Nation Earns a Grade of C Amid Mixed State Showing

The new Education Week Research Center report, Quality Counts 2019, synthesizes 39 indicators that capture a range of school finance, academic achievement, and socioeconomic factors that affect the quality of state school systems. Southern states with high poverty rates dominate the lower rankings, but overall, 32 states earn grades between C-plus and C-minus. Why does the U.S. educational system consistently get low marks for student academic achievement?

We recently conducted an informal poll of the social workers we deal with every day and asked them what they thought was the #1 social malady threatening the country today. Their answer might surprise you; more than the opioid epidemic; more than veterans affairs; more than homelessness; more than woman’s rights; more than economic imbalance; more than education issues; more than civil rights; more than the environment; the problem that was cited more than any other was – STUDENT DEBT!

Where have all the CDCs gone? For decades, Community Development Corporations tackled some of America’s most challenging problems: neighborhood revitalization, affordable housing, community economic development, workforce development and job creation, financial empowerment and food access.

The nonprofit universe is vast and varied. According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics, more than 1.5 million nonprofit organizations are registered in the U.S. This number includes public charities, private foundations and a wide array of other nonprofit organizations like civic leagues, fraternal organizations and even local chambers of commerce. Because we work every day with a variety of nonprofits all across the country, it is important for us at Global Vision Technologies to have a clear picture of the nonprofit universe in order to gain insight into the challenges nonprofits face. Here is the nonprofit big picture.

The climate change debate has centered on global warming for the last 10 years. Because the science tends to be arcane and somewhat opaque, the debate has become clouded with opinion rather than fact. However, the impact of severe weather events cannot be ignored.

Henry Ford, not the US Labor Bureau, instituted the first major increase in the minimum wage. In January 1914, Henry started paying his auto workers a remarkable $5 a day. Doubling the average wage helped ensure a stable workforce and likely boosted sales since the workers could now afford to buy the cars they were making. It laid the foundation for an economy driven by consumer demand. 

In our last post, we talked about how we are constantly in hackathon mode and how listening to and working with social workers in the field helps us find better solutions. In talking to those caseworkers and their supervisors recently, we were able to pull together a list of some of the top things that cause them frustration. Here is what they said and how we can help solve the problems.

Social workers across the country often ask us how we create the software products that have become the standard for the industry. The answer is…collaboration. Global Vision Technology designers and engineers are constantly collaborating with social work professionals to design and redesign the FAMCare suite of products now used by thousands of social workers in hundreds of diverse agencies. We are conducting an ongoing social work hackathon.

How did the United States, with 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners, become home to the largest prison system in the history of the world? Some say it’s an accomplishment. The U.S. is a law and order country and our criminal justice system is the envy of the world. Others feel quite differently and suggest that the “war on drugs” led to the mass incarceration of two generations of the urban poor.

In our 2015 report, The Aging Tidal Wave, we dealt with the healthcare crisis that was about to overwhelm the long-term care industry. The aging baby-boomer population was growing rapidly while the number of caregivers was actually declining.