US – Childhood obesity a serious problem

Pediatric obesity is a significant problem in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the number of children who meet criteria for being overweight, which is at or above the 95th percentile on body mass index growth charts, ranges from about 10 percent in infants and toddlers to approximately 18 percent in adolescents and teenagers.

Why Is This A Concern?

We are concerned about children being overweight because obesity is associated with a number of chronic diseases that are historically associated with adults. For instance, high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, and type 2 diabetes are now observed with far greater frequency in the pediatric population. This puts these overweight children at increased risk for the early onset of heart disease and other serious health problems.

Isn’t It Difficult To Assess Obesity In Children?

As children grow, we obviously expect them to gain weight. Therefore, to assess growth and weight concurrently, we use a measurement called the body mass index. Pediatricians routinely check BMI as part of the standard health evaluation because this is our best tool for assessing whether your child is overweight or obese. The doctor will show you the BMI growth chart, which makes it easy to determine if your child’s BMI is rising and if the growth pattern is cause for concern.

Obesity Is Related To Type 2 Diabetes?

Yes, there is a strong association between obesity and the onset of type 2 diabetes (T2DM), a condition that is on the rise in children. The good news, however, is that when you lose weight, you can reverse T2DM. Often the doctor can identify the early indicators of T2DM, such as insulin resistance, and the condition can be prevented.

What Can Parents Do To Help Children Maintain A Healthy Weight?

The best way to ensure normal weight in your kids is with a healthy diet and daily exercise. The American College of Pediatricians promotes the “5-2-1 Rule” to prevent obesity. The rule stands for five servings of fruits and vegetables, less than two hours of screen time (e.g., computer, TV, video game), and at least one hour of physical activity, each on a daily basis. In addition, it is important that parents serve as healthy role models for their children. If your children learn healthy living habits from you early in childhood these practices are more likely to become habituated later in life.

How Can I Help If My Child Is Overweight?

Assess the child’s daily activity level. If it is limited, think of fun ways to increase it, such as joining a sports team, going for walks with the family, or just going outside to play. Focus on simple changes in terms of the food you provide. Eliminating juice, soda, and sports drinks can be a big help. Switch to whole-grain foods and be diligent about maintaining healthy portion sizes. Another trick to keep food from becoming a battle is to provide your child with options. For instance, let your child choose what he or she wants to eat, but make both options healthy (e.g., apple vs. orange). So your child doesn’t feel deprived, allow treats in moderation on special occasions.

The changes your pediatrician encourages making with your overweight child are good guidelines for everyone. Importantly, these changes are more likely to take hold if the whole family participates.

Woo is board certified in pediatrics and in pediatric endocrinology.

http://www.theithacajournal.com/article/20100227/LIFE/2270314/1127/HealthWatch–Childhood-obesity-a-serious-problem

US – Can Michelle Obama put America’s children on a diet?

If there’s any doubt that opposing childhood obesity is a political winner, as well as a noble cause, Michelle Obama’s upcoming trip to Mississippi, the nation’s most obese state, may be more proof.

Gov. Haley Barbour, a portly Republican who’s mulling a challenge to President Barack Obama in 2012, will join the first lady at a Wednesday event in Jackson promoting school nutrition and exercise. Barbour, a former lobbyist who heads the Republican Governors Association, recently said that if he lost 40 pounds, it would mean he’s running for president or has cancer.

Before heading south, Obama will speak Monday in Washington to the School Nutrition Association’s Legislative Action Conference. These appearances follow others that have gotten attention in recent weeks.

As Obama settles into her post as the public face of the administration’s new “Let’s Move!” campaign to combat the growing problem of childhood obesity, advocates are watching how her role will evolve – and, ultimately, how aggressive or successful her husband’s administration will be at changing the standards of the food and beverage industries, schools and unhealthy eaters and their enablers.

Will the Obama administration push taxes on sodas? Sugary juices and chocolate milk? Restrict farm subsidies related to corn and sweeteners? How will regulators deal with oft-maligned high-fructose corn syrup? Will meat and animal fat get new scrutiny? What new food and beverage labeling might appear?

Should health insurance rates reflect adults’ and children’s diets? Should food advertising on TV be reined in, and in this deficit-ridden era, how much money can the federal government spend on some of the initiatives the Obamas favor to get more fresh and health food into inner city markets and school lunch programs?

The first indications will come this year. Reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act is overdue. The Food and Drug Administration is considering standards for new front-of-package labeling.

In his Feb. 9 memo establishing an interagency task force on childhood obesity, President Obama set a 90-day deadline for a strategic plan. That effort will pull together his economic and budget advisors, as well as officials on the first lady’s staff and in departments that oversee everything from health and food and drug regulation to education and agriculture. The task force is led by the president’s domestic policy adviser, not the first lady.

Penny Lee, a senior adviser and spokeswoman for the non-profit Campaign to End Obesity, a coalition that includes charitable and corporate health-care interests, said administration officials have told advocates that Michelle Obama “won’t be doing legislation, she won’t be going to the Hill; she’s trying to change the environment. This is a platform, a movement, a cause she will be championing, but this will not be her initiative.”

Lee said the first lady’s public efforts to date, from her White House vegetable garden and farmer’s market visits to her talks with school children and parents and her recent speeches on obesity, have been “wonderful.”

Past administrations have talked about child nutrition and obesity, but they didn’t act in as comprehensive a fashion as the current administration seems to be embracing, Lee said. While she’s hopeful, she said, “This effort is just starting.”

Former Food and Drug Administrator David Kessler said that more legislation and government regulation probably are essential to getting obesity in children and adults under control.

However, Kessler, who in recent years has been as passionate about teaching Americans about the dangers of overeating and junk food as he once was about tobacco regulation, said that government intervention won’t work without a parallel effort to change society’s norms about how much and what kind of food and drink to consume.

About one in three American children is overweight or obese today, with asthma, heart disease and cancer on the rise as a result, and related health costs in the billions each year.

Obama’s spokeswoman role on that front has been “pitch-perfect” so far, Kessler said.

“Laws, legislation, policy is all important, but how you look at it is key. Do you need to do front-of-package labeling? Absolutely. Menu labeling? Yes. Do you need to change farm subsidies? Yes. Does the FDA have to act? Yes. The CDC? Yes. The USDA? Those things will come. But she said ‘it’s important,’ and that’s how you start.

“There’s a cook in a school, I can assure you, somewhere in the United States, who listened to the first lady and is changing because of it. Tackling obesity and childhood obesity is as hard as anything we’ve ever done. You can live without cigarettes, but you can’t live without food.”

