Educational Public Health and the "Broader, Bolder Approach"

A hundred years ago this year, in 1913, Harvard and MIT, in a joint venture, founded the first American school of public health.  That same year, the Rockefeller foundation sponsored a conference that led to the expansion of Harvard’s school of public heath and the founding of another school at Johns Hopkins.  Over the past century, the field of public health has made amazing progress—arguably, far more than medicine—in improving and expanding American lives.  Now, a hundred years later, it’s time for a similar effort in education.  Along with graduate schools of education, which focus mainly on in-school factors of our educational life, we also need graduate schools that would study the many significant out-of-school, society-wide factors in education. 

I wrote a post a few months ago outlining this idea of educational public health.  That original post is here.  I also got in touch with some of the very few Americans who work on these issues full-time.  Elaine Weiss, who runs an effort called the "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education," liked my post well enough to put an edited version of it up on her Huffington Post blog, under her and my byline.  You can find it here. 

The Broader, Bolder Approach, affiliated with the worthy Economic Policy Institute, is one attempt to do some of what I have suggested a graduate school of public education might do.  You can support them by visiting their website and reading about their work, and by joining luminaries like Linda Darling-Hammond and Diane Ravitch, and teachers like me, and signing on to the BBA's mission statement.