help reduce chronic absenteeism.

Jennifer Lansford helps explain the science behind why children find their parents annoying in a recent episode of BBC’s Crowd Science podcast.  

Helen Ladd was cited for her research on public education spending in WRAL’s analysis of North Carolina schools.

Anna Gassman-Pines joined a recent episode of A Health Podyssey, the Health Affairs podcast to speak about her research on the health disparities experienced by unemployed Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ladd argues, [public school funding] must be used “productively and efficiently to promote good educational outcomes.” Charters, by design, “operate outside state and local education systems,” to varying degrees depending on which state we’re talking about. Ladd observes that this creates several challenges.

The national shortage of baby formula in the U.S. that began in February of 2022 cast an urgent spotlight on the difficulties parents can face in meeting basic nutritional needs of their babies. A narrow focus on the supply of infant formula or the benefits of breastfeeding does not shed light on the full scope of economic tradeoffs families face.