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/02/27/1503893/can-michelle-obama-put-americas.html

UK – Takeaway ban near schools to help fight child obesity

Councils pledge to limit growth of fast-food outlets as nutritionists bid to make meals healthier – without customers noticing

Many schoolchildren visit fast-food outlets during lunch breaks. Photograph: Getty Images

Councils across England are banning new takeaways from opening within 400 yards of any school, youth club or park, in an attempt to tackle the growing toll of obesity, strokes and heart disease.

Waltham Forest in east London was the first to begin turning down applications from people who want to set up takeaways near schools or young people’s facilities and now at least 15 other local authorities either have, or plan to, follow the example.

“There are 255 fast-food outlets in the borough, which is far too many already; that’s one for every 357 families,” said Terry Wheeler, a Labour councillor and Waltham Forest’s cabinet member for enterprise and investment.

“The mess associated with them ends up in nearby streets; bones from chicken takeaways get dropped and attract rats; they spoil the look of shopping parades and there’s a strong association between fast-food places and young people eating unhealthily when they are ravenous, both at lunchtime and after school.”

Barking and Dagenham council is finalising a plan that would limit the number of fast-food premises and impose a £1,000 levy on any new outlets, to be spent on tackling childhood obesity. Chains such as McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken objected, but the National Obesity Forum, Chartered Institute of Environmental Health and Child Growth Foundation backed the move.

The council is also working with its local NHS primary care trust (PCT) to help make takeaway products healthier. Tower Hamlets, also in east London, is doing the same and offering food preparation staff free nutrition workshops. It has set up a healthy eating awards scheme for caterers as part of a £4.7m “healthy borough programme”.

Chip shops, kebab shops, pizza outlets and Indian and Chinese carryout restaurants are working with councils in many parts of the country to make their dishes lower in fat, salt, sugar and calories while preserving their taste, appeal and cost.

In Liverpool, for example, eight Chinese takeaways, eight Indian restaurants and four other fast-food premises have agreed to participate in Eatright Liverpool, a joint initiative between the city council, PCT and Liverpool John Moores University to bring in healthier menus. Under the £1m NHS-funded scheme, nutritionists from the university, led by food science lecturer Dr Leo Stevenson, will devise new formulations of popular products for fast-food businesses across the city. They have acted after the council nutritionally analysed the contents of 300 takeaway dishes and found staggeringly high levels of salt, saturated fats and calories.

For example, a Chinese dish of beef and green peppers in blackbean sauce contained 27.6g of salt – almost five times an adult’s recommended daily intake. A pepperoni pizza had 3,320 calories, far in excess of the advised daily maximum of 1,940 and 2,550 1,940 for women and 2,550 for men.

Rachel Long, the Eatright project manager, said: “I knew that takeaway meals weren’t good for you. But I was absolutely shocked by the results of our study. It’s unbelievable to think that someone eating just one dish could be consuming as much as 28g of salt.

“We aren’t saying to people don’t eat takeaway food. But we do want to make dishes more nutritious because salt and saturated fats in particular are closely associated with problems such as obesity, cardiovascular [disease], diabetes and high blood pressure.”

Councils in other parts of the country, such as Wandsworth in London, are doing similar things, but on a smaller scale. “There’s an invisible revolution going on in one of the most popular and unhealthy areas of British food culture, the takeaway,” said Professor Jack Winkler, director of the Nutrition Policy Unit at London Metropolitan University. “The plan is that consumers don’t notice; that you don’t tell them that the new products are healthy and that they can’t taste the fact that a certain amount of salt, for example, has been taken out of one of their favourite dishes.”

Britain’s attachment to takeaways means quiet reformulation, rather than simply telling people not to go there. “This isn’t authoritarian puritanism, eat your greens, five-a-day hectoring or an assault on Britain’s love affair with takeaways,” added Winkler. “This is a gradual, unobtrusive way of leading people to a healthier diet, and a much more sophisticated way of dealing with the takeaway’s undeniable popularity.”

Food companies had adopted this approach in recent years, he said, cutting salt content in soups, beans, crisps and tinned spaghetti without losing sales.

The Food Standards Agency is monitoring developments closely. It is already conducting a pilot study among about 80 chip shops in Cambridgeshire, Greater Manchester and Northern Ireland, helping them make their fried potatoes healthier by changing the thickness of the chips, the temperature of the cooking oil and the size of the portions.

It also plans to produce a series of advice leaflets for producers of each of the main different types of takeaway food, starting with chippies and then doing the same for sandwiches, Indian, Italian and Chinese dishes, chicken and chips and traditional British cafes.

Leicester city council has developed another tactic: banning chip and burger vans from trading outside schools. Councillors hope that will deter pupils from leaving school at lunchtime and increase the numbers having the nutritious meals that have become standard since Jamie Oliver exposed how unhealthy school food was. Schools in the city demanded action after seeing how mobile fast-food vendors parked outside were enticing large numbers of children. Since late 2008 the only food that can be sold outside schools is ice cream, and only at the end of the day. The Department of Health’s childhood obesity national support team has praised the scheme and other councils may adopt it too.

Many authorities have begun to copy Gateshead council’s provision at chip shops of salt shakers with only half the usual number of holes in the top.

Councils are holding a conference on takeaways in West Bromwich on 30 June, while the children’s services network of the Local Government Information Unit will also discuss action at a seminar on children and obesity on 19 March.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/feb/28/takeaway-food-school-ban

US – Shaking up Miss. education landscape Initiative to learning

MISSISSIPPI is a state that has historically faced severe economic challenges, as well as high rates of poverty, dropouts, and illiteracy. Efforts though to bring community partners together have gained traction to create a system of quality education for young children.

Community, state and national leaders saw the need for action to improve the state’s ability to compete economically, to enhance the quality of life for its children and families, and to increase opportunities for all Mississippi children to achieve success.

With the support of business, philanthropic, community and education leaders, many child care programs and preschools are receiving help to increase quality early childhood education.

Laying a foundation

Mississippi has adopted a quality rating system to promote quality improvements and business leaders have backed an early childhood education demonstration model that aims to improve the quality and delivery of services to children in early learning settings.

At the same time, coalitions and calls for early education innovation and investments that will benefit young children across the state continue to grow.

Supporting Partnerships to Assure Ready Kids (SPARK) Mississippi has helped to lay a foundation from which an early learning system in Mississippi can evolve.

