Tag: Education

Empty classroom.

Can Schools Require the COVID-19 Vaccine? Education, Equity, and the Courts

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Emily Caputo and Blake N. Shultz

As school systems consider policy options for the spring semester, both vaccination requirements and proposals to address inequities in access to education may be top of mind. However, policymakers should be aware of the possible legal challenges they may face.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an educational crisis in the United States by disrupting the learning of millions of students across the country. School closures, remote learning, and generalized societal stress have all raised serious concerns about persistent harm to adolescent learning and development — particularly among low-income and minority students.

While the pandemic has exposed widespread inequities in educational opportunity, it has also revealed the relative inability of the courts to promote access to education. A recent California lawsuit illustrates the manner in which students must rely on state-level, rather than federal, protections to ensure equal access to education. And COVID-19 vaccination requirements, which could facilitate a return to in-person education, are likely to result in lawsuits, and may be struck down by a skeptical and conservative Supreme Court.

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Bill of Health - empty desks in a classroom showing absenteeism during the pandemic, with the desks spaced apart

Federal, State, and Local Responses to Student Absenteeism during COVID-19

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Eileen Macron, J.D.

In the past several years, school attendance and absenteeism have been key focus areas of education policy. Consistent school attendance is necessary for students’ long-term academic success, and the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 heightened the role that attendance plays in school performance metrics. The Act requires states to submit multi-factor education plans for measuring and attaining student achievement to the federal government. Most states have chosen to include chronic absenteeism in their plans as one of the ways that they assess student progress. And in many districts, school funding depends partly on daily attendance, a relationship that has been a source of anxiety for — and inequality between — school districts.

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Bill of Health - two girls wearing masks in school bump firsts during covid-19 pandemic

The Education Divide Caused by COVID-19

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

 

By Annie Kapnick

The United States has entered a ‘third’ wave of Covid-19 , and many students are entering yet another month of online learning. The American education system has long been plagued with racial and socio-economic inequalities, but the COVID-19 pandemic and the nationwide shift to online learning has transformed what was an already widening inequality gap into a massive chasm.

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Why Justice is Good for America’s Health

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Dayna Bowen Matthew

Justice is good for health [and] . . . health is the byproduct of justice.

— Norman Daniels, Bruce Kennedy & Ichiro Kawachi (Boston Review, 2000)

Among the most salient lessons to be learned from the coronavirus pandemic are that unjust laws produce unjust health outcomes, and that justice is just plain good for America’s health.

Health justice is the moral mandate to protect and advance an equal opportunity for all to enjoy greatest health and well-being possible. Health justice means that no one person or group of people are granted or excluded from the means of pursuing health on an inequitable basis. To achieve health justice, societal institutions such as governments and health care providers must act to advance equality, by increasing fairness and decreasing unfairness of their current and historic impacts on populations.

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School Discipline is a Public Health Crisis

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Thalia González, Alexis Etow, and Cesar De La Vega

Education is well-accepted as a key social determinant of health. It serves as a strong predictor of chronic disease, social and economic instability, incarceration, and even life expectancy. For example, by age 25, individuals with a high school degree can expect to live 11 to 15 years longer than those without one. Despite such evidence, education policies and practices have not been public health priorities. Too often, policies and practices in schools that create and compound health inequities are narrated and re-narrated as falling outside health law and policy. This is a missed opportunity for collective action to positively impact the future health pathways of children and communities.

In the wake of national protests against racialized police violence and COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on communities of color, the time has come for the health community — from researchers, to public health organizations, to advocates, to health care professionals — to move from simply affirming that racism is a public health crisis, to actively exposing how structural discrimination in education has fueled disparities and deepened the persistence of health inequities.

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What’s Missing From Biotech Graduate Education? With Free Course, RA Capital Attempts to Fill the Gaps

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By Jessica Sagers

As a PhD student in the life sciences at Harvard, I attended almost every career seminar that came through my inbox. I had no idea what I wanted to do after finishing my research doctorate, but I was certain that it wasn’t more cell culture.

