Aging Baby Boomers Concerned About Future Health and Financial Security

A new report by the Commonwealth Foundation asserts that almost seven-in-ten (69 percent) of all Americans between the ages of 50 and 70 support the idea of paying one percent of their wage earnings to a Medicare health account to help pay for long-term care services or uncovered health care expenses when they retire.

The report, Will You Still Need Me? The Health and Financial Security of Older Americans, is based on a survey of older adults about their health and financial concerns. The study found that a majority worried that their retirement income and savings will be inadequate for living and health care costs after they quit working. Almost half (48 percent) of older Americans have retirement savings of less than $50,000. Nearly two-in-five (38 percent) have retirement savings of less than $25,000.

The study also found that a strong majority of those from age 50 to 64 would like to participate in Medicare before they turn 65. Among wage earners between 50 and 64 years of age with incomes between $25,000 and $39,000, 31 percent indicated they were uninsured or had been without coverage at some point since turning fifty.

For more information, go to www.cmwf.org.

Database of Public School Information Now Available Online

A new web site -- SchoolMatters.com -- provides free statistical data and analyses about public schools, districts and state education systems. It includes information about student achievement at the national and state levels and financial data for every school district along with student demographics such as class size and teacher qualifications.

The online database, the largest searchable collection of public education performance, was developed in response to the education community's need for an impartial and transparent analysis of American educational data. By making the information publicly available, educators and policymakers will be able to identify and track promising trends in school reform as well as compare state and national data. Equally important, parents will be able to compare information about local school districts with demographically similar school districts across the country.

SchoolMatters.com is a program of the National Education Data Partnership (NEDP), a collaborative effort of the Council of Chief State School Officers, Standard & Poors' School Evaluation Services and the Center for Educational Leadership and Technology Corporation. NEDP is supported by The Broad and Bill & Melinda Gates foundations.

For more information, go to www.SchoolMatters.com.

Diversity Within the Academy Continues to be an Issue

According to a recent report from The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation called Diversity and the Ph.D., African Americans and Hispanics remain significantly underrepresented in the highest echelons of the academic community.

While the two groups combined account for 32 percent of all American citizens in the typical age range of Ph.D. candidates (25-40), only 11 percent received doctoral degrees in 2003, the most recent year for which figures were available.

The latest information comes from a study of nationwide programs that seek to recruit and retain students of color in American doctoral programs. Researchers identified critical impediments to the success of these programs, including recent court challenges to affirmative action, reduced fellowship support and limited communication between the programs.

"We still have a great expertise gap in the United States," noted Robert Weisbuch, past president of Woodrow Wilson and a contributor to the report. "Our next generation of college students will include dramatically more students of color, but their teachers will remain overwhelmingly white."

The study was created through the foundation's Responsive Ph.D. initiative and received support from the Atlantic Philanthropies and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In fall 2005, the Responsive Ph.D., a consortium of 20 national research universities, will release an overarching report on best practices and innovations in doctoral education that was supported by the Atlantic Philanthropies, the Henry Luce Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts and Carnegie Corporation. For more information, go to www.woodrow.org.

Election Experts Offer Recommendations for Voting Reform

A working group of election law scholars and voting reform experts has released a series of practical recommendations for election reform in a report called Balancing Access and Integrity: The Report of the Century Foundation Working Group on State Implementation of Election Reform.

The report, presented at the 2005 annual meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State, is intended to help state legislators and election officials improve voting procedures in time for the 2006 and 2008 elections. The goal of the working group is to ensure accuracy and integrity in the voting process and to guarantee that all eligible voters will be able to cast ballots and have their votes counted.

While the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 addressed some of the issues surrounding the flawed 2000 election, the Century Foundation's working group found that ambiguities and inconsistencies in election laws and procedures continue to exist and may cause problems in the future.

With the view that most election reform must be implemented at the state level, there is little chance of further imminent action from Congress, and with HAVA mandating that many of the reforms be implemented by the end of this year, the working group looked at practical ways to solve the problems that HAVA may have inadvertently created.