This system includes multiple strategies and service components that ensure children’s health care needs are addressed, parents are supported in their efforts to provide nurturing and stable home environments, and that early care and education settings provide high-quality learning experiences while working with schools to develop effective transition plans.

Starting their work in five locations, mainly in the Mississippi Delta, SPARK staff worked with cohorts of three-year-olds in each community to provide them and their families with the supports and services needed to ensure their seamless transition into school and academic success through the third grade.

By providing transition strategies, intense intervention, and scaling the SPARK work, we were able to make a difference in the early childhood education community in our selected sites, most of which have evolved into model programs that can be replicated statewide using existing governmental resources.

Planning intervention

Intervention strategies include: professional development and technical assistance for early learning center staff; resource fairs and cultural awareness activities for children and families; home visitation and the coordination of transition activities between early learning settings and public schools.

In a recent evaluation, SPARK children, with all of these interventions, out-performed students in a comparable school district who did not have access to these interventions on a statewide achievement test.

A key component that has led to the success of SPARK Mississippi is the formation of Local Children’s Partnerships.

These partnerships are made up of community members representing early education, local school districts, business leaders, parents, health providers, SPARK staff and other stakeholders who realize that the success of their community and ultimately the state rests upon meaningful investments in its children. These stakeholders work together to act on issues of quality, transition and alignment of the early education community.

Expanding the model

The next phase of work plans to take the lessons learned from the first six years of the initiative and expand the model into additional communities throughout the state. We want to ensure that the investments made will continue to build support for early childhood care and education and influence early childhood policy and practice across the state.

To help share the lessons learned through SPARK’s early learning initiatives, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation partnered with IDEO, a renowned design and innovation consulting firm, to help communities improve their learning systems.

Instead of relying on outside experts – the usual method for reforming schools – these communities are looking inward, tapping parents, teachers, business and faith leaders, and even students to help generate solutions that work for them.

The best programs, we continue to learn, link parents, teachers, and students and create strong connections between classrooms and communities, building an educational continuum.

Coming up with ideas

Communities, school districts, and policymakers are creating new ways to teach and nurture children from age 3 through third grade. National leaders are taking notice and, more important, taking steps to replicate successful programs across the map.

President Obama is asking states and communities with innovative ideas to help reshape American education. To propel these innovative ideas, two new federal funds for innovation will provide a total of $5 billion to inspire communities to shake up the education landscape.

Through the president’s initiative we have the chance to further revolutionize learning and set Mississippi’s children on a path to long-term success despite the current economic crisis.

Collins is the executive director of SPARK-MS, an initiative of the Children’s Defense Fund – Southern Regional Office. Taylor is vice president for programs at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/print/article/20100227/OPINION/2270306/Shaking-up-Miss.-education-landscape-Initiative-to-learning

US – Poverty During Early Childhood May Last a Lifetime

Children raised in poverty in their first five years are more likely to feel its effects well into adulthood.

THE GIST:

• Poverty during early childhood is correlated with lower adult income.
• Childhood poverty causes lasting effects on the brain and on the way DNA is expressed.
• Because early childhood is so important, researchers advise policies to address these problems should focus on the youngest children.

It’s no surprise that growing up in poverty makes it more likely you’ll be poorer as an adult.

But new research shows that the earliest years of life are the most critical in determining future earnings. Even more strikingly, a growing body of research shows that childhood poverty causes lasting changes in the brain — from its overall structure down to the level of gene expression.

These findings highlight the importance of programs that specifically address the needs of the youngest children, the researchers say.

“Early experiences are built into our bodies, for better or worse,” said Jack Shonkoff of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., speaking at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego on Sunday.

“If you begin with the experience of adversity and stress, those get translated into changes in brain function and structure that get translated into changes in cellular and neuronal connections, and most recently, down into lasting changes in how the DNA is expressed,” said Thomas Boyce of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who has carried out several studies that show these effects.

Poor children perform worse in many ways, said Katherine Magnuson of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, from standardized tests to amount of schooling to behavior and health. “We’ve known this for a long time. What is interesting and emergent is our ability to talk about these as being caused by income per se rather than the range of things that are associated with poverty,” Magnuson said.

Greg Duncan of the University of California, Irvine, examined information on income, health, education and other factors for a group of children born between 1968 and 1975 tracked through adulthood.

Duncan found that for children in families earning less than the equivalent of $25,000 a year in 2005, a $3,000 increase in household income during the first five years of a child’s life translated into 17 percent higher earnings as an adult, and almost a month’s more working hours annually. The effects lasted at least until age 37, and are independent of other factors that are typically associated with low income like education or poor health.

This association disappeared when Duncan looked at the effect of poverty during later years of childhood.

Other studies have found that lower family income correlates with lower cognitive performance in children, Magnuson said.

Why income has such an effect on the brain, on cognitive and behavioral performance, and on future earning could be because income allows parents to buy things that enrich their child’s environment like books or quality childcare.

But it also could be because low income creates constant stress that the children feel in the home. Indeed many of the biological changes seen in the brain are consistent with prolonged exposure to stress, Boyce said.

Evidence suggests that both of these mechanisms contribute to cognitive and behavioral problems in low-income children. This means interventions need to target more than just early childhood education for children, the researchers agreed.

Intervening early may be important given Duncan’s findings.

“We’re focusing on the potential for early childhood as a particularly sensitive period,” Duncan said. “With all the different economic policies that we’ve developed, there’s never been a distinction based on age. We haven’t treated families with young kids differently. When we think about these, it’s a good opportunity to think of privileging early childhood as being a particularly important period.”

http://news.discovery.com/human/poverty-children-income-adults.html?print=true

Harvard Graduate School of Education – Right on the Money

Despite repeated efforts to reward teachers based on performance — both theirs and their students’ — many experts say this incentive doesn’t improve education.

Offering financial incentives to improve education — providing money rewards to students, teachers, schools, or districts as a way to motivate them to try harder and do better — is one of the hottest topics in education today.

On the student side, schools in cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., are experimenting with financial rewards, including cash payouts to students who make good grades or show other achievement. The new competitive incentive grants from the federal Department of Education — the so-called “Race to the Top” money — hand out financial remuneration to states that comply with certain requirements, including improving academic results.