The walls of my academic bubble were so thick that even as a budding cell biologist, I’d managed to hear almost nothing about Boston’s booming biotech industry. “Going into industry” was regarded as an “alternative career,” to the point where it sounded like taking a job outside of academia was tantamount to abandoning science. Besides, all my training had been in basic science. The coursework I’d excelled in, from neurobiology to biophysics, did not equip me to translate what I’d learned to the business world.

During my final PhD year, curiosity about the biotech sector drove me to accept an internship at RA Capital Management, a life science-focused investment firm in Boston. Dr. Peter Kolchinsky (Harvard Program in Virology, ’01), Founder and Managing Partner of RA Capital, brought me and a group of fellow PhD students on board to help achieve his vision of providing more pragmatic, focused training to scientists and professionals interested in working in biotechnology. Together, we designed a short, advanced course on the business of biotech designed to fit the practical needs of late-stage graduate students and early-career professionals.

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Genetic Discrimination in Education: What’s the Risk?

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By Kaitlyn Dowling, based on research by the Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society

Illustration of a gavel made out of a DNA helixIn a new, year-long series on Bill of Health, we’ll be exploring the legal scholarship on genetic non-discrimination. We’ll talk more about GINA and state laws protecting citizens from genetic discrimination. We hope these posts help shed light on this complex and ever-more-relevant area for legal scholars, policymakers, and the public at large.

As discussed in our last post, most states regulate the use of genetic information in some way, although usually only in employment and insurance. Comparatively few states have protections against genetic discrimination in other contexts. Today, we’re exploring education protections in eight states: California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia.

In comparison with other genetic non-discrimination protections, most states have not acted to implement protections in the education context. California, West Virginia, and Washington are the only states out of the eight surveyed with these types of protections.

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Summer Course for Professionals in “Pharma Law & Policy” at the University of Copenhagen

Timo Minssen Leave a comment

Stay abreast with recent developments and trends determining the legal and regulatory framework of the European pharmaceutical industry.

What are the most significant current issues shaking and shaping the pharmaceutical industry today? The business environment and legal framework relevant to the pharmaceutical industry continues to change rapidly in the face of constant challenges posed by competition, politics and technological innovation. Considering the highly lucrative and competitive nature of the industry, it is more important than ever for professionals working with legal and regulatory aspects of drug development to stay abreast of the most recent developments.

This course provides a broad and practical understanding of the ‘hot topics’ and will present and analyse these topics from scientific, legal and policy perspectives.

Further information about the course is available here.

Course content

The course begins with a general overview of the current scientific and legal trends in pharmaceutical R&D, organisation and policy. This is followed by a review of the hot topics through a combination of lectures, discussions, group work and case studies. The course is designed to allow room for the issues and challenges crucial to the participants’ daily work and practice.

Participants

The course is designed for professionals working with legal issues and/or regulatory aspects of drug development, decision-makers, administrators and health care practitioners within both the public and private sectors, e.g.:

  • Legal departments in the pharmaceutical industry.
  • Law firms dealing with patent and competition law in the pharmaceutical industry.
  • Branch organizations in the pharmaceutical sector.
  • Health care professionals and decision makers.
  • Bank and finance consultants working with risk and investment in the pharmaceutical industry.

Credit – especially for lawyers and trainee solicitors

This course meets the Danish requirements for compulsory supplementary training for lawyers and trainee solicitors.

Course dates

5 days, 18 – 22 August 2014, 9:00 – 17:00 at the University of Copenhagen, Frederiksberg Campus.

Course director

Timo Minssen, Associate Professor, Dr., LL.M., M.I.C.L., Centre for Information and Innovation Law, Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen

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Educating ELSI

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By Matthew L Baum

“Examining the intersection of law and health care, biotech & bioethics”

– the subtitle of the Bill of Health blog.

I approach this intersection like many of my fellow students: outfitted with the tools and spectacles of a specific discipline. Whether that is health law, policy, medicine, engineering, philosophy, genetics, or cognitive science, none of us have had the ideal education that would enable not only an approach, but an inhabitation of this intersection.

What would that ideal education be? To consider the ideal education for a citizen, Rousseau conducts an elaborate thought experiment giving that education to a fictional young boy named Emile (hence the title of the work: Emile, or On Education). Let us begin a similar experiment to consider the ideal education for someone to inhabit the intersection of law and health care, biotech & bioethics.

Let’s call our fictional young person, ELSI.

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