The report suggests improvements for each phase of the voting process, including voter registration, provisional ballots, felon purges and testing and certification of voting systems. Chief among the recommendations is the necessity for establishing clear rules and procedures that can be easily understood by the voters and election workers.

For more information about the election reform recommendations, go to www.reformelections.org or www.tcf.org.

Freeman Foundation Gives $1.75 Million for Education in Tsunami-Affected Regions

The Institute of International Education (IIE), a world leader in international exchange, received a donation of $l.75 million from the Freeman Foundation to support rebuilding educational resources in tsunami-affected areas of Thailand and in Aceh, Indonesia.

In Thailand, IIE/Southeast Asia will work with the Rajaprajanugroh Foundation and the Somdet Phra Thep's Charity Fund to reconstruct schools destroyed by the December 2005 tsunami and provide educational services to displaced students. In Aceh, IIE's partner organization, The Indonesian International Education Foundation (IIEF) will work with the Sampoerna Foundation to rebuild schools and to help high school students prepare for the national university entrance examination.

"Along with the rest of the world, the Freeman Foundation and its trustees have been immensely shocked and distressed at the havoc and loss of life in the countries of Southeast Asia that have resulted from this tsunami" said Houghton Freeman, Chairman of the Freeman Foundation. "As the Freeman Foundation's main mission is in the educational field, we feel it most appropriate that we do what we can to help alleviate some of the problems created in Southeast Thailand and in Aceh's educational sector by this terrible act of nature."

Sampoerna Foundation Chief Operations Officer Elan Merdy agreed. "We need to make sure that Aceh's children do not lose their right to a formal education because of the catastrophe that devastated their land. They have lost their homes; let us not have them lose their future, too. We need to work with other domestic and international organizations to restore Aceh's educational sector."

The Freeman Foundation is a U.S. private philanthropic organization that aims to improve understanding and to strengthen ties between the United States and the countries of the Pacific Rim.

For more information, go to www.iie.org.

New Survey Probes America's Foreign Policy Concerns

Public Agenda, a nonprofit organization that conducts nonpartisan public policy research, has teamed up with Foreign Affairs, one of America's most influential publications on international relations, to create the new Public Agenda Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index. The Index will regularly explore the public's perceptions of America's role in the world on a wide range of issues. Unlike other surveys, the Index looks past the ups and downs of daily events and explores the public's underlying beliefs about America's role in the world, strategies for addressing foreign policy challenges and key concerns about the direction of U.S. international relations.

Results from the first Index find Americans worried about issues surrounding the United States' relationship with the Islamic world. Seventy-five percent of the country is concerned about losing trust and friendship abroad and growing hatred of America in Muslim countries; two-thirds feel the world has a negative view of the United States. More telling, one-in-ten actually used the word "bully" or "bullying," without prompting, to describe how America is viewed from abroad.

Asked to rank American security priorities, three-quarters give the United States a "C" grade or lower in protecting our borders. The report also mentions another important issue on people's minds--illegal immigration and the protection of American jobs--and includes a special note that the latter two problems are nearing a point where the public's concerns will be too strong to be ignored.

More information about the survey results and meth-odology are available at www.publicagenda.org or www.foreignaffairs.org.

Nonprofit Joins with Biotech Industry to Fight Neglected Diseases

Right now, less than 10 percent of health funding goes toward finding cures for the diseases that account for 90 percent of the world's disease burden. BIO Ventures for Global Health (BVGH), a nonprofit organization established in 2004, aims to change this by eliminating funding, market and information barriers that have in the past prevented biotechnology companies from investing in research for cures.

The new initiative stems from a $5.4 million grant by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that will help BVGH launch a series of business cases to assess and build market opportunities for the neglected diseases. Many biotechnology companies lack the capacity to evaluate developing world markets. BVGH will fill this void by developing new models for emerging markets that can be used by the industry. Its first effort will be to evaluate the market opportunity for tuberculosis vaccines.

BVGH is a nonprofit organization founded in 2004 by the Biotechnology Industry Organization with support from the Gates and Rockefeller foundations. It seeks to narrow the gap between biotechnology's great promise and the unmet health needs of the developing world.

For more information, go to www.bvgh.org.

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