But the greatest focus has been “pay for performance” initiatives for teachers whose students make the most academic progress, typically measured by results of standardized tests. The concept is simple: A series of influential studies in recent years have shown that teacher quality is one of the most important factors in student achievement, so “good” teachers — as reflected in growth in student test scores — should be paid more than their less able colleagues. Financial incentives will encourage teachers to try harder in their jobs, the theory goes, and those who don’t should leave the field and seek other careers. Pay for performance will rid schools of mediocre teachers, proponents say, leading to higher student achievement, betters schools, and, in the long-run, a more productive workforce in the United States.

In the ongoing effort to address the complicated issue of improving American education, pay for performance seems to make sense, and so the movement has caught on across the country. In the past decade, at least 20 states and a large number of districts have instituted some form of pay for performance for teachers, including California, Florida, Minnesota, Texas, and the cities of Cincinnati, Denver, New York, and Charlotte, N.C., according to Donald Gratz, Ed.M.’76, author of the new book, The Peril and Promise of Performance Pay. And President Obama has announced that the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, a competitive grant program to support pay for performance plans, will increase five-fold, from $97 million to $483 million.

But does pay for performance really work? According to many experts, the answer is a resounding no — especially when teacher ability is measured solely or primarily on student scores on standardized tests.

“There has never been any research that shows that this works, although it’s very fashionable to think that it should work,” says Richard Rothstein, the former education columnist at The New York Times and the author of a number of books on education, including Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right.

“When it comes to the sexy reform du jour — basing teachers’ pay on student performance — the research doesn’t support it at all,” concurs Bella Rosenberg, Ed.M.’72, an independent education consultant based in Washington, D.C., who worked for more than 20 years for the American Federation of Teachers. This year, Rosenberg did a project that required her to read “just about every piece of research available on this, including from the advocates,” she says. She found no evidence that pay for performance improves education. “It’s not there — it’s just not there,” she says.

Indeed, since the idea of pay for performance first was born, in the 18th century, it has failed every time it’s been tried, says Kitty Boles, Ed.D.’91, a senior lecturer at the Ed School. As early as 1710, in England, teachers were paid based on their students’ test scores in reading, writing, and arithmetic. But problems with this approach quickly became apparent, she says. The curriculum narrowed as arts and science classes were no longer taught. Teachers focused on drills aimed at improving test scores, and “teaching to the test” was born. There were even scandals with teachers faking test scores. For these reasons, pay for performance — also known as merit pay — was abandoned. Over the past three centuries, it has been resurrected numerous times, and in each instance, Boles says, it has failed to improve education and was eventually dropped. This cycle has been repeated each time a merit pay system has been launched, including one championed by President Richard Nixon but declared a failure not long afterwards, Boles says.<

Professor Susan Moore Johnson, M.A.T.’69, Ed.D.’81, agrees. “There have been waves of merit pay initiatives in the past, and every time someone recommends it anew, it’s as if it’s never been done before,” says Johnson, who recently coauthored Redesigning Teacher Pay: A System for the Next Generation of Educators, a book garnering much attention in the education world by advocating a radically different approach to teacher pay that encourages teacher career development through a four-tier system of promotion.

Despite the history of merit pay, these plans continue to be reborn, including in various waves in the United States over the past century. Most recently, the passage in 2001 of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act reignited the movement. By mandating that all states develop annual standardized tests to measure student performance, NCLB created objective standards that could be used for other purposes, too — including as an ostensible means of judging teacher effectiveness. Merit pay gained real traction when the federal government instituted the fund that distributes awards to states and districts that create pay for performance plans in high-needs schools.

Proponents, insisting that tying teacher salaries to measurable standards will improve schools, have instituted a wide variety of incentive plans across the country: Some evaluate teachers based solely on standardized test scores, some on teacher skill development; some offer more pay to teachers working in at-risk schools or with at-risk children, or for teaching certain subjects. Some favor subjective measures such as a principal’s evaluation of the teacher, which has its own critics who fear favoritism, and some rely on a combination of these and other factors.

To Boles, the format doesn’t matter, whether it’s purely objective or not; merit pay misses the point. “I’m not ready to say it will never work, but I doubt it will work because it’s not the way we should be assessing teachers’ abilities or skills,” says Boles, who instead advocates better teacher training and a career path that involves mentoring and being mentored.

Plans that rely solely on student test scores have the most opponents, including many parents, who scorn “teaching to the test,” in which students are drilled to increase their test scores rather than taught to understand the underlying material and learning skills to last a lifetime. Teachers’ unions are strongly against these plans for a variety of reasons, including that they say it’s nearly impossible to accurately measure an individual teacher’s contribution to a student’s success, since a child’s achievement is cumulative over a period of years and the result of the efforts of many people. Some plans only reward the teachers whose subjects are tested; namely, reading and math teachers, thereby excluding others who also influence student achievement.

“We are opposed to any form of merit pay where pay goes to individual teachers based on student test scores,” says Ed Doherty, Ed.D.’98, assistant to the president of the American Federation of Teachers in Massachusetts, which has 20,000 members. Not only is this the official position of the union, Doherty says, but in a survey of the 40,000 teachers in Massachusetts, about 90 percent oppose merit pay.

A related problem is the emphasis on subjects in which student performance is easiest to measure; namely, math and reading. “There’s no way to measure performance other than in math or reading, other than by observing teachers in the classroom, but that’s extremely expensive, so no one is talking about that,” says Rothstein. By focusing on math and reading to the exclusion of other subjects, he says, “you create incentives to further distort and narrow the curriculum, which is disastrous.”

He adds, “In any institution, if you have multiple goals and you create incentives to pursue only one or two, you get people abandoning other things they should be doing in order to focus on things for which they’re held accountable.” In his opinion, he continues, “this is one of biggest shortcomings of No Child Left Behind — schools have abandoned science, social studies, history, arts, and physical education, which is particularly disastrous in low-income communities.”

Teachers and many others are particularly offended by the underlying assumption of merit pay: namely, that teachers would work harder if only they were rewarded with even a minor financial bonus (the pay differential in most plans is typically quite small, only a few thousand dollars tops.) Most people who go into teaching are motivated by intrinsic rewards — the value of the work they do — rather than extrinsic motivators, such as money, many educators believe. “There’s an assumption under this that teachers would try harder if they were paid more,” says Gratz. “The corollary is that they’re not trying hard enough now, which means they care more about money than kids. Frankly, teachers find that insulting.”

Rothstein agrees. The flawed theory behind pay for performance is “that student achievement is not as high as you’d like it to be because teachers, to use the economists’ term, are shirking, are not doing as well as they could, so they need incentives to work harder or better. That assumes that reason student achievement is poor is that teachers know what to do and just aren’t doing it.” To the contrary, Rothstein says, poor achievement in school is a larger problem that can’t be laid in the laps of teachers. “The assumption is that all our problems are due to teachers, so we don’t need to pay attention to social conditions students come from,” he says.

Johnson concurs. “The essential assumption of pay for performance is that pay for performance is about effort, and that teachers who are offered a small sum of money — and it’s really very small, when you look at these plans — will somehow redouble their efforts and solve problems [of student achievement] they don’t know how to solve,” she says.

Rob Stein, C.A.S.’93, Ed.D.’01, also believes that teacher motivation is not the core issue. Stein was named principal of an inner-city Denver high school when it reopened two years ago after being shut down for being the worst-performing school in the district. Denver’s merit pay system, known as the Professional Compensation System (ProComp), is currently touted as the model system for merit pay because it had widespread support, including from teachers and parents when it passed about five years ago.

“Denver may be leading the nation, but it’s still not a very good model,” insists Stein, who describes himself as “agnostic” with regard to performance pay for teachers because he doesn’t oppose it, per se, but believes it doesn’t work. “Teachers probably are not drawn to the profession for financial incentives,” says Stein, whose faculty receives additional pay because they work in his high-needs school. “These are people who already take a pay cut just by deciding to teach. Giving them a five or 10 percent bonus — when they could earn much more in another field — isn’t a real incentive. Financial stakes aren’t what they’re in for, and the amount isn’t enough to make a real difference anyway.”

He says, “What I see is that people have a missionary zeal to want to work with kids who need them the most. I’ve never heard anyone say, ‘I’m applying to your school because of the extra pay incentive.’” Still, he adds, if the district is going to offer rewards for things his teachers would do anyway, he’s happy to ensure they receive them.

Gratz also believes merit pay doesn’t incentivize teachers. But, he says, educators in Denver find that ProComp has some real benefits in getting all stakeholders — teachers, principals, and parents — focused on student success. In other words, he says, the schools benefited not from improved teacher commitment but as a consequence of everyone searching for ways to help students.

Merit pay may not compel teachers to try harder. But on the specific issue of attracting high-quality teachers to teach in at-risk schools or with difficult student populations, Jennifer Steele, Ed.D.’08, says financial rewards have an impact. Steele works for the Rand Corporation on projects related to pay for performance and teacher effectiveness; at Harvard, she wrote her dissertation on whether a $20,000 cash incentive in California would induce academically talented teachers to go to disadvantaged schools.

In fact, it did. The bonus increased by 28 percentage points the likelihood that gifted teachers would enter a low-performing school. “So far, we’ve found that you can influence the career choices of teachers with financial incentives,” Steele says. Still, that’s a different issue than rewarding teachers for student performance, she says. While test scores can be one measure, it’s critical that they not be the sole measure. Rather, a broad set of factors should be evaluated in assessing a teacher’s performance, including his or her lesson-plan portfolio. Another measure should be a principal’s subjective evaluation of a teacher, which Steele says is a pretty good predictor of a teacher’s effectiveness. While there are many critics of the subjective approach, it has an important role in order to balancing out the “teach to the test” and other negative consequences of relying solely on test scores.

What to Reward

Eric Anderman, Ed.M.’86, and his wife, Lynley Hicks Anderman, who teach at The Ohio State University, are researchers who’ve studied and published in the area of educational motivation for 20 years. In their new book, Classroom Motivation, they argue that incentives can work in motivating students — and teachers, too — if they are properly structured. That means incentives should be awarded only if they are informational, meaning the student has really learned something, and if the reward is not perceived as controlling but provides the student some choice, such as deciding to read a book when not specifically asked to do so.

“You get rewarded not for doing something but learning something,” says Anderman. “For example, you’re rewarded for demonstrating to me that you know how to add a series of two-digit numbers and understand the process behind it, versus just completing a worksheet.” The same principles apply to teachers: “If teachers are simply rewarded for following some kind of protocol or rule according to how it’s mandated, that’s not effective. But if the teacher did something creative, innovative, that would be great because it’s coming from the teacher,” he says.

The other kind of reward will work, he stresses, but has serious negative consequences. “The danger is people start doing things just to get the reward and lose interest in the activity itself. So the teacher might go through the appropriate behaviors in order to get a bigger paycheck instead of because he or she wants to teach kids. The same with kids: they’ll do the worksheets in order to get the reward, but get bored with math and rule it out as a career,” he says.

Of course, it’s more time-consuming to base rewards on a larger portfolio of factors including subjective evaluations, which is why relying on test scores is popular. But in the end, it will backfire — if the goal is to produce educated children. “If you keep rewarding for teaching to the test, teachers will keep doing that,” says Anderman. “What would be a good thing would be if teachers were rewarded not just for making students achieve, but for specific ways of making them achieve” including learning critical thinking and other things harder to test but more valuable in the long run. Like Boles, Stein, and others, Anderman believes higher salaries across the board for teachers would be more useful than merit pay, as would better teacher preparatory programs, mentoring, and other ongoing supports.

A Multi-Tiered Approach

Johnson is director of the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, where she studies teachers’ work and careers. Her latest book, Redesigning Teacher Pay: A System for the Next Generation of Educators, cowritten with John Papay, Ed.M.’05, an advanced doctoral student at the Ed School, is gaining attention from educators searching for better ways to approach teacher pay. The book grew out of two studies, the first of which took a broad look at pay for performance in four urban districts: Houston; Minneapolis; Charlotte- Mecklenberg, N.C.; and Hillsborough County, Fla. Without assessing these programs per se, Johnson explains, the book examines how these systems are set up, including whether they use student performance on standardized tests, professional evaluations, a hybrid model, and whether they used individual or group assessments.

But it’s the second part of the book that is gaining attention in education circles. It offers a new and comprehensive approach for teacher pay that focuses on helping teachers develop their skills throughout their careers in order to benefit students and schools. Johnson and Papay’s concept states that since money is not the primary motivating factor for teachers, it will neither attract nor retain them in the field. What’s needed to cultivate good teachers — and by extension, better students — is a range of support including mentorship and the ability to learn and grow in a formal way, they believe.

“Teachers generally don’t go into teaching for money, especially in these days when they have access to all other lines of work,” in contrast to years past when women and men of color went into education because they were blocked from some fields, Johnson says. “Today, people who are choosing to teach are really choosing to teach, and it’s with awareness of the limitations of salaries. No one expects to get rich. You hear this again and again in interviews with teachers.” As most teachers will explain, she says, they’re drawn to the field because they want to help students. “They’ll say that again and again: It’s the kids,” she says.

For that reason, Johnson and Papay propose a system that would replace the common single-salary scale in teaching with a four-tiered pay structure that sets out goals and provides rewards in the form of substantially higher pay when teachers achieve them by being promoted to the next tier. Each of the tiers — probationary teacher, professional teacher with tenure, master teachers and school-based leaders, and school and district leaders — provide opportunities for career growth. And the system emphasizes career support that helps all teachers improve. Johnson and Papay also propose what they call a “Learning and Development Fund,” created by diverting resources from the single-salary scale, to finance new learning opportunities for teachers, provide stipends for special staffing assignments, and give other support to assist teachers and schools.

Johnson believes that such an approach — with its emphasis on investing in teachers’ careers — is the answer to a stable and successful teaching corps.

“Districts that implement the tiered pay-and-career structure and its companion Learning and Development Fund will fundamentally change how they recruit, compensate, assess, and develop teachers,” she and Papay write. “As a result, their schools should achieve greater stability, steady improvement, and increased student success.”

http://www.gse.harvard.edu/blog/news_features_releases/2010/01/right-on-the-money.html

US – Teachers sink or soar early

Many of the factors that earn CMS teachers more money don’t lead to better results, researchers found.

Success emerges early in teachers’ careers, and so does failure, a Harvard University study of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools found.

In fact, one of the best predictors of teacher effectiveness with students is where teachers earned their bachelor’s degree, researchers told the school board Tuesday.

The things that earn teachers extra money – experience, advanced degrees and National Board Certification – have little or no significant relationship to the gains their students make on state math and reading exams, the report said.

The study is not just academic. The quest to identify, recruit and keep teachers who make a difference with kids has zoomed to the top of the nation’s priority list, with millions of dollars in federal grant money riding on teacher effectiveness.

In CMS, Superintendent Peter Gorman says the current pay plan fails to promote top-quality teaching. He has called for converting to a “performance pay” system for teachers and other employees.

“This is data like we’ve never had before,” said Gorman, who e-mailed a summary to employees Tuesday night.

For the district’s roughly 9,000 teachers, the question of how CMS gauges effectiveness is especially pressing. Preliminary budget scenarios would cut up to 658 teacher jobs in 2010-11, with layoffs expected to be linked to performance.

The Harvard research won’t affect this year’s evaluations.

Gorman and the board are just starting to figure out how to use the research, which was paid for by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The research showed new teachers tended to make big gains on student performance for their first three years – the stretch that leads up to tenure – and then level off. Teachers whose students saw the biggest gains their first two years saw similar results in year three, the report says, while those who were least effective stayed that way.

Gorman said one conclusion might be that CMS should focus more on screening teachers before awarding tenure.

Board member Joe White urged rookie teachers working in tough assignments not to be discouraged: “Hang in there and continue to work hard.”

The research is based on student progress on reading and math exams in grades four through eight, with the strongest effects showing up in math.

Gorman has been enthusiastic about bringing in Teach For America cadets, who are recruited by a national nonprofit program that targets college graduates who didn’t study education. Teach For America provides a summer course and ongoing support to prepare those students for working in high-poverty schools.

The Harvard study found that CMS’s Teach For America cadets were less effective than experienced teachers and about the same as fellow rookies. But executive director Jon Fullerton said the sample size was so small – only 45 Teach For America teachers in the targeted grades and subjects – that it’s not conclusive.

Gorman said CMS’ own studies show about the same thing for elementary and middle school, but in high school the Teach For America cadets outperform other rookies.

National Board Certification, a voluntary credential that Gorman has said makes a difference for kids, showed only a minor benefit in this study. Gorman said CMS has found more impact, but is updating its research.

The report did not identify which education schools produced the most effective teachers in CMS. And Fullerton said it doesn’t mean CMS can boost effectiveness just by hiring more teachers from those schools.

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/02/24/1268451/study-teachers-sink-or-soar-early.html

Playing along with the Mozart effect

If you want music to sharpen your senses, boost your ability to focus and perhaps even improve your memory, you need to be a participant, not just a listener.

Five months after we are conceived, music begins to capture our attention and wire our brains for a lifetime of aural experience. At the other end of life, musical memories can be imprinted on the brain so indelibly that they can be retrieved, perfectly intact, from the depths of a mind ravaged by Alzheimer’s disease.

In between, music can puncture stress, dissipate anger and comfort us in sadness.

As if all that weren’t enough, for years parents have been seduced by even loftier promises from an industry hawking the recorded music of Mozart and other classical composers as a means to ensure brilliant babies.

But for all its beauty, power and capacity to move, researchers have concluded that music is little more than ear candy for the brain if it is consumed only passively. If you want music to sharpen your senses, boost your ability to focus and perhaps even improve your memory, the latest word from science is you’ll need more than hype and a loaded iPod.

You gotta get in there and play. Or sing, bang or pluck.

“The Mozart effect? That’s just crap,” says Glenn Schellenberg, a psychologist at the University of Toronto who conducts research on the effect of music and musical instruction.

Even the author of the 1993 study that set off the commercial frenzy says her group’s findings — from an experiment that had college students, not babies, listen to Mozart — were “grossly misapplied and over-exaggerated.” Psychologist Frances Rauscher, along with the rest of the field studying music’s effects on the brain, has long since moved on to explore the effect of active musical instruction on cognitive performance.

The upshot of their work is clear: Learning to make music changes the brain and boosts broad academic performance. Findings across the board suggest that, even for a kid who will not grow up to be a Wynton Marsalis or a Joshua Bell, spending money and time on music lessons and practice is a solid investment in mental fitness.

Entrepreneur Don Campbell, dubbed the “P.T. Barnum of the Mozart effect,” has built a thriving online business selling CDs with names like “Mozart to Go” to enhance children’s creativity and school performance. And, Campbell says on his website, parents of children with dyslexia, autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder should buy his CDs to improve their children’s neuropsychiatric conditions.

Campbell’s sales pitch melds seemingly scientific claims with breathless hype. Mozart’s compositions “modify attentiveness and alertness” because their “structural and not overly emotional expression helps clarify time/space perception.” His proprietary mixes of the prodigy’s music, writes Campbell, draw on “psychological, physiological, and aesthetic factors to achieve a variety of auditory, physical, and emotional responses.”

Wolfgang Amadeus is not the only composer beloved by entrepreneurs promising smarter children. Internet sites offer fretful new parents a range of slow, synthesized music by other musical greats, including J.S. Bach, Haydn and Vivaldi.

A “Baroque-a-bye Baby CD,” its cover showing a blissed-out baby clamped into earphones and a slant seat, promises that its musical offerings will mimic mother’s heartbeat at 60 beats per minute, offering “mathematical perfection and symmetry” designed to “stimulate your child’s brain.”

If only basking in surround sound were enough. The effect of listening to beloved classical music is at best small, fleeting and — with all deference to the late-18th century musical genius — not even unique to Mozart, Schellenberg says.

True, listening to music we like — whether it’s hip-hop, show tunes or Schubert — does makes us feel good. Positive mood, in turn, increases focus and attention, which improves performance on many tests of mental sharpness. In some, but not all, studies, that includes improvements in the kind of mental skills we use in doing complex math problems, interpreting driving directions and pondering how to fit a large bookcase in the trunk of a small car.

But the performance-enhancing effect, Schellenberg says, lingers for no more than about 10 minutes after the music stops.

Learning to play, he has found, is a far better bet. In a 2004 study, he and his colleagues randomly assigned 144 6-year-olds to receive instruction in keyboard, voice, drama or nothing. After a year, kids who got keyboard or voice lessons showed a 3-point IQ boost on average over the kids taking drama or no lessons at all.

It’s a modest improvement but one that may build on itself since, for all its faults, IQ is a reliable predictor of a child’s performance in school. Better performance in school typically leads to more and better schooling — which, in turn, further increases IQ.

For those receiving musical instruction, “there is evidence that music changes the brain in positive and permanent ways,” says Laurel Trainor, professor of psychology, neuroscience and behavior, and director of the auditory development lab of McMaster University in Toronto. Yet like a medication that powerfully treats an illness, but in mysterious ways, the means by which music might enhance cognitive powers has eluded scientists so far.

They do have some clues.

Learning to make music engages and demands coordination among many brain regions, including those that process sights, sounds, emotions and memories, says Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, a Harvard University neurologist.

Years ago, Schlaug found a glaring and suggestive difference between the brains of 30 professional musicians and 30 non-musician adults of matched age and gender.

In the musicians, the bundle of connective fibers that carry messages between the brain’s right and left hemispheres — a structure called the corpus callosum — was larger and denser on average than that of their non-musical peers. The brawnier bridge was particularly notable toward the rear of the brain, at the crossing that links areas responsible for sensory perception and voluntary movement.

It suggested not only that musicians might be able to more nimbly react to incoming information but also that their brains might be more resilient and adaptable, allowing right and left hemispheres, which specialize in separate functions, to work better together.

Schlaug and colleagues also found that the musicians who had begun their musical training before the age of 7 showed the most pronounced differences — suggesting an early start might rewire the brain most dramatically.

Newer work has shown that music also enhances mental performance. In a study published last March, Schlaug and a team of researchers in Boston put 31 first-graders through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans, as well as a series of cognitive skills tests, to gauge the effect of 15 months of keyboard training. Compared with kids getting a playful group music class once a week, 6-year-olds who got intensive, weekly, one-on-one music instruction had greater and more widespread expansion in volume across many areas of their brains. And they performed better on tests of fine motor skill and of several other skills directly related to music. But the study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, failed to find improvements in cognitive skills not directly related to musical skills, such as word recall, language discrimination, abstract reasoning and spatial and visual problem-solving.

Other studies have found that music instruction may indeed make you smarter. A team led by Trainor reported that in kids chosen randomly to get a tightly structured instrumental training called the Suzuki method, brain responses were two to three years more mature on average than those in children not taking music lessons.

Electrical signals traveled more swiftly and efficiently through the brains of the Suzuki-trained kids, who also showed improved performance on tasks that required sustained attention and the ability to hold information in memory long enough to execute complex tasks — what neuroscientists call working memory.

“What happens in music lessons is they’re fun,” Trainor says. “But at the same time, they’re very demanding. The child has to hold an instrument, position his hands, listen to the sound the teacher’s making, reproduce that sound, hold in mind the sound and compare it, assess pitch and sound quality, and change that if necessary.

“All that takes a tremendous amount of attention. It trains kids how to accomplish things, and it trains memory as well,” Trainor adds. “All that is going to make you better at learning.”

In the end, music listening may come in a distant second to learning in a brain-building contest. But one thing we know beyond a doubt is that it brings pleasure — and few psychologists scoff at the power of that. It promotes well-being. It enhances attention. It protects against the depredation of age. It can even ease pain. “Music is one of those things out there that people enjoy,” says Robert Zatorre, a neuropsychologist at McGill University who researches music’s effects. “That’s already a lot!”

http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-0301-brain-music-20100301,0,3251510,full.story

Sri Lanka – Save our babies

Powdered milk giants batter the breast and break guidelines with five-star parties

The breast vs bottle battle for the “young child” has taken a new turn, with milk giants resorting to various insidious and unethical methods to promote their products, sending shockwaves in health circles.

Such modus operandi by the milk giants in their race to catch the “young child”, especially those who have celebrated their first birthday, includes tamashas at five-star hotels with product launches (euphemistically called introductions) thrown in for eminent gatherings of medical personnel including policy-makers, all expenses paid junkets to foreign destinations to attend medical meetings and misleading advertisements in the media to tempt mothers, the Sunday Times understands.

Seemingly abiding by the codes and guidelines set not only internationally but also locally prohibiting the promotion of formula milk for “infants” (up to one year) as against breastfeeding, the main giants in the milk industry are, however, exploiting the “young child”, it is learnt. The young child is defined as those between one and five years old, with a particular focus on one- to two-year-olds.

One brand not only sponsored the sessions of a college of medical personnel but also introduced “specialized milk for 1 to 3 year-olds” by handing out gift packs comprising a milk packet, a mug and a pen prominently displaying its logo, after a grand dinner at a five-star hotel, a senior health official said on condition of anonymity.

Even though knowing well that the policy and recommendations of the government are to promote exclusive breastfeeding within the first six months after birth, then begin complementary feeding with such foods as a home-made multi-mix along with breastfeeding and gradually increase the solid food intake of the young child while breastfeeding up to two years, the milk companies are in a race to promote “growing up milk powder” (GUMP) among one-year-olds although there is inadequate scientific evidence of their usefulness, lamented a respected paediatrician.

This is also despite the strong ‘Global Strategy for Infant and Young Child Feeding’ very well publicized worldwide by both the World Health Organization and UNICEF.

