Stop five men and five women on the street outside an elementary school and ask them the shoe size of their youngest child, or the phone number of that child’s pediatrician. Odds are, the women will know both, the men neither. Much ink is being spilled lately to probe the...

As often happens, the just-completed Pittsburgh G-20 meeting ended with admirable pronouncements, among them, the "responsibility to invest in people by providing education, job training, decent work conditions, health care...and to fight poverty, discrimination, and all forms of social exclusion". But with the near-exclusive use of GDP growth as the...

When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Mississippi and Louisiana four years ago, extreme weather and acute human vulnerability met head-on with tragic results. Long-standing gaps in the well-being of different groups of Gulf coast residents were suddenly everywhere in evidence - on rooftops, on I-10 overpasses, and on TV screens...

High school dropout rates have been in the news a lot lately. Last month saw the release of two major reports that drew renewed attention to the issue. One from the America's Promise Alliance found that in the fifty largest cities in the U.S., nearly half of all high school...