The recommendation for children between one and two years is family food including one to two helpings of a milk product which could be a glass of whole milk, curd, yoghurt or cheese, while continuing breast milk, he said.

“The policy is very clear – we want our mothers to breastfeed their children up to two years. It is the best nutrition for the young child with no extra cost for the family,” he said.

While moves are underway to strengthen the ‘Sri Lanka Code For the Promotion, Protection and Support of Breast Feeding and Marketing of Designated Products’, the paediatrician pointed out that such product launches were clearly in violation of Article V of the present Code.

Article V titled ‘Health Care Workers’ categorically states: “No information, including scientific and factual information regarding infant or young child feeding, shall be given by any manufacturer or distributor to a health care worker….provided however where the manufacturer or distributor discloses all the material in respect of such information to the Monitoring Committee and the Committee approves such information……

The Code further stipulates: “No manufacturer or distributor of designated products or complementary food or any person on his behalf, shall offer or give any gift or benefit to a health care worker including but not limited to fellowships, study grants and funding for attendance at meetings, seminars continuing education courses or conferences within or outside Sri Lanka. Any manufacturer or distributor may make contributions to a nationally recognized medical association in accordance with the objectives of the Code and such contribution shall be intimated to the Committee……”

A “health care worker” has been identified by the Code as a person providing or in training to provide health care in a health care system whether professional or non-professional including voluntary workers and dispensing chemists while a “young child” has been identified as a child from the age of 12 months up to the age of two years.

Not to be outdone, another milk company hosted a “nutrition discussion” bringing down two experts from Germany once again at a five-star hotel, a week after, but was clever enough not to distribute any material. “They did it the subtle way,” laughed a high-level health official, adding that the wining and dining were enjoyed by all those dealing with young children such as paediatricians, paediatric registrars etc.

Another milk company did it a different way some time ago, the Sunday Times learns, “sponsoring” paediatricians on a fully-paid trip to a child health conference abroad.

The first company had also brought in a child specialist cum scientist to address many important groups of doctors and medical policy-makers this month, while also placing full-page advertisements in question-and-answer form on the importance of DHA (Docosahexaenoic Acid) in a child’s brain development. Without mentioning a particular milk brand, this “renowned child health specialist” talks of “growing up milks” as an important source of DHA.

What he fails to mention in the advertisement is that he is a consultant to that particular milk company. “There is a clear conflict of interest,” stressed a perturbed senior paediatrician, explaining that such scientists must clearly state their links with the milk company so that everyone knows they have a vested interest.

The other important point is that breast milk is the best and least expensive source of DHA, while there has been no conclusive evidence through clinical trials of the benefits of DHA-added milk for “young children”. However, there is strong evidence that breastfed children have better cognitive development (intelligence) than those who are given milk formula, he said.

There are several other less expensive sources of DHA such as small fish and organ meat (eg: chicken liver).Toddlers who are on a mixed family diet while continuing breastfeeding can obtain their DHA in this manner, he added.

Code committee decides to act

The Violations Monitoring Committee of the ‘Sri Lanka Code For the Promotion, Protection and Support of Breast Feeding and Marketing of Designated Products’ set out by the Health Ministry met last week to discuss stronger implementation of the Code, the Sunday Times understands.

The committee has already written to the Director-General of Health with regard to certain violations and will also keep the Consumer Protection Authority informed about them, it is learnt.

Most of the multi-national milk companies are taking cover for promoting milk among one-year-olds on the excuse that the Code is only for infants, without following it in spirit, knowing that Sri Lanka’s recommendations are to continue breastfeeding up to two years, concretely supported by the WHO and UNICEF Global Strategy, another official said.

In the light of the happenings in the milk industry, the Sri Lanka College of Paediatricians has informed all its members not only through its newsletter but also on e-mail about the need to adhere not only to the Code but also to the recommendations. “We’ve made them aware so that even those who are new to the profession will know,” said a spokesperson.

Companies say no unethical practice

Two milk companies were categorical in their denial that they were unethical in their actions, stressing that they have upheld the spirit of the Code. They were of the view that a ban on promotion of 1+ milk is just a suggestion and not regulated.

“Our company has not acted unethically,” said an official when contacted by the Sunday Times about sponsoring the sessions of the medical personnel and presenting packs with a milk packet, mug and pen.

“It was not a promotion of any product. We were making them aware and educating them, so that if a mother asks them they can give a proper insight into what it contains,” he said adding that the mug, pen etc were just tokens

With regard to the child expert, the official said he was in independent person who expressed his independent views. He came on invitation and the company sponsored some of the events during his stay here.

When asked whether the expert divulged his links with the milk industry, he said there was no need to because everyone knew the company sponsored those particular sessions and the expert spoke on nutrition.

With regard to misleading advertisements and not stating in the advertisement that he was linked to the milk industry, the official said there too the expert was expressing his independent views on nutrition.
The second company which hosted the other nutrition seminar with another foreign couple as experts and dinner for doctors said it was an event where scientific and factual information was disseminated. “No brand was discussed, no posters displayed and no product promoted,” an official said.

The experts had come to India and we just invited them here for a day and paid only their airfare and for the food at the hotel, he said. “No fee was paid to them, consultancy or otherwise.”

When the Sunday Times contacted the milk company which had “sponsored” several paediatricians to attend a conference abroad, a senior official said he was unable to comment as he had not been with the company at that time. He requested that the return of the head of the company who is abroad should be awaited for a comment.

http://www.sundaytimes.lk/100228/News/nws_22.html

Childcare CEO backs EU maternity leave reforms

The chief executive of the Daycare Trust has backed the EU’s plans to extend the minimum amount of paid maternity across Europe to 20 weeks at full pay.

Alison Garnham said that while the changes may place pressure on businesses left with big maternity leave bills to pay, the resulting benefits far outweigh the costs.

She said: ” Daycare Trust welcomes EU plans to implement a European-wide extension of maternity leave to 20 weeks.

” Despite the high cost that the Treasury were quick to associate with this proposed policy, there is evidence to suggest that where countries implement child and family friendly policies, the benefits to society and family/work balance outweigh the initial costs.”

Ms Garnham added that she believed the EU hadn’t gone far enough and that the trust would like to see mothers paid 26 weeks at 90 per cent pay and fathers four weeks at 90 per cent pay and that all payments should be at least at national minimum wage level.

http://www.seraphine.com/maternity-wear-fashion-news/all-maternity-news/19636869/childcare-ceo-backs-eu-maternity-leave-reforms